Month: September 2023

Notes: Orioles’ new lease, A’s stadium supporters sue, Brewers, Royals updates

Just some Friday notes on the billions, plural, in public funding for a few MLB teams that are currently being discussed or handed out.

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The Orioles have a new 30-year lease with the city of Baltimore to keep playing in Camden Yards. It should have been a pretty open-shut acceptance months and months ago, since the Orioles receive a $600 million public subsidy that’s already been set aside for them by signing said lease, all to be put toward stadium renovations, but team owner John Angelos has been a nuisance for at least that long, holding up a deal in attempts to acquire land, for free, that wasn’t available. All so the Orioles could build a Battery-esque space around Camden that they could profit from, just like the Braves.

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Notes: MiLB lawsuit, Rob Manfred’s lies, Nevada educators

Another win for the latest suit against MLB, Manfred calls someone else a liar, and more on Schools Over Stadiums.

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Earlier in September, a judge in New York state’s highest civil court declared that the lawsuits of the Tri-City Valley Cats and the Norwich Sea Unicorns, both former Minor League Baseball affiliate clubs, can proceed to trial in November. This was a significant victory for them, as Evan Drellich detailed at The Athletic, as Major League Baseball wanted to have the suits dismissed: not settled, but just gone.

Drellich, later in the month, tweeted out part of the transcript from the virtual meeting between the two sides, where the judge was “not having any of” MLB’s pleas for a delay in the trial — if the trial had to happen, MLB wanted to keep pushing it off as long as possible. From the sounds of it, though, the judge believes this should all proceed, which is good news for a few reasons. Most promising of which is that, the longer MLB’s antitrust exemption stays in the spotlight and looks like it does more harm than good, the better.

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The Rays are staying in St. Petersburg, for 600 million reasons

A stadium in St. Petersburg is unsustainable for the Rays, unless someone writes a check for $600 million, anyway.

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The whole saga of the Tampa Bay Rays has been something, hasn’t it? It feels like they’ve been trying to move out of the area they call home — or at least out of St. Petersburg, where they actually play their games — since they got there. To be fair, there are loads of problems with their current arrangement. Tropicana Field, as I’ve said many times in the past, reminds me of a rec center where I used to play indoor softball in the winter — that’s great for the rec center, less so for the Major League Baseball team that has to play in that setting. And St. Pete is considerably smaller than Tampa, with just under 260,000 residents compared to Tampa’s nearly 400,000.

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The Red Sox fired Chaim Bloom because John Henry can’t fire himself

Chaim Bloom might be good at the specific job he was asked to do in Boston, but we won’t get to find out.

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The Red Sox have fired Chaim Bloom, because owner John Henry hates nothing more than someone doing exactly what he wanted them to and it not being very popular with fans and media. Not to say that Bloom did a magnificent job with the Red Sox by any means, because he sure did not, but he did about what you’d expect him to be able to do with the resources given to him. Which is to say, not many: the Red Sox might still be spending a lot compared to some clubs, but with three of four seasons under the luxury tax threshold, they aren’t spending like the Red Sox can. And the team Bloom inherited was one designed to be spent on a lot more heavily than his own clubs were allowed to, so you can imagine how “don’t spend” impacted any plans to field the kind of team that was supposed to be at the end of this particular rainbow.

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Oakland reportedly a ‘top two expansion site’ once A’s leave

Oakland will be an attractive expansion city, sure, but what does that mean exactly, and who does this information actually benefit?

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According to USA Today’s Bob Nightengale, Oakland might not be without a baseball team for long after the A’s eventually vacate for Las Vegas. It’s just a little note in a longer article, so, here it is in full:

Although the Oakland A’s will be moving to Las Vegas, the city may not be without a team very long.

High-ranking executives say that if Oakland officials and an ownership group secure a site to build a new ballpark, they will join Nashville, Tennessee, as the top two expansion sites in the next five years.

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There’s something ‘icky’ about those waiver dumps

The Angels dumping their players on waivers was a problem, but the Guardians scooping up so many of them is its own issue, too.

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I haven’t taken the time to write about what the Angels did before the postseason eligibility waiver deadline, when they placed 20 percent of their roster on waivers and told the rest of the league to have at it just so they could save a few bucks. And at this point, basically everything there is to say about it has been said, but still, there are some things about the whole ordeal I’d like to reaffirm, with the help of a couple of pieces that have run at Baseball Prospectus on the subject.

Patrick Dubuque, as I linked to last week, wrote about rules, and how there is always someone looking for a loophole, which makes acting within the rules the correct thing to do in a very general sense. That point of view forgets who makes the rules, though, which is how we end up with something like the Angels very obviously just trying to drop their chances of exceeding the luxury tax threshold and looking to gain a better compensation pick if Shohei Ohtani leaves as a free agent this offseason.

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Notes: Oakland bargaining with A’s name, Red Sox own Pirates TV now

The A’s won’t be the A’s anymore if Oakland has anything to say about it, and Fenway Sports Group owns the Pirates’ TV station now.

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The Athletics are leaving Oakland, we know this much to be true. Or, at least, we’re pretty sure we know this to be true, but until John Fisher gets a bank to agree to pay for the portion of stadium costs that Nevada isn’t taking care of, well. Chaos isn’t out of the question just yet, is all. Anyway! It’s going to take time for all of that to go down, so extending the lease with Oakland is a possibility, even if the eventual outcome is still the A’s heading a little bit east for Vegas.

Extending the lease isn’t going to come free, though, and I don’t mean that the A’s are going to have to pay for it, either. In addition to the usual fees for stadium usage, the mayor of Oakland, Sheng Thao, has said that the A’s need to relinquish their team name to the city as part of a deal to continue to play in the Coliseum while they wait for their home in Vegas to be built. That’s according to Scott Ostler of the SF Chronicle, who reported as much earlier this week:

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