Whether you're looking for a conclusion to the Oakland A's ballpark saga or a path for Major League Baseball expanding to 32 teams, the first official step has been taken toward each.
The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports that the Oakland ownership group signed a binding purchase agreement for 49 acres just west of the Las Vegas Strip. It's the most significant development in relocating the franchise after a score's worth of attempts to get Oakland to publicly finance a replacement for the Coliseum, and a few years of giving up on the fan base.
It's a shame, because the recent scenes in Oakland -- most notably the four-figure attendance totals and the opossum inhabiting the visiting team's TV booth -- obscure what had been one of baseball's liveliest environments whenever the A's had promise. The Coliseum inadvertently helped create that charm, because nobody went to there to enjoy the amenities. The people who showed up were there to watch the A's, and when you had 40,000 of those people in the unmistakable green and gold combinations firing each other up, it made for great television.
I visited the Coliseum for the first (only?) time in 2019 for an ordinary midweek A's-Rays game, and even though it drew only 16,126, you could still sense where fans directed their attention, because thanks to Mount Davis blocking what had been a great backdrop, there was nowhere else to look. I sat down the left-field line by the Oakland bullpen, watching fans and relievers interact over the course of the evening like they were watching the game together. Liam Hendriks in particular seemed like a cool guy.
Time marches on, populations shift and some markets just get left behind. Baseball history is littered with such examples, and just because it hadn't happened in a while doesn't mean the game had advanced past requiring such "corrections." But as I mentioned in my review of the Coliseum, losing the Oakland A's definitely makes baseball less democratic. They'll be moving from a 46,000- to 56,000-seat monstrosity where you could effectively pay what you wanted and make your own fun, to a 30,000-seat ballpark that leverage the scarcity to maximize the dollar value extracted from whoever shows up.
Oakland fans had devised a reverse boycott for mid-June to show everybody that the market wasn't the problem, and even though this news probably dulls any impact, I still hope they show up to offer at least one more reminder of what baseball will miss. Considering the A's are the Opposite Rays -- 3-16 instead of 16-3 and trailing the league in just about every category -- another postseason run isn't going to be in the cards.
Spare Parts
Marc Carig's column spoke to me, because while I had no connection to the Bay Area, the A's were the first baseball team I gravitated toward because of all the players who were fun to imitate in the backyard.
For me, there was no cultural translation needed to appreciate Rickey, or Dave Stewart, or Dennis Eckersley, or the Bash Brothers, Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco. They made a very difficult game look very easy, and for the first time I had something I could talk about at school. Through the years, my brother and I went to more games together than we could count. My family used to attend Opening Day. I’ve spent some of the greatest days of my life in that ballpark. And I wasn’t alone.
Set Betteridge's Law of Headlines aside and focus more on how this story digs into how Jake Burger went about "creating a floor in the strike zone" to attack his weakness of low strikes and lower non-strikes.
Carlos Rodón's March was disrupted by a forearm strain, and his April has been disrupted by a back issue he suffered while rehabbing his forearm strain. The problem originally surfaced a couple weeks ago, and it's still "barking" on him.
As I mentioned in Thursday's post about Andrew Vaughn, José Abreu is off to one of his slow starts in Houston, but unlike last April, the contact quality isn't there, and Abreu's plate discipline has also swung the wrong way. Dan Szymborski says these developments "are consistent with an aging hitter with declining bat speed," and if this ends up being the decline that sticks, it won't be the White Sox's problem.
Speaking of Hendriks, he announced on Thursday that he's officially cancer-free. Now everybody involved has to figure out what he might be able to offer the rest of the season. While there aren't many precedents, Ethan Katz said there might be something to learn from 2022, when Hendriks wasn't available for his usual multi-inning appearances, and the Sox only had a flexor strain to point to.
“I look back at like every little detail last year that had gone on, and just think about him and what he did do, and maybe he was going through, and no one really knows,” Katz said. “One of my questions was, ‘How long have you been dealing with this?’ And the response that he gave me was, ‘Probably a lot last year.’ So to think that he actually did what he did last year with everything that had been going on, not knowing, to pushing through spring training and doing all kinds of throwing while doing treatment, it’s an incredible story.”
Regardless of what Hendriks can contribute on the field, this might be the best news of the season. Everybody would welcome the rest of the White Sox giving it some real competition.
