Laying It Out on the Table: Questions to Ponder

then don’t buy one.

You disrespect all of us who treat it as a civic religion.

In particular, that your team’s attendance relative to average team attendance is probably not relative to the player budget. I think that’s true even for owners who have different motivations.

But this bugs me:

If I’m the owner the only thing I care about is how much money I make.

I hear this all the time, and I think it’s wrong and misleading. I’m not saying that making money doesn’t matter. Of course it matters. But to reduce it to a simplified formula where increasing profit is the only consideration is an absurd caricature that doesn’t reflect reality.

If you’re a bazillionaire who can afford to buy a baseball team, there are a lot of avenues available for investment of your bazillions. You can buy a media corporation, you can buy giant shopping centers, you can buy oilfields, you can buy biotechnology research, you can buy a baseball team, you can buy some combination of these. Which you choose to buy is not solely a function of which one your financial advisor tells you will yield the highest return. Sure, you want a decent return and you don’t want to lose your investment, but to a large extent you’re going to pick something that you want to own.

Let’s scale it down. When you go to work — whether it’s as an attorney, a veterinarian, a software engineer, or an advertising salesman — you’re pretty much going to work in order to make money. If you didn’t make money, you wouldn’t do it. But which one you choose is not just a function of what gives you the best return for your labor. Part of it is what you like to do.

Why does anyone want to get rich anyway? You want to get rich because then you can have cool things and do cool stuff. You want to get super-rich because they you can have super-cool things and do super-cool stuff. Super-cool stuff like own a baseball team. Bazillionaires who buy baseball teams aren’t just generic bazillionaires. They are bazillionaires who think it’s cool to own a baseball team.

Making money is very important, but not for its own sake. It is important as a means to an end. Suppose you quit your boring day job and open up a sports bar. You will very much want to make money. The reason is because if you don’t make money, you’ll go broke, be unable to pay the bills, and you’ll have to shut down the sports bar and go back to your boring day job. And that would suck.

Baseball owners need to make money because if they don’t they won’t be baseball owners any more. Plus, making more money is always better than not. But to pretend that making money is the only thing an owner cares about, and he’d just as soon have sunk the same investment into an office park if he thought that would give a better return, is silly. Worse, it leads one to erroneous conclusions.

That comment was a response to you, WC.

When did the Wolff/Fisher group ever run ads that said the team sucked? Newspaper articles discussing a possible move, or the blatant fact that the coliseum is outdated do not count

…residential properties throughout the 90s and ‘Aughts’, too.

 Does anyone know whether baseball’s antitrust exemption brings with it some responsibility on the part of team owners, e.g., to field a competitive team, or spend some threshold amount?

the percentage below [in ALL cases other than 2003] the average American League game attendance figure for the year being referenced.

The formula for “Y”: ((Average Athletics Attendance / Avg. AL Attendance) – 1) * 100. In other words, the percentage above (or below [in all case save 2003]) the league attendance of other American League teams collectively.

I could be completely ignorant but my feeling is that Wolff likes baseball and wants to be the owner of a supremely successful team. He came to the conclusion that if he wants to lay out a $100M payroll and compete with the big dogs of the AL he needs to get the A’s in new stadium in San Jose to support that kind of expenditure. As a simple fan I don’t know if that conclusion is correct but I certainly understand it.

I don’t think we will ever know the true financials of baseball teams but I believe that just like every business in the world baseball expenditures are determined by revenue. If the A’s want to spend like the top teams in baseball they need to earn like the top teams in baseball and I don’t think they can do that in Oakland. I think the A’s could be a big part of a renaissance in Oakland but I don’t think the city has the will to make it happen and I can’t imagine that a professional sports team owner has the responsibility to make it happen.

The A’s want a new ballpark, Lew Wolff claims Oakland is not an option because he already tried, though many believe he’s never been interested in Oakland in the first place. Since Fremont fell apart, San Jose has emerged as the leading option, but Oakland has done enough in the 11th hour to at least get MLB to intervene and make recommendations. San Jose’s territorial rights belong to the Giants, which has to be resolved for the move to happen. San Jose is now getting antsy about getting MLB’s blessing because they want to put the measure before the voters on the November ballot, but MLB is uninterested in accelerating their process and timelines to accommodate them.

In my opinion, it’s still likely they’ll end up in San Jose, but there are enough cracks around the edges that it could still fall apart. Oakland has a clear and present opportunity to try and expand those cracks, though it require a level of action on their part that they have never possessed in all of recorded history haven’t shown previously.