Month: February 2024

Notes: Rafael Devers speaks up, White Sox stadium, expansion

The Red Sox aren’t spending enough, the White Sox want to spend more public money than anyone ever, and expansion is in the news, again.

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Rafael Devers watched as Mookie Betts was traded to the Dodgers for salary relief. He saw the Red Sox bungle negotiations with Xander Bogaerts, who then left for the Padres. He can be forgiven for deciding to speak his mind on the current direction of the Red Sox, which, with spring training now open, he did at the first opportunity. Per Jen McCaffrey at The Athletic:

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Oakland isn’t going to just let the A’s extend their lease

Watch as the A’s try to extract something they need from a city they’ve been openly and unfairly criticizing for months and months.

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If you’ve been following along with the Athletics’ search for a stadium to play baseball in during the years where the (supposed, hypothetical) Las Vegas stadium is being built, then you already know that it is not going well. As I wrote for Baseball Prospectus earlier this month, John Fisher’s A’s no longer have a lease with the city of Oakland after the 2024 season, and then, playing outside the Bay Area until 2028, when the (supposed, hypothetical) Vegas stadium is finished and ready for baseball will cost them their regional television contract, which pays them $67 million per year.

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Is it Rob Manfred’s last term as commissioner?

A comment made by the current MLB commissioner makes it sound as if this current contract is his last one.

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MLB’s owners had their annual preseason meetings last week, and The Athletic’s Evan Drellich covered quite a bit of what commissioner Rob Manfred had to say after them. Lots of it is important to consider for different reasons, but this one stuck out first:

“In times of uncertainty, it’s hard to talk about additional change. Having said that, look, I got five (years as commissioner) left, this year and four more. Those teams, even if I push the issue, they won’t be playing by the time I’m done.”

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Notes: The A’s don’t seem more Vegas-bound yet, Diamond’s future

The A’s aren’t clarifying how this relocation is going to work over time. Instead, it’s only being further muddled.

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On November 30, Baseball Prospectus published a piece of mine titled “The A’s Move to Vegas is Approved, Not Assured.” The idea being that MLB had given permission for the Athletics to vacate Oakland and head to Las Vegas, but beyond that, all that was in place was Vegas allowing it to happen, too. There were a number of ways this relocation could fall apart, and the two-plus months since this piece ran have not reduced that number, either.

On top of that, 2024 kicked off with a look at how the A’s still haven’t provided the stadium renderings that they had promised in early December, and the excuses they used for the delay, both directly and indirectly, no longer exist. So what gives?

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