Category: Media

The Oakland A’s are no more, and here’s why

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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.

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Notes: A’s and Las Vegas timeline, Reinsdorf’s stadium gambit, incompetency

The more things change? No, just the more things stay the same.

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You will be shocked, but the A’s are in the news again for their planned move to Las Vegas. You will be even more surprised by this, but it’s more like “news” where information we’ve already had access to is being presented as if it’s new, in such a way that makes it seem if progress is being made. Ah, well, nevertheless.

Here’s an Oakland Fox affiliate, KTVU, doing that very thing earlier this week:

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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: Continue reading “Notes: MLB’s latest threat to Bally Sports, NCAA unfair labor charge”

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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Notes: MLB discussing national streaming package, Athletes Unlimited Softball, WNBA TV deal

MLB is working on national streaming, Athletes Unlimited brings a new model to our attention, and the WNBA is close to a record TV deal.

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It’s felt, for some time, like MLB was moving toward having some kind of national streaming package in place as a replacement for the regional sports network model. It just hadn’t been explicitly said by anyone in a position of power with the league yet: instead, it’s been a lot of putting pieces together and projecting from there, something I’ve been doing in this space and at Baseball Prospectus for some time now.

Now, though, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred has outright said this is something they’re considering, due to what he describes as the “deteriorating” of the RSN business: “We know the future is going to be streaming. What we’re hearing from the streamers is they want a more national product, and we need to be responsive to what people want to buy.”

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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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Notes: White Sox stadium rumors, changing free agency, Diamond

Jerry Reinsdorf is doing it doing, changes are needed to get players to free agency sooner, and Diamond has a deal, maybe.

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Remember back during the winter meetings, when Jerry Reinsdorf went and had lunch with the mayor of Nashville? With the idea being that it was solely to help build up some leverage for some stadium demands in Chicago? Last week, the Chicago Sun-Times reported that the White Sox were in “serious talks” to build a stadium, following a meeting between Reinsdorf and Chicago’s mayor, Brandon Johnson.

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On MLB’s rejection of the Amazon/Diamond streaming proposal

MLB’s rejection is also them showing their hand on their preference for the future of broadcasting.

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You saw the headline, now let’s get to some background. From me on December 22, at Baseball Prospectus:

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Notes: MLB broadcasting and Amazon, Tinyletter

The latest on the Diamond broadcasting issue, as well as some newsletter housekeeping notes.

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Here we go, the final newsletter for 2023. Thanks for reading through what has been a year that involved a lot more stadiums and a lot less labor-specific news than expected. But don’t worry, MLB deciding to mess with workers of one kind or another is a tradition they don’t plan on leaving behind forever.

***

Earlier this week, it was reported that Diamond Sports Group, which runs the Bally regional sports networks, was seeking a way back to the kind of profit they were hoping for by negotiating a partnership with Amazon. This would allow them to rely less on the shrinking cable market, and by moving onto one of the streaming video platforms with the most subscribers. Amazon Prime Video has 200 million subscribers, with Netflix (247 million) having more, Disney+ behind at 150 million, Paramount Plus at 63 million, Hulu at 48 million, Peacock 28 million, ESPN+ 26 million, Apple TV 25 million. Amazon Prime Video is massive, is the point, with only the original streamer ahead (and also the only one not tied mostly to their own original content). If Diamond is going to partner with anyone in the space, Amazon makes the most sense, especially since they’ve already successfully partnered with the NFL for Thursday Night Football.

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Mailbag: MLBPA members, licensing, and scabs

A question on why scabs were even allowed into the league in the first place.

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Mailbag time!

One of the things that has come up in our internal [organization] discussions lately is how if we are able to successfully unionize where I work, every employee that falls under the proper umbrellas is required to be a member of the union (that may be a California-specific thing, but I can’t remember). That got me thinking about some baseball players who I know historically were not part of the MLBPA. Barry Bonds and Kevin Millar (aka Jon Dowd and Anthony Friese) are the two big guys that came to mind. Under what circumstances was it okay for non-union members to participate in the league though? Couldn’t those guys have signed contracts that undermine things the MLBPA was doing? Wouldn’t the union have wanted to stop those non-union guys from signing into the league?

-HB

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