There's a sad fact to face in the Bay Area: The Oakland Athletics are going to cease to exist by 2020, perhaps even by 2015. This offseason has highlighted the problems the organization is having by playing in Oakland. The A's and their GM Billy Beane had one player in mind all offseason, 3B Adrian Beltre, but, after he had a terrific season last year in Boston, they really had no chance at affording him.
Economic handicaps like this are not new in Oakland, as far as baseball is concerned. They've been unable to hand out big free agent contracts since the late-1980s and early-1990s, perhaps not coincidentally the last time the A's had a string of dominance in the AL West. When the team was sold in 1995, it became apparent that big spending was no longer possible. Former A's GM Sandy Alderson began employing a Moneyball theory and the rest is history.
A visit to Oakland will explain everything. The city - and its suburbs in the Bay Area - are not conducive to baseball. Baseball's target audience consists primarily over older white men with white collar jobs and more sophisticated backgrounds. That niche audience is disappearing in Oakland and will soon cease to exist. The attendance is reflective of this. Their attendance has gone down in each of the past five seasons and, in each of the past five seasons, they've finished in the bottom five in home attendance in MLB.
Belaboring the point is their stadium, the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum. The Coliseum also serves as the home of the Oakland Raiders of the NFL and was designed more for football than for baseball. The Coliseum is spacious, tough on power hitters used to playing in smaller parks, and a generally bad place for a fan to see a baseball game.
Okay, so their fans are disappearing and their stadium sucks. But how does that make them different from teams like the Kansas City Royals, Cleveland Indians, and Pittsburgh Pirates? Simple: They've had an offer to move to a different city. They have no type of binding lease with the city of Oakland and MLB is anxious to right this franchise (and a move to a new city and new ballpark could, in theory at least, increase revenue enough where the team would no longer qualify for revenue sharing benefits).
The city in question is San Jose, California, not exactly far from their current home in Oakland and it would allow MLB and the state of California to keep two MLB teams in the Bay Area. The residents of San Jose have voted in the past to approve the construction of a 32,000-seat baseball stadium should the city have the opportunity to acquire an MLB franchise. That vote has come, gone, and expired, but it passed with flying colors and a second vote would almost certainly yield a similar result. Architects have estimated that the stadium could be completed within three years.
Okay, so there's a new city that wants the team and they're ready to build a stadium. So why aren't the A's jumping for greener pastures? Again, simple: That other Bay Area team, the San Francisco Giants (fresh off their World Series victory), own territorial rights to San Jose.
This is where the pessimists begin. How difficult it will be for the A's to negotiate the surrender of a prosperous city like San Jose, clearly coveted by the Giants. Actually, pessimists, the Giants hold rights to Santa Clara County, with the city of San Jose simply housed in that county.
Oh by the way, they didn't always have rights to San Jose or the county in which it sits. How did that happen? A story: Know AT&T Ballpark, that place where the Giants play now? Well it's actually a pretty new stadium. Remember Candlestick? Well back in the 1990s the Giants wanted to get a new stadium because Candlestick was garbage for baseball. The city of San Francisco would not relent and the Giants threatened to leave the city for greener pastures. The city of San Jose welcomed them with open arms. Only one problem: In those days, Oakland held territorial rights to Santa Clara County. In a goodwill gesture the A's granted rights to the Giants so that they could make the move. People in San Francisco got scared and built them a new stadium so that they would stay (it was originally called Pac Bell Park but after a series of corporate mergers it's now AT&T Park) and that was all she wrote. So the exchanging of territorial rights might not be so far fetched.
Yeah, but the Giants didn't actually move, say the pessimists, there has to be some kind of a precedent. Guess what? There is a precedent for just such a move. Pretty recently, too, the agreement not being finalized until March of 2005 actually. The team? The Washington Nationals. The city? Washington, D. C. The territorial issue? The Baltimore Orioles held territorial rights to most of the mid-Atlantic region, including but not limited to: Baltimore, Maryland, Washington, D. C., and Richmond, Virginia. The solution? An agreement was made where O's owner Peter Angelos was paid off for losing the territorial rights and an additional cable channel was hastily created so that Nats games wouldn't cut into O's broadcasts (the network was the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network, or MASN, it's terrible, don't watch it, trust me, you're talking to a man who owns the 50 Horror Classics on DVD). And yes, it is true that broadcasters on MASN were hired to call the season a little less than 48 hours before opening day for the Nats. If a deal weren't reached, the team would have gone to play in either San Juan, Puerto Rico or Monterrey, Mexico.
The Bay Area already has two MLB teams so territorial rights are much more muddled than the rights were in the mid-Atlantic region, which were basically exclusively owned by Baltimore (some counties in Virginia belonged to the Atlanta Braves). No baseball people in the Bay Area are as insane as Angelos so the negotiations should go much more smoothly. The A's already have their own cable channel complete with announcers so that does not pose a problem. If the deal can't be made in time then the A's would just stay in Oakland as opposed to heading to Latin America. San Jose is only about 40 miles away from Oakland and most arbitrators and mediators would be likely to side with the A's in a hearing. Oakland and San Francisco have already had an amicable agreement regarding territorial rights in San Jose and a further deal seems likely. The A's previously held rights in San Jose and could probably get them back. There aren't very many Giants fans in San Jose and any payoff for the rights would likely be far less than anything the Nats paid to Angelos and the O's.
So, the A's and MLB in San Jose? If you consult your magic 8 ball, all signs would point to yes.
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