Which is of course why Arizona has a domed stadium, and is mostly why the Rangers do too.
I would imagine they will also put in that artificial turf that looks just like grass, as in Phoenix and Texas (and Toronto and Tampa Bay and, for some reason I do not know, Miami.)
Here’s another question … was there a chance ever they were going to stay in Oakland?
If not why didn’t they/ok build the stadium like 2-3 years ago so they didn’t have the mess they’re currently facing and have to have another lame-duck seasoning Oakland…?
I’m having a hard time finding the articles from the time because the new news is clogging up Google. IIRC the need for a new stadium was obvious. The Coliseum is a dump. They tried to get financing for a new stadium in Northern California if Oakland itself wasn’t possible. No one wanted to finance it.
one of the local sports talk guys brought something up "what are they going to do if the Vegas teams end up like most of the Florida teams ? where the locals dont really care about the sport and the ones who do go are there to root for the other out-of-town team?:
Are they spending money elsewhere in town? Yes?
Then nobody in town will give a shit. They will build an economic boom out of people coming to watch their home team play in Vegas. MGM is going to make bank on hotel packages for Away stands (MGM owns all the adjacent hotels to the to-be-built stadium). Hell, by the time they actually move, I’ll be retired and I am sure I’ll spend a few days at Mandalay Bay whenever the Mariners are in town. Or the Angels. Or any other team but Houston. This will be a gold mine for everybody except TV receipts. Those will suck.
Can’t have everything.
Shohei Ohtani has unanimously won the AL MVP; his second such award in the past three seasons.
An Angel has won half of the AL MVPs in the last 10 years. They are 0-3 in the playoffs during that period. What a waste. Talk about owners that need to sell, step right up Arte!
The hockey team built a strong fan base very quickly. It’s shaping up to be a decent sports town. Of course the Knights helped themselves by being really good right from their first year of existence. The A’s won’t build up a local fan base unless they are willing to pay for players to stay and to come to the team. They’ve been the farm club for the rest of the league for years.
And Ronald Acuna Jr. has unanimously won the NL MVP award.
To make it crazier, Ohtani came very close to hitting for the cycle twice, and also came within one pitch of having a perfect game.
I still have no idea what the guy was thinking, signing with a hapless team like the Angels for such a long time to begin with.
Money, dear boy.
That wasn’t it. Because he was under 25, he was officially an international free agent. That gave the Angels the usual 6 years to underpay him, like any other rookie. Heck, he ‘only’ made 5.5 million in 2022 via arbitration.
He signed with them, primarily, because they were west coast and promised that he would be a two-way player.
The smart money is having him stay on the west coast. In the end money will be the main factor. This is the contract where he gets generational wealth.
Like every other fan, I wanted him for my team (Yankees) when he left Japan, but now I don’t even want them to make an offer. He’ll turn thirty in the first year of his next deal; some team is going to be paying him absurd sums for a long time after he’s an MVP candidate. And who even knows if he’ll be an effective starting pitcher much longer. Much better the Cubs or Dodgers or Giants take that on.
The White Sox traded adequate left reliever Aaron Bummer to the Braves for 1/3 of their rotation and some other pieces (they get Mike Soroka, Jared Schuster, Nicky Lopez, Braden Shewmake and Riley Gowens).
These trades between WS competitors and teams in a rebuild are interesting. Soroka and Schuster are good pitchers (Soroka had an extremely good 2019 season before getting hurt), and Schuster was a 2020 first rounder who had some very impressive minor league numbers in 2022. Lopez is a defense-first kind of middle infielder - certainly someone that offers value to a team that has a need. I know nothing of the last 2 pieces.
I think what this move does is really clear the deck for Atlanta to make some big moves in the free agency pitching market. They have an absurdly low team salary considering the amount of talent they have locked in, so I could see them going for at least 2 big name arms - probably 2 out of Snell, Nola, Gray and Yamamoto. They’re going to be tough to beat next year.
For the Sox, this is throwing a pot of spaghetti at the wall. There are some pretty high percentage strands of pasta in the bowl, and they’re pretty cheap overall - I bet most of them stick and provide pretty solid value.
They absolutely COULD have. The deal the city built was an excellent deal.
But it’s quite apparently Fisher was never negotiating in good faith. Every moment they were “negotiating” with the City of Oakland was bullshit; he intended to move all along.
There is an excellent chance this will happen. Las Vegas is a small market by MLB standards.
I know the Knights have been successful and I’d presume the Raiders are too, but that doesn’t mean the A’s will be. The Knights were the first true major league team in town, which can grant a degree of novelty and civic pride, and have been insanely good since arriving. The Raiders are an NFL team; the NFL is a television program, first and foremost, and a live attendance business second. NFL teams are not as dependent on local viewership/attendance to be successful. Anyway, they’ll just pack up and leave for San Diego or Portland or Toronto or Austin or wherever in ten or twelve years if it doesn’t work out. Pulling the new stadium scam is how it rolls.
More pertinently is that MLB plays a lot of games and has to sell a lot of tickets. MLB teams need to sell millions of tickets, not hundreds of thousands. MLB requires a fanbase heavily comprised of people who buy ticket packages, not individual game tickets, and who think nothing of watching or listening to scores of games every year on TV or radio.
The other MLB team in the desert, the Diamondbacks, sells about two million tickets a year - and that is BAD. They have been bottom tier in attendance in the NL every single year, even when they have a good team, for twenty years now. Only once in the last 19 years have they been better than 10th out of 15 NL teams, and that’s a year they were ninth. (Obviously 2020 doesn’t count.) Their attendance isn’t the worst in MLB or close to it, but it is pretty much the minimum you would hope for - and Phoenix is about twice the market Las Vegas is.
No team is guaranteed to be hapless for six years.
The Angels the year before they got him were 80-82, hardly terrible. They had the market and the resources. They were already committed to the greatest player in baseball. They didn’t look nearly as horrible as they do now.
All the As have to do is have better attendance than they did in Oakland. Not going to be hard. There will be copious trip packages and hotel specials offered far and wide. The Champion WNBA Las Vegas Aces had the highest attendance average in the league. The Raiders attendance is in the bottom fifth of the NFL, but still better than Chicago or New England.
I think the As will do just fine in Vegas.
Not a blockbuster deal but the first move by the Yankees.
Bauers was one of the journeyman castoffs the Yankees have been filling the bench with the last few years. One of the low BA guys that occasionally came through. The two prospects I have no idea about. Bauers is arbitration eligible so they had to tender a contract or release him. At least this way they get something.