Home plate is on its way to Cooperstown. What’s left is quite an image.
I’ll have more thoughts this weekend. In the meantime, read my postmortem from 10 months ago, which I didn’t realize I was writing back then.
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newballpark.org 
Against the backdrop of your linked 2023 post, I’ve been thinking about Walter J. Haas’s recent comments on John Fisher. Beyond his assertion about interested suitors quietly approaching Fisher, I’m wondering why Haas was so sanguine about a new owner-slash-savior having success in finding a new local home for the Athletics…when the current ownership couldn’t find a way to do this over the entire lifetime of your website.
There isn’t much to like about Fisher, but the A’s under his ownership certainly put up a serious, sustained, and persistent effort, over many years, to find a new home for the club in the Bay Area; for all the reasons you cite in the ’23 post, the deck was (and still is) stacked against that ever happening, no matter who owns the team. Do you think Haas is seeing the situation a bit too much through forest-green-colored glasses?
I am not a California resident, nor am I on social media, so apologies in advance if I’m missing something.
Completely. The game has changed. If you consider that buying the team would cost at minimum $1.2 B and any new ballpark alone would cost the same, that’s not pocket change for any tech billionaires outside of the Ellison/Musk/Ballmer types. Anyone who sniffs around the A’s will find out within seconds that aside from local and national revenue sharing they get, there are no inherent cash cows built into the franchise. So anyone who gets involved would need some youth and a lot of patience to pull off a real turnaround in Oakland. Plus you’re probably running the team at subsistence levels for a few years if not in debt because the CBA dictates that the A’s have to be off revenue sharing once a new ballpark opens in Oakland. Those are tough terms to put into any prospectus.
Great points both. When you talk about the Ellison’s and Musk’s of the world, it makes you think
I’ve always wondered what the territorial rights to the south bay could be bought for and if it would make it worthwhile to the buyer. The Oakland only crowd talks about Fisher selling not realizing that his highest bidders would most likely come from outside of Oakland. Think Phil Knight in Portland, the Sheldon Adelson estate in Vegas or Larry Ellison in San Jose. I’m thinking that if Ellison were to offer a $1 billion to the Giants for the territorial rights on top of another $2 billion for the A’s, you would be looking at something close to a deal
and what’s crazy is that the Haas family gave the territorial rights to the South Bay to the Giants to get them to stay. I don’t know what they’re worth, but a Billion seems a bit much. I wish MLB would just award them back to the A’s.