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We’ve known this was coming for some time, of course, but it’s official: the Oakland A’s have played their final games in that city, as they’ll close out the 2024 season on the road. The next time they play a home game, it will be in Sacramento… assuming that park does end up with the necessary renovations to appease the Players Association, anyway.
The shock of this has, unsurprisingly, hit hard, both for people who have known this day was coming and for those who were sort of forced to recognize what’s been going on for the better part of the last two years. I wanted to address something Buster Olney posted on Twitter, though, since it feels like a too-common sentiment both for some media and fans who haven’t been locked in on this whole saga.
What remains a total mystery is why the other owners in baseball stand by as the A’s debacle plays out, and they don’t do anything. And the situation will continue to be an embarrassment for them all, as the team moves to a minor-league park. It’s mind-boggling.
It’s really only “mind-boggling” if, for whatever reason, you don’t view the owners as how they actually are and operate, and cling to the idea that there’s some inherent good or collective interest in baseball as a healthy, functional sport that they all possess. Which Olney, to the detriment of coverage of moments like this, seems to be cursed with believing — and he’s far from alone in this, which is why we don’t have more mainstream coverage answering his exact question. Olney has shown himself capable on more than one occasion of understanding that the owners go overboard pushing the limits of their greed, but for some reason, the lesson doesn’t seem to stick from one event to the next. So it goes.
There are two reasons I’ve been considering for some time now, as to why the owners would let this happen even as the behavior of A’s owner John Fisher acts as an “embarrassment” to the league.
The first is that the other owners do know this is embarrassing behavior, but also know that the positives outweigh the negatives from their perspective. Fisher might be making a mockery of everything at the moment, and Oakland’s heart is broken, but he’s also renewed a fear in other cities across MLB that can be used for leverage in stadium subsidy talks. Relocation is a real possibility now, when a city and a team can’t come to terms on a stadium deal. It’s a more realistic threat, again, than it was in all the decades when the only move we saw was of Montreal to Washington, which had its own somewhat unique set of circumstances that had it set apart from the mass relocations of an earlier age.
Oakland losing the A’s might be its own one-off, as well, but it’s one that’s going to b utilized by owners looking to gain an edge in their quest for paying as little as possible for a new stadium when taxpayer funds can be used instead. Jerry Reinsdorf didn’t even wait for the body to get cold before his camp started leaking about his having lunch with the mayor of Nashville at last December’s winter meetings — others will follow suit as necessary, especially since, a month after that lunch, Reinsdorf was getting meetings with power players in Chicago about a new stadium.
Owners know they can use the behavior of the A’s to their advantage, so, shameful as it is, they’ll keep quiet about it and let it happen. In much the same way that the behavior of teams like the A’s, Pirates, Marlins, and Rays are shameful when it comes to spending, and they’re very clearly pocketing revenue-sharing dollars they should be spending, instead, but even this helps the teams subsidizing their profits. Fewer teams trying means less competition for players, which can help keep salaries down for non-stars. It’s a symbiotic environment, even for the ones who think their neighbors do kind of suck.
The other thought is that all of this is going to be worth the expansion fees, which won’t be incoming until the A’s are settled. With the Rays getting a new, publicly financed ballpark, and the A’s, at least in theory, getting a stadium in Las Vegas, the big questions commissioner Rob Manfred said needed to be answered before expansion could become a priority are mostly taken care of. The A’s need an actual stadium to play in and not a hypothetical one, yes, so this can all still backfire, but Fisher is getting his chance to solve this problem until he proves for sure that he cannot. The moment he’s messing with the money of the other owners on a much larger scale than he has done with revenue-sharing checks, and Fisher won’t have any chances left. Until such time, though, he’s part of the club, and this club acts with one collective interest in mind. This is the lesson former commissioner Bud Selig learned and imparted on the other owners after the success of the Players Association during the 1994-1995 strike: the owners needed to stick together if they were going to have any chance of clawing back gains the players had made, and reasserting their authority over the sport they believed belonged to them. Letting Fisher do what he wants, within their version of reason, is a continuation of an ethic that led George Steinbrenner to relent and start paying into revenue-sharing for owners he wanted nothing more than to outspend and destroy every year.
There’s one more thing worth noting: Patrick Dubuque and I had a conversation about this last year in preparation for a Baseball Prospectus article I was writing on the surge of demands for public subsidies for ballparks. The death spiral of shame in greater society:
Why not just squeeze people for more money you don’t need, because you can? It’s happened with groceries, even though people need to eat. Rent keeps going up, with landlords claiming they can’t afford their dozen properties, none of which they themselves live in, if they don’t force tenants to pay for them. If fossil fuel execs can keep pulling in record profits and impede their more climate-friendly replacements while the world literally and incessantly burns, then surely some sports owners pulling a Lyle Lanley on city after city isn’t that big of a deal!
This is just how things work now. The short-term is valued over the long-term, and these owners absolutely only care about the short-term health of Major League Baseball. Expansion fees are a massive potential payout — two more teams would mean roughly $4 billion in expansion fees, split 30 ways. That’s well over a nine-figure payday simply for letting someone else into the club, never mind whatever increases come from allowing two more payers into the central fund.
Increased leverage in stadium subsidy talks means a better chance at a stadium deal, one that can approximate the lucrative shopping mall atmosphere the Braves built outside of Atlanta, and that will only further increase franchise values, as well. Which… the Marlins were and are an absolute joke of a franchise, and still sold for $1.2 billion in no small part because they had a five-year-old stadium financed by Miami as part of the deal. Imagine how much a real team can get if the owner decides to sell in a similar stadium situation?
The A’s leaving Oakland is messy, it’s ugly, and it’s also a temporary cost of doing business for the other owners. This could all backfire, with the Las Vegas deal not working because Fisher can’t secure the necessary private financing, but the other owners are betting that it will all be sorted out, or someone besides Fisher will end up installed to fix what’s broken, and the remaining owners will still be left with the ability to threaten relocation while one step closer to expansion. That’s a risk worth taking for them, as we can see by the fact it’s all happening at all. There’s no mystery to it at all, unless you believe there’s something at play here besides the potential to extract as much money as possible from as many people as it can be extracted from. There is not; there never is.
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