BOB: Athletics stadium limbo
by Brian BorawskiMay 23, 2012
Athletics still hoping for San Jose home
Major League commissioner Bud Selig recently talked about the Oakland Athletics' stadium issue. He said it's up to owner Lew Wolff whether to consider different sites for a new ballpark but he also said that as of now, he's focused on a move to San Jose. He also said at the quarterly owners' meeting that there's still no timetable for a resolution on the San Jose issue. For now, it's up to the San Francisco Giants because they control the territory that includes San Jose.At the moment, Wolff can look at any location within his territory without getting league approval. If he wants to move, then it gets a little stickier. San Jose is closer to San Francisco than Oakland, and the Giants were given that territory when the built their new ballpark, so it looks like it's going to take a lot for the Giants to let the Athletics move in.
MLB has record-breaking weekend
With interleague play across baseball last weekend, the turnstiles appeared to move more then at any other time on this side of the Memorial Day weekend. Whether you like interleague play or not, there were 1,652,935 tickets sold in the 45 games over the weekend and this breaks the record set in 2006, when 1,640,976 tickets were sold in the weekend before Memorial Day.It also was the best-attended 45-game weekend since the final weekend of the 2008 season. Baseball attendance has been good so far and through Sunday, it was were at 18,637,924 tickets sold, which is 6.7 percent better then this time last year.
Mets get 2013 All-Star Game
The New York Mets and their ballpark, Citi Field, were awarded the 2013 All-Star Game. It's the second time the Mets will have hosted; the last was 1964 at Shea Stadium. This isn't a big surprise because most new ballparks have gotten the All-Star Game within a few years of construction.Aroldis Chapman sued for $18 million
Danilo Curbelo Garcia recently sued in Miami federal court alleging that Cincinnati Reds fireballer Aroldis Chapman falsely accused him in a human trafficking case. He's suing for $18 million in damages. How the story goes is that to get in the Cuban government's favor, he threw Garcia under the bus. That favor allowed Chapman to rejoin his team, which eventually went to the Netherlands where Chapman defected from.Garcia is a legal U.S. resident who lives in Miami, but he also hold Cuban citizenship. The lawsuit was filed just before Chapman was arrested for driving under suspended license in Ohio earlier this week.
Minor league merchandise sales did well in 2011
Minor League Baseball announced this week that licensed merchandise generated $52.2 million in sales in 2011. This was the third best year since 1991 and it's a 2.2 percent increase from 2010.Of the top 25 top-selling teams, only four weren't in the top 25 in 2010. The new teams were the Greensboro Grasshoppers, the Louisville Bats, the Omaha Storm Chasers and the Salt Lake Bees.
Brian Borawski is a member of SABR's Business of Baseball Committee and writes about the Detroit Tigers at his own website, TigerBlog. He welcomes comments, questions and suggestions via e-mail.
i’d take issue with “San Jose is closer to San Francisco than Oakland, and the Giants were given that territory when the built their new ballpark, so it looks like it’s going to take a lot for the Giants to let the Athletics move in.”
1. while SJ may be, as the crow flies, closer to SF than to Oakland, SJ is further from SF than Oakland is. so the issue is not proximity or any kind of “physical” encroachment.
2. the Giants got the territorial rights to SJ years before they built their current ballpark - they asked for and were granted those rights when, after failing to get SF voters to build them a new ballpark, they tried to get SJ voters to do the same (w/ same results). when new ownership decided to build/finance their own park in SF, they asked for, and received from mlb, a reaffirmation of this territorial right to SJ. This is the crux of the issue—Giants refusal to give up their “right” to SJ.
3. the Giants, apparently, are not holding out for more to get them to cede their rights (like the orioles got when the expos moved to dc). It appears that they, like current A’s ownership, believe that remaining in Oakland is untenable, so the desired outcome for Giant ownership is not getting a bigger payoff (for ceding their rights), but forcing the A’s to move out of the territory, making the Giants the single team in an enormous market. They believe that this is a far greater payoff than anything they could get from the A’s directly.