Posted on 10/31/2022 4:18:26 AM PDT by C19fan
It's a safe bet that the Oakland Athletics baseball team will leave the city for Las Vegas, according to MLB commissioner Rob Manfred.
Manfred said in an interview Friday with Sirius XM that he is no longer optimistic that the A's will stay in Oakland.
'It just doesn't look like it's going to happen,' Manfred said.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Maybe they should move back to Kansas City?
...or Philadelphia...
There is no future in Oakland.
Part of this story is that the teams have evolved in terms of ‘cost’ and the Oakland doesn’t have enough people who are willing to pay out $300 for two people to attend a game, park their car, or take care of beer/food. I could have told you that back in the late 1990s when cost was ramping up.
Vegas? If they are smart, there will be over 300 party rooms on the main deck areas...with guests to lounge around and watch the game.
Professional sports have been pricing themselves out from the average person. Ticket prices are ridiculous along with the food. You want to take the family to a game? It’s a couple hundred bucks. Pass.
“Professional sports have been pricing themselves out from the average person. Ticket prices are ridiculous along with the food. You want to take the family to a game? It’s a couple hundred bucks. Pass.“
Yep! Not to mention another $30 for parking…. And all so that you can watch soulless minor league action, complete with commercials throughout.
Ugh..
Who wants to take the family to a ballpark that has a high probability of some sort of crime being perpetuated against them?
Druggers and muggers......where do I sign up for that?
Vilify the police and this is what happens.
It's gotten to the point where it may not even be considered a "large" sports market anymore.
They sure did. In 1971, when the A’s were in their ascendency, I attended a game that July against the California Angels. Vida Blue was on the mound and Rudy May started for the Angels. Blue went 11 innings and struck out 18, while May went 10 and fanned 11. The A’s finally won in the bottom of the 20th inning when Angel Mangual doubled in Curt Blefary. It was truly a classic.
20 innings. Wow! Were you the only person still in the stadium when the game ended?
Ha! Almost! My dad and I were with the junket from the Vallejo, CA Elks, and by the time the game ended, there were probably 3,000 in the stadium. Started out with an announced attendance of 33,000+. The game finally ended around 2 a.m.
A couple corrections on my earlier comment. Blue struck out 17 over 11 innings and May went 12 innings and struck out 13. Back then, complete games by pitchers were the rule, rather than the exception.
If they move to Vegas they’d better build an indoor stadium. The ubiquitous nostalgic old-timey brick ballpark would keep the paramedics busy treating heat stroke.
The game of baseball, through the first 30 years of its professional existence, had undergone an aggressive evolution with rules that finally settled in for the long run after the Turn of the Century. But the maturation of the ballparks in which the game was played dragged along at a much slower rate. Yes, they gradually grew bigger, but structurally and aesthetically there was neutral advancement. Elegance, on occasion, would rear its pretty head at the front entrance, such as the classy medieval spires at Boston’s South End Grounds or the Romanesque Palace of the Fans in Cincinnati. But for the most part, major league venues were essentially no different from what they had been decades earlier: Physically basic, architecturally uninspiring and, as purely built with wood, prone to a five-alarm blaze at any moment.
Shibe Park provided baseball with its long overdue great leap forward. The first folks to stumble upon its magnificent, opulent façade could not have imagined that a ballfield hid behind it. This place, a ballpark? Perhaps an opera house or five-star hotel, but not a ballpark.
Constructed with cutting-edge steel-and-concrete techniques, Shibe Park would become, along with the future openings of the Houston Astrodome and Baltimore’s Oriole Park at Camden Yards, one of the seminal turning points in ballpark history. It sprang a revolution that resulted in a turnover of nearly all major league ballparks over the next 15 years and put an end to the fading debate over whether baseball had graduated to modern times.
Over its long life, Shibe Park would be home to two of baseball’s greatest and most fleeting dynasties, a jaw-dropping pennant race collapse, and an awful lot of awful baseball. The fans were often far from civilized—this is Philadelphia, after all—but through thick and (mostly) thin, they got a kick out of the place.
From the "This Great Game" website.
Saw a World Series game there in 74. Few years later saw several Concerts there . I imagine it’s a run down dump . Locally there is a 50 year old venue that is crumbling, but the city kicks the can down the road. So it goes.
No doubt and it will cost a billion dollars. But frankly, Vegas is a good spot for major league sports teams as there are thousands of fans that look for entertainment options.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.