BOB: A’s relocation rhetoric heats up

CBA changes: playoffs

While this was announced before the new collective bargaining agreement, the new CBA spells out some of the details to expand playoffs beginning as early 2012. Each league will have a second wild card team, and those two teams will play a one-game playoff to decide who gets into the final four.

I was against expanding the playoffs, but if they’re going to do it, this is the way I wanted to see it happen. Now, winning the division will mean a lot more then just home-field advantage, and you won’t have situations like 2010 when the Tampa Bay Rays and New York Yankees had locked up playoff spots but it seemed like neither really wanted to push for that top spot. Now there’s a lot more incentive.

Of course under this new system, the excitement that happened last fall wouldn’t have occurred.

A’s not a lock for San Jose

Last week, I talked about how the decision to allow the Oakland Athletics to move to San Jose was going to happen shortly. But soon thereafter, we heard from the San Francisco Giants, who own the territorial rights to that area, and the Giants aren’t going to give up those rights.

Unlike what I reported last week, it looks like the Athletics move isn’t on the agenda for this month’s owners’ meeting. There are some interesting quotes in the story by former managing partner Peter McGowan, who said Athletics’ owner Lew Wolff told him way back when he bought the team that he was never interested in San Jose, but Las Vegas was one of the places he was looking at. Wolff says he doesn’t remember the conversation.

In other A’s news, Lew Wolff and his investors purchased a hotel in downtown San Jose for $17.18 million. It’s not too far from the proposed stadium site, but this shouldn’t be seen as any sort of sign because Wolff already owns a hotel down the street.

Prospective Dodgers owners Steve Cohen states his case

With the pending sale of the Los Angeles Dodgers getting closer and closer, the participants in an auction for the team are being revealed. One of the people who is going to bid on the team is multi-billionaire hedge fund excecutive Steven Cohen.

Cohen is an East Coast guy, but he seems to have entered the auction with some gusto. Cohen already has put together plans for a Dodgers Stadium renovation and has retained former MLB deputy commissioner Steve Greenberg to help him with the purchase.

Cohen does come with some baggage because a few people from his firm have been implicated in insider trading. Still, this isn’t going to be your usual sale. If MLB rejects the winning bidder, then Frank McCourt has some recourse in bankruptcy court. In some ways, this might be McCourt’s final revenge by pushing an owner on the league that MLB might not normally approve.

Barry Bonds has March deadline in appeal

If slugger Barry Bonds decides to appeal his obstruction of justice conviction, he has until March 21, 2012, to file his written arguments. Then the federal prosecutors will have to until April 20 to respond. Bonds would then have two weeks after that to respond to the federal prosecutors before everything is sent to a three-judge panel.

With all of this in mind, it doesn’t look like Bonds’ fate will be decided until 2013. He is fighting a sentence that was laid down because the district court decided Bonds gave evasive answers to a federal grand jury.

What does MLB’s security chief do?

I guess I didn’t even know MLB had a vice president of security, but after reading this piece, I’m not surprised. Bill Bordley is the new security chief, and he got right into things when, less then a month after taking, Washington Nationals player Wilson Ramos was kidnapped. Bordley is a former Secret Service agent, and the piece that profiles him is very interesting.


2 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
DrBGiantsfan
12 years ago

FYI:  The former Managing Partner of the Giants is Peter Magowan, not David McGowan.

Greg Simons
12 years ago

Thank you, Dr.  It’s been fixed.