Inspired by jeffro's idea for getting a bunch of AN'ers together to watch the A's open the season against the Red Sox in Japan, I thought that we should "invite" Billy Beane to have a few loyal friends over—to the Coliseum to watch the games on the StomperTron. Obviously, sure, there'd be a multitude of logistical questions on the A's end—mostly to do with staffing and setup, which is really beyond my purview or concern. And given the early-morning start time for the games, BART wouldn't really be an option for getting to the game (though I have a potential solution for that, which I'll outline below). Most importantly, we know that the A's, as is only right, don't really have any interest in making a massive giveaway of goods and services. So the question is: How many of us would be willing to pay to do this, in order to make it cost-effective for the A's to do it? Billy, consider this an open-source marketing survey more than a request, per se. AN'ers, please read the poll answers carefully before you respond. And chime in with comments about how this could (or couldn't) be made to work to the A's (financial and fan-base) advantage. Personally, I think that with the combination of the uniqueness of the event and the usual capacity crowd associated with a Red Sox visit to the Coliseum (i.e., transplanted Bostonians with cash to burn), the A's could probably pull in a sizable crowd for such an event. They could even work around the problem of BART's last train for the previous evening arriving at 1:00 a.m., by scheduling some sort of promotional or charity on-field event (perhaps as simple as fireworks?) prior to game time.
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