Notes: A’s stadium(s), newsletter housekeeping

Another loss for Schools Over Stadiums, issues in Sacramento, and a note about scheduling.

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The news isn’t great for Schools Over Stadiums, the political action committee formed to attempt to stop the Oakland A’s from becoming the Las Vegas A’s. The Nevada educators who formed the PAC were dealt a blow last week by a state district court judge who rejected their lawsuit over the constitutionality of the public subsidies the team would receive to build a new ballpark.

Judge Kristen Luis did not rule on “the merits of the claims,” per the Los Angeles Times’ Bill Shaikin, but instead, stated that whether or not the money the A’s were receiving from the public coffer was constitutional could not be determined until said money was actually made available to the A’s. And it won’t be unlocked for them until they secure the private financing that they need to pay for the rest of the stadium.

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Notes: MLB’s latest threat to Bally Sports, NCAA unfair labor charge

MLB and Bally continue to go at it, while Dartmouth College’s men’s basketball team ups the ante.

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There’s been some progress in the Bally/Diamond broadcasting rights bankruptcy debacle of late, but only for the National Hockey League and National Basketball Association. MLB is continuing to have issues with the regional broadcasting giant, and the latest stems from the agreement Bally made with the NHL and NBA. Evan Drellich has the full story at The Athletic, but there’s one specific thing I want to focus on here:

“Major League Baseball and those clubs are unable to plan to obtain revenue and to have certainty with respect to the 2025 season,” James Bromley, a lawyer for MLB, said in court Tuesday.

Judge Chris Lopez on Tuesday approved deals Diamond recently reached with both the NBA and NHL, calling them “a step in the right direction.” But contained in those agreements is a key date that has put MLB on the offensive: both require Diamond to come out of bankruptcy by April 1, shortly after baseball’s season begins.

Speaking for nearly 14 minutes straight, Bromley warned Diamond that it cannot wait that long to figure out its plans in a bankruptcy process that’s already taken nearly 18 months, and called the status quo a “Band-Aid.”

Nine teams are under contract with a Diamond-operated RSN for 2025, with another three facing expiring contracts after this season. So we’re talking about over one-third of the league not knowing just how much money they’ll be getting in 2025 for their television rights, and from where. Diamond, per Drellich, seems unfazed by the threats from MLB to escalate their legal action if this isn’t figured out sooner than later.

Here’s what matters about this from this newsletter’s perspective: whether 9-12 MLB teams actually will have a problem with revenue and cash flow in 2025 isn’t what we should be concerned about, but that their public position is that the lack of resolution from Bally will keep them from being able to plan out rosters for 2025 is an issue. Now, I’m not saying these clubs are absolutely all fine, that there won’t be issues with their numbers or what have you; it’s more that, by saying this, you know that they’re going to act as if there definitely are. As if 2025 is something of a lost year, before it even begins, one in which general managers of these clubs are probably going to have to work overtime to make creative upgrades to the roster that won’t increase payroll.

The 2023-2024 offseason was already a slow one. Yes, massive contracts were handed out to the very best talent out there, but the winter, for most, was a slow-going affair, one that resulted in a number of players signing very late, even during spring training, which in turn impacted the year they had. It took Blake Snell months to finally be the guy he’s supposed to be, to make it deeper into games (well, deep for Snell) and look dominant and healthy. Jordan Montgomery still hasn’t recovered from his late start and lack of prep. We’re probably just going to do that again, which shouldn’t be a surprise, really. Even without the broadcasting issue, the current CBA has just two more seasons on it before it expires. The league’s owners want to tighten their grip a bit before then, to help create problems that need to be solved in bargaining, in order to try to extract more from the players once more.

It’s not a new tactic, but the Bally issue helps give them an excuse for the kinds of behavior they’d be displaying, anyway. This is an ongoing story to watch, basically, that is about more than it’s about on the surface.

Late last month, Dartmouth College’s men’s basketball team union filed an unfair labor practice charge against the school with the National Labor Relations Board. The charge? A refusal to bargain with players. The union, formed in March, has certainly been patient with Dartmouth College, which has refused to enter collective bargaining with the players despite the NLRB’s regional director already declaring them to be employees.

In a way, this is all a positive, though. Dartmouth’s refusal to bargain, with the defense being that the NLRB has made a mistake, means that this is a case that’s probably going to end up in court, with decisions that reverberate throughout college athletics. The school wants a federal court to review it, even! Now, federal court could certainly be a blow to the idea of unionized college athletes, especially with how much more conservative they’ve become in recent years, but look at the current situation, where the NLRB has declared that these athletes are employees and should be treated as such. Dartmouth refuses to acknowledge this to be the case, so nothing has changed. The courts could force a change, and the results would then be NCAA-wide, because what separates Dartmouth College from every other institution with college sports on campus? Not a thing, other than that their students struck first.

No need for a full monthly check-in on the White Sox since I already did that on Friday, pre-Labor Day holiday, but just for the sake of having something here in early September all the same: the White Sox lost every game since that piece was published. They finished August 4-22, just one win better than July with the same number of losses, despite losing 16 in a row that month. They’re 0-3 to begin September, already set a new franchise record for losses in a season with weeks left to go, and are 14 losses away from setting the modern-day league record with 22 games to go.

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Let’s check in on the White So—oh god there’s blood everywhere

The record-tying losing streak is over, and somehow, the White Sox are still just as bad as they were during that.

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Monday is Labor Day, and given that this is a labor-focused newsletter, it feels wrong to sign myself up to cover any stories then. So, instead, let’s do our monthly check-in on the White Sox and their horrific 2024 season now, the final weekday of August.

Last we looked in, the White Sox were in the midst of a franchise-worst losing streak that would soon end, but not until after they had tied the historical AL worst mark of 21 in a row. They were 27-84, “good” for a win percentage of .243, and had been outscored by -229 on the season. Things have somehow gotten worse than they were then, which seems impossible. But that’s our 2024 White Sox, baby.

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Notes: NPB free agency, NWSL’s new CBA, NBA’s second apron issues

Japan’s baseball players are looking to make a major change, the National Women’s Soccer League already has, and concerns about what the NBA’s new salary cap rules are doing to player movement.

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According to Evan Drellich at The Athletic, Nippon Professional Baseball players are preparing to fight for a major overhaul of the system used to keep them in place, and in Japan, for as long as it does. They plan to combat the reserve system “on antitrust grounds,” per Drellich, which would mean significant changes to not just movement within the NPB, but for leaving Japan for a league such as Major League Baseball, as well.

Players in Japan have two forms of free agency: domestic and international. Domestic free agency, the freedom to switch to another NPB team, is achieved after seven or eight years in the league, depending on whether the player was drafted out of college or high school.

But to leave as a free agent for a foreign league like MLB, the wait is nine years. Players can depart sooner, but only if their team posts them for bidding. Instead, NPB players want what’s in place in MLB: free agency after a blanket six years, regardless of entry or destination.

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Notes: Kansas City gives up on Royals stadium(?), A’s ballpark financing, trading picks

The Royals get cut out of the public subsidy game (for now), the best an A’s lobbyist can muster is that things are probably on schedule with financing, and my latest at BP.

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Back in April, a referendum was introduced to the voters of Jackson County, Missouri, letting them decide whether or not the public should fund a $500 million subsidy for new stadiums for both the Kansas City Chiefs and Kansas City Royals. The public said no, resoundingly so with 58 percent against.

That story isn’t quite over yet, though, as now a second referendum is being prepared, but this time it will only involve the Chiefs. As Neil deMause put it at Field of Schemes:

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MLB’s rumored innings minimum is the league showing its hand

Whether the idea is a good one or not is beside the point here: just recognize that this is all a warm-up for CBA talks.

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For the last month or so, there have been leaks and instances of Rob Manfred speaking at press conferences that give you an idea of what’s being discussed in MLB’s offices. Which is always notable to some degree, but at this point, this far into the current collective bargaining agreement, it’s worth maybe noting all of it a little bit more than it would have been a year or two back.

The current CBA kicked off in 2022, so it will end after the 2026 season, which means we’re less than two years away from the serious ramp up that leads to the actual end of things. Remember, the 2021 deal expired in the offseason without a new deal in place, and MLB imposed a lockout: that could always occur again, if the league thinks the strategy of purposefully waiting out the players worked for them, or, helped expose rifts within the ranks of the players that the league would like additional chances to exploit.

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The ‘caveat’ MLB requires to allow trading draft picks

And an educated guess as to why MLB would require such a weird caveat in the first place.

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During the All-Star break, the idea of trading MLB draft picks came up. At the time, I was cautiously in favor of this kind of change to the available transaction options:

Without thinking too much on it, it feels like this would be a net positive for the league, to allow for this like other sports do. Especially given that the shorter draft and fewer minor-league clubs post-disaffiliation means it’s a little tougher to find advantages on the farm these days than it used to be: maybe the team that’ll exploit this rule for positive reasons can outweigh the sins of those who will simply use it as yet another excuse for not spending or trying. But I don’t want to underestimate just how annoying and exploitative that second group can be, either.

“Cautiously,” because as I said, I hadn’t thought too much on it just yet, and there are certainly teams who might abuse the system, or some wrinkle that’ll come up that would make it a goofy and convoluted idea instead of a straightforward one.

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Notes: ‘Media disruption distribution’ fund, The Wilpon Zone, Billy Bean

A workaround for RSN troubles, answering a John Fisher-related question, and the passing of an MLB executive.

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Per the Athletic’s Evan Drellich, the collective bargaining agreement has been altered by MLB and the Players Association, as a reaction to the current issues in the regional broadcasting landscape. It’s not something that every team will have access to, since not every team is struggling with their RSN, but it’s meant to assist the clubs that are dealing with any of that fallout. As Drellich put it:

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White Sox franchise-worst losing streak has them historically bad once more

It was so over because the White Sox were just regular bad, but now we’re so back because they’re embarrassing again.

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July started out so promising for White Sox fans. The team was merely bad instead of historically, meaningfully bad. in the prior month. Between June 3 and July 7 — the period of time in between check-ins on the club round these parts — the South Side club went 11-21, no small thing for a team that, in the two months prior, had managed all of 15 combined victories. That pace was a 106-loss pace, which knocked them from “in line to finish with the worst-ever record in modern baseball” to “merely the third-worst team in modern baseball.” You take whatever dub you can when they aren’t regularly showing up, you know?

The rest of July was a course correction. July 8 was the last time that I looked in on the White Sox, and, coincidentally, is right before the wheels came off again. The White Sox are in the midst of a 17-game losing streak, the longest such streak in franchise history — a history that dates back to 1901. They won on July 5, then lost their next three, then won the first game of a doubleheader, and have dropped the 17 games since that W. Which is a long way of saying that, since bringing their record to 26-66 and a .282 winning percentage, they’ve fallen to 27-84, for a .243 mark.

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MLB reportedly has ‘gag order’ on interested A’s buyers

It’s not that the Bay Area lacks people who want to buy the A’s, it’s that they’ve been ordered to be quiet about it until MLB says it’s fine to speak up.

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I had missed this originally when it ran in the San Francisco Chronicle back on July 17, but Noah Frank’s recent Baseball Prospectus column linked to and quoted it, bringing it to my attention. Apparently, MLB has a “gag order” out on anyone in the Bay Area interested in purchasing the Athletics from John Fisher.

Scott Ostler of the Chronicle wrote about how John Shea, another Chronicle journalist, had asked commission Rob Manfred if a potential mayoral change in Oakland could bring the city back into contention “if the Las Vegas deal falls apart,” or just as a potential expansion location in the future, and then, well, here you go:

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