10 miles away from an infintely superior park

where infinitely inferior baseball is played.

I remember in the 90s de la Fuente talking to Channel 2 news saying the A’s have been sold and would be relocated to Las Vegas. Nice one…

If he had not said that it would leave the A’s open to go to San Jose because Selig already said if Fremont doesn’t work then Wolff can look at any other city.

This does not mean that the city of Oakland will change their ways or open up Jack London Sq. or a large area downtown where the A’s can actually draw a larger crowd.

where does it say he wants out of oakland as fast as possible?

I didn’t know that.

Try buyin’ a house up in that area…

Ironic to think that the Oakland City council in 1956 wrote an unsolicited letter to Walter O’Malley of the Brooklyn Dodgers, asking him to move the Dodgers to Oakland. The city council had authorized “one million dollars” to build a Buckminster Fuller-design “dome” stadium!!

I think it’s MLS, not MLB

No substance to it whatsoever.

But Fisher and Wolff are friends. Fisher doesn’t want to be the team’s mouthpiece, that’s why he is working with Lew. And Selig is friends with Lew, same problem there. Dellums is a moron. You don’t go to a guys friends and ask them to backstab him. That’s going to work as well as Dellums as mayor has worked out.

…but the A’s do make money in the Coliseum.

I believe the Phillies’ owner in the 1940s was forced to sell the team after being caught in a gambling scandal. I’m pretty sure he was banned from baseball. I don’t know if he was actually forced to sell but being banned from the game certainly suggests it.

You say not to bite the hand that feeds him, but frankly what’s feeding him? We have one of the major’s lowest attendances despite being one of the better teams. And while Oaklanders feel alienated, they also don’t come to games. I’ve actually never met many of these Oaklanders you speak of at games.

I have to agree, he is killing baseball in Oakland, kinda like Wayne Huizenga did for the Marlins. It’s all about the money to these capitalist pigs, and that’s the ONLY thing they care about. They don’t care about the team, or the city, or the fans that support it. They ONLY care about the dollars that they can generate. Hence why capitalisim will ultimately fail this nation.

GO A’s!!!

You’re exactly right that that’s why Wolffish want to move. Funny, though, how he never says that, and that his statement blames only the ticket buyers.

i was expecting a lower number, i’m shocked the OAFC can get 200 people to do anything.

sports an A’s hat.

i coach high school baseball in Oakland and all the kids love the A’s.

youth baseball in Oakland has been making a remarkable comeback. between Oakland Babe Ruth, NOLL/SOLL and the RBI program – tons of kids (future ticket buyers) are falling in love with the game.

if that doesn’t convince wolff to stay in oakland, nothing will!
if san jose falls through and wolff sells the team, the new owners will definitely give oakland a second chance if attendance is EVEN LOWER!

Screw Wolff. He ’s not welcome at the coliseum anymore.

In the usual hysteria of fan support, owners have been able to get municipalities to open up and provide money. After the Raider return debacle, and the permanent “cremation” of the “seat license” idea for revenue, it is too easy for a disgruntled minority in any large metro area to chop the electric cord from any big-idea-dazzling-sign that reads “Let’s Build A Stadium and Help Multi-Millionaires!!”

The Athletics aren’t going anywhere, and the City of Oakland/Alameda County is going to continue to present a venue with all the appeal of a mall parking garage …no, those get a nice coat of paint. The Coli has all the appeal of a freeway underpass, including the desultory chain link fences.

I think in the short term — and perhaps for the forseeable future — that this is true, at least until there is a bit more clarity on how long it will be before the economy begins to recover.

After losing to the Red Sox in the ALDS when Beane said, “Give me $150 million and I’ll win a playoff series.”

At least we have a few years left in Oakland, i dont see the economy turning around in a year all of the sudden.

The A’s consistently drew more fans than the Giants before Pac Bell opened. They drew very well in the late 80s/early 90s. In the last 15 years, two thirds of mlb teams have moved into new parks. The A’s have the oldest park, and it became substantially worse with Mt. Davis. If they had moved into a new park in Oakland 10 years ago, there would be no controversy about whether Oakland can support a team. If the A’s had moved to San Jose in 1968 and been playing in a decrepit football stadium ever since, the current outlook would be substantially the same.

That said, given the Giants, Oakland is not a very good market. It’s certainly in the bottom 10. San Jose would be somewhat better, and there would certainly be more of a corporate base, but it would also still be a bottom 10 market.

What’s not to like? That you have to drive an hour to the game.

Since you are not an idiot, I have trouble understanding why you would make such an idiotic argument. Many people root for the “Oakland A’s” as much the “A’s”. Removing the “Oakland” would hurt such people’s interest in the team. Is that rational? Maybe not; fanhood is not rational, it is arbitrary. I would not root for the A’s if they moved to North Carolina. I would not root for them if they moved to San Jose, changed their colors to red and called themselves the San Jose Cardinal. I will root for them somewhat less when they move to San Jose. Other people would like the A’s wherever they wind up. I don’t think this is the sort of thing where it even makes sense to say one point of view is right or wrong.

By the way, thank you for not complaining about your commute (ever!) You are a hero and an example to the young in these dark times.

I am starting to question what he really means, is what I meant to say.

As long as they stay in Nor Cal (prefer the bay area) I’ll be happy. I don’t believe it is complicated to understand why most A’s fans want what is best for the organization whether that be Oaktown, SJ or wherever as long as it’s local dirt. Especially if another area (like SJ) would allow us to be more competitive with revenue streams, updated facilities and an overall organizational health allowing us to be competitive in FA courting.I will always refuse to shift my allegiance to the Giants and find it hard to believe any “real fan” would because a team shifts 20 miles, that’s almost offensive and sounds more like selfish tantrums. There are more fans outside a 20 mile radius of the coliseum then there are in the circle now that have no issues commuting to the product and won’t care. Oakland has many issues and I’m sure it’s tough to make the A’s a priority. The reality is there are more important issues to city development then athletic franchises.

I also find it curious that the Giants have been very silent over this. Previously every time this ever comes up the Giants are quick to squash any talk of it… yet this time (unless I’ve missed it) they’re saying squat. Makes me wonder if they’ve already been told to STFU because it just might happen.

Why May?I really want to go to opening day in April and I already have tickets for a couple of games in June and July.

you are the MLK of our generation.

…is like an outhouse stopping a skyscraper.

He DID try in Oakland. It didn’t work. He tried even before he bought the team. Oakland doesn’t want the A’s, they want the Raiders. Perfect proof: the huge block of concrete in Centerfield.

Did Fremont ever make sense? Yes. It made a lot of sense. But then the Economy went down the shitter, and it fell apart. Did Warm Springs make sense? Not really, but that was the City asking for it.

Lew Wolff gains nothing by essentially throwing a written tantrum about Ron Dellums’ letter to Bud Selig. Now all of his eggs are in San Jose’s basket, and if he thinks San Jose is guaranteed to succeed, he’s mistaken.

Why go to games and spend money on a team that’s just spitting on you in return? I have no clue. His letter is ridiculous, Leww Wolff is ridiculous. If the Mayor’s office is willing to make an aggressive effort to keep the team in Oakland why not work with them ?

I love Oakland very much, but objectively I think it is a city with more past than future. Not that Oakland is going to wither up and die or anything, but it will continue its slow transformation into just another suburb and won’t be a grand center of its own like it once was.

This is indirectly connected to the city’s architecture I love so much. There are three large cities in the United States with an abundance of art deco architecture. The other two are Tulsa and Miami. What all three cities have in common is that they were booming, successful, modern cities in the 1920s and 1930s (when art deco was all the rage everywhere) but were in relative economic decline in the 1950s and 1960s, when the fashion was to tear down the old buildings and build new ones with the steel-and-glass look that now fills most cities.

For Tulsa it was that the local oil boom ran out. For Miami it was divorce from its natural economic partner Cuba. (There’s tons of great art deco in Havana as well.) For Oakland it was the Bay Bridge. The Bridge didn’t change things overnight. But once it was there, San Francisco and Oakland were suddenly next-door neighbors, which they hadn’t been before. Each city had grown up as the center of its own region, now they were vying to be predominant in the same region. Inevitably one would be absorbed by the other.

Today we naturally think of San Francisco as the more prominent city, but it wasn’t always that way. In the 1930s it was not at all clear which city would prevail, but in the end SF won out. New companies looking for a regional headquarters chose SF over Oakland. By the end of the 1950s, the verdict was in, and that’s why most of San Francisco’s great old buildings are long gone and Oakland’s are still with us.

The lack of corporate base that Wolff complains about is really the long tail of this slow transformation. It’s not that Clorox is going to pack up and move to San Francisco, or Safeway to San Mateo. That’s not how it was before either (unless you count Trader Vic’s). Old companies close down and new ones come in to replace them, but if the new ones come in somewhere else, the center of gravity shifts.

Short of tearing down the Bay Bridge, there’s no reason to believe it will ever shift back. Oakland’s future, like it or not, is as a suburb of San Francisco. San Jose, with more distance, is far more likely to thrive as its own metropolitan center.

…in part, because they had a very good stadium ready to go.

Las Vegas would eb a bad move for MLB. And it has nothing to do with perceptions of gambling improprieties.

would block a sj move. i think that is the easy part.

Lew Wolff has been a better owner than Schott and Hoffman were. Not that being better than those two is really all that hard.

Unfortunately, I don’t think selling the A’s would mean they were sold to someone who wants to keep them in Oakland.

As far as the stadium goes, unless it’s a total piece of crap (like Candlestick), I also doubt that the stadium has all that much effect on how many fans attend, but more so how much corporate revenue can be generated.

This is like the season where the warrior played half the seaosn in San Diego and half in the Bay Area… it wouldn’t stop the arguing.

thats an A ball team. Its pretty small.