1. John Fisher Missed a Layup
When it first became clear the A’s were going to move to Las Vegas, it felt sad but natural. Oakland is a small place for a professional team, especially with San Francisco right across the bay. The Oakland Coliseum is falling apart, and while it was shitty for A’s owner John Fisher to push so hard for free commercial real estate from Oakland taxpayers in addition to his new stadium, it was hardly outside the current norms in American professional sports. Las Vegas? A growing city with a thriving NHL expansion team and the A’s old roommates, the Raiders? That’s hard to beat. We said sometime last year that if the A’s didn’t exist and you were to pick a place for an MLB expansion team, you would not consider Oakland. Las Vegas would be at the top of your list.
Somehow, John Fisher has botched this. And he keeps botching it.
The first errors surrounded the stadium plan in Las Vegas. The plan to build on the Tropicana hotel site has smoothed out, but it was dicey for a while there, plagued with possible pitfalls, and even now the stadium won’t be ready for at least four more seasons. The A’s burned their Bay Bridge without a boat to get them out of Oakland.
Now, the A’s are finding their temporary home, and it’s a terrible solution. For the next three MLB seasons, 2025 through 2027, the A’s will play in Sacramento at the ten-thousand-seat stadium of the Sacramento River Cats, the Giants’ AAA affiliate. The A’s will be the tenants of a minor league franchise. This could work fine. The A’s could get themselves embraced by Sacramento. The A’s could become Sacramento’s hometown team for at least a few years. The A’s could pitch their vision of a developing farm system blooming in the Central Valley, the next baseball stars playing alongside marketable veterans like Brandon Belt wanting an MLB landing spot in which to do a victory lap.
But the A’s aren’t trying that.
Beyond those who haven’t yet reached free agency, the A’s don’t have a single player signed for 2025. Those next MLB stars? They’ll be developing in an extended minor league setting, losing one hundred games a year as a byproduct of the most inhumane draft ever imposed upon any setting other than armed conflict. Why should the A’s first round pick sign this year if he has college eligibility at his disposal? How is the MLBPA not filing grievance upon grievance over this situation? And how is Sacramento supposed to feel about being the home of the A’s when the A’s reportedly won’t even call themselves the Sacramento A’s? (They’re reportedly just going to be…the A’s. No city. Inverse of the Washington Football Team situation.)
The Las Vegas A’s might work out, as a franchise and a brand. Maybe it’s as simple as dropping an MLB franchise into Las Vegas and letting nature take its course. The A’s have moved plenty of times before in their storied history. But it’s hard to trust a franchise run by John Fisher to do anything other than blunder in continuously mind-boggling ways. Moving a professional sports team is one thing. Burning a franchise to the ground in pursuit of more comfortable later failure is something else.
The Cubs Won Ugly
It wasn’t pretty last night at Wrigley Field, the Cubs becoming heavily reliant on a Rockies implosion to get out victorious after a disastrous collapse of their own. But the Cubs did win, and they’re up to 4–2, which is about as good as you can reasonably ask an MLB team to be two series into the year.
There aren’t a lot of early takeaways worth discussing. The sample is just too small. But little things like winning that game are the things you’d expect from a team like last year’s, one that overperformed on the margins. It would be more encouraging if they’d simply smoked the Rockies three games in a row, but a sweep is a sweep, they’ve got a day off today to rest the bullpen, and after losing two games and Justin Steele in the season’s first two days, the team’s made the first 3.7% of the season a success. Credit to the grounds crew for keeping the field playable in the miserable conditions.
That Super League Isn’t Happening
It’s possible that the group promoting college football’s “super league,” the group which secured a large free advertisement yesterday from The Athletic, is onto some things. It’s possible some of their concepts will take root. But what they’re advertising—a sport which preserves some national path for Group of Five teams while cutting power conferences up into more regionalized divisions—is exactly where college football is already headed. If power conferences get any bigger, regionalized divisions will naturally return. The next decade of the sport is committed already to a large playoff format. Smaller programs can already play their way into better conferences, just like UCF and Cincinnati and others have recently done. The super league isn’t that novel. It’s college football, with a heavy NFL flavor and a decent amount of history stripped away.
The alleged business model here is predicated upon an assumption that fans will like this more and watch this more. That’s this group’s justification for how their super league will not only make more money, but will make enough more money that the House vs. NCAA lawsuit—the one where former college athletes are asking for damages from NIL not always being allowed when its prohibition was always illegal—will become easy to settle. The group says the House lawsuit might bankrupt college sports, but that if they’re in charge, it won’t, because their vision will be more popular. But ESPN and Fox Sports reportedly don’t like it, and they’re the ones who gain the most from better ratings?
This is idiocy.
Thankfully, this isn’t going anywhere. The ACC took a meeting on it, but the Power Four’s football conferences did not. ESPN and Fox Sports, again, are opposed, and they’re the ones who broadcast college sports. This only got published as some combination of clickbait for The Athletic and water-carrying by Stewart Mandel on behalf of “sources,” probably the same sources which he allowed to use him as a consistently incorrect mouthpiece over the last two offseasons of realignment rumbles. It’s a dumb idea, one the Power Four’s lesser football brands only like because it locks them into a power conference world. It’s not going to happen. It’s not worth more time than we’ve just given it.
