The Oakland Athletics
- Thread starter D-Rose
- Start date
AS good as shape as a 39 year old can be anyways, He'll be 40 by the time his suspension is up. I guess its a good omen that he came into contact with the other players with a positive fashion, cause hes definetly a drama queen. Yall can talk about him being a veteran and all, but he definetly hasnt been known to be the positive guy in the locker room that young players look up to
A's/Dodgers series, who's going? I was gonna get like 12 tickets cuz the $2 game is the day after my birthday. But my "friends" are fags who would be like "why would i ever go to an A's game?" Oh yeah, im sorry i provided blunt smoke, booze, snacks, a ride, free parking, and a fun ass time. Yeah why the fuck would you go?
Giants CEO Larry Baer when asked about the Giants potentially relinquishing territorial rights to San Jose, allowing the Athletics to move...."I'm going to be respectful of the process here," said Baer to reporters "You know, I think that's really important. The game is bigger than any internal machinations."
MLB likely to uphold San Francisco Giants' territorial rights in San Jose, leaving the A's stuck in Oakland
Baseball to tell Oakland ... no way, San Jose
TAMPA - After a whirlwind winter of wheeling and dealing, in which he traded three All-Star pitchers and signed both Cuban expatriate, Yoenis Cespedes, and MLB renegade Manny Ramirez, Billy Beane went to Hollywood for the Oscars last week as a guest of Brad Pitt (who played him in a 2011 film) and Sony Pictures, with visions of one day soon taking his revised on-field version of “Moneyball” to San Jose.
Unfortunately, the “Moneyball” film came up empty with the Academy Award voters, and the same fate beckons for Beane and Oakland A’s owners Lew Wolff and John Fisher in their determined effort to move to a new stadium in Hi-Tech haven. The latter prospect, in which, for a variety of reasons, MLB is going to uphold the San Francisco Giants’ territorial rights in San Jose, will be especially disheartening for Beane. The man behind “Moneyballl” essentially blew up his pitching staff, trading his 1-2 starters, Gio Gonzalez and Trevor Cahill, to the Washington Nationals and Arizona Diamondbacks, respectively, and shipped closer Andrew Bailey to the Red Sox — for a bushelful of prospects and young players. All the deals were designed to have a contending-ready team in three years when, presumably, the A’s would be liberated from the gloomy, outmoded Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum and on their way to San Jose.
“For the last 15 years it’s been business as usual in Oakland except the cycles are closer payroll-wise versus revenues,” Beane said by phone from Arizona. “We had a two-fold problem. We needed payroll room to put together an entire new outfield (after the free-agent departures of Josh Willingham, David DeJesus and Hideki Matsui) and we needed to replenish our farm system. So we traded our three best assets and got back 10 young players plus payroll room to sign (center fielder) Coco Crisp (signed for two years, $14 million) and Cespedes.
Though most scouts contend Cespedes has a lot to learn about hitting a major league breaking ball, Beane says the 26-year-old Cuban center fielder is in camp competing for a job in the outfield that now also includes Josh Reddick, the erstwhile top Red Sox prospect who came over in the Bailey deal; Collin Cowgill, a .354 hitter in 98 games at Triple-A Reno last year who was part of the Cahill deal with Arizona; Seth Smith, whom Beane obtained from the Colorado Rockies for two other pitchers, Guillermo Moscoso and Josh Outman; and rookie Michael Taylor. As for Ramirez, believed to be a baseball pariah after he walked away from the Tampa Bay Rays last spring and tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs, Beane defends: “It’s a non-guaranteed, no risk ($500,000) contract for the DH spot where we didn’t have a young player ready to slip in. If he can’t do it, we can turn the page in one hour and release him.”
With or without Manny and Cespedes, however, the A’s are looking at another long, dreary season in Oakland as Wolf grows increasingly impatient with Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig’s interminable delay in ruling on the Giants’ territorial rights to San Jose. There are two reasons why Selig hasn’t ruled:
1. The Giants’ territorial rights to San Jose are part of the MLB constitution as a result of former A’s owner, Levi-Strauss heir Wally Haas agreeing to cede them in 1989 to Giants owner Bob Lurie, who, frustrated in his efforts to get a new stadium in San Francisco, was looking to relocate the team.
2. Even if Selig did invoke his “best interests of baseball” powers and allowed the A’s to move to San Jose, he probably doesn’t have the votes.
Lurie never did try to move the Giants to San Jose, but the fact that he now held those territorial rights to the rich high-tech Silicon Valley enhanced the Giants’ value, and was a prime reason why Lurie, who bought the Giants in 1976 for $8 million, was able to sell them for $100 million in 1993 to a group headed by former Safeway magnate Peter Magowan. The San Jose rights were also the reason why Magowan was able to secure financing for the new ballpark in San Francisco, as the Giants now maintain the crux of their constituency — season box and suite holders — is from the Silicon Valley.
To strip the Giants of their territorial rights to San Jose would require a three-quarters vote of the clubs, and as one baseball lawyer observed: “Clubs would realize what a terrible ‘there but for the grace of God go us’ precedent that would create in which all of their territorial rights would then be in jeopardy.” As an example of that, one can’t imagine the Yankees, Mets or Phillies voting to take the Giants’ territorial rights to San Jose away when it could conceivably open the doors for a team seeking to re-locate to New Jersey.
So, with no way to San Jose, where does this leave the A’s and Beane, who recently signed a contract extension through 2019 when he conceivably thought he’d be operating there? With the Giants adamant against making any financial settlement with the A’s on San Jose, Wolff and Fisher would appear to have only two options: Find a suitable site for a new stadium in their own (East Bay) territory, possibly right next door to the Coliseum, or sell the team. At least, if they choose the latter, the likely $1.5 billion-plus the Dodgers figure to fetch will help boost the value of the A’s well past the $172 million they paid for them in 2006.
Or, if everyone concludes the A’s financial survival anywhere in their own territory is untenable, there is the final solution: Contraction. In noting the similar plight of the Tampa Bay Rays, whose ironclad lease with Tropicana Field holds them hostage in St. Petersburg until 2027, one baseball official said darkly: “The A’s and Rays are both in hopeless situations, and there’s no place to move these teams. Hard as this might be to swallow for a lot of us, it would be in the best interests of baseball to contract both of them. You’d have a better game, and it would be two less teams we all have to subsidize.”
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/b...stuck-oakland-article-1.1032531#ixzz1o9KO8u1U
Baseball to tell Oakland ... no way, San Jose
TAMPA - After a whirlwind winter of wheeling and dealing, in which he traded three All-Star pitchers and signed both Cuban expatriate, Yoenis Cespedes, and MLB renegade Manny Ramirez, Billy Beane went to Hollywood for the Oscars last week as a guest of Brad Pitt (who played him in a 2011 film) and Sony Pictures, with visions of one day soon taking his revised on-field version of “Moneyball” to San Jose.
Unfortunately, the “Moneyball” film came up empty with the Academy Award voters, and the same fate beckons for Beane and Oakland A’s owners Lew Wolff and John Fisher in their determined effort to move to a new stadium in Hi-Tech haven. The latter prospect, in which, for a variety of reasons, MLB is going to uphold the San Francisco Giants’ territorial rights in San Jose, will be especially disheartening for Beane. The man behind “Moneyballl” essentially blew up his pitching staff, trading his 1-2 starters, Gio Gonzalez and Trevor Cahill, to the Washington Nationals and Arizona Diamondbacks, respectively, and shipped closer Andrew Bailey to the Red Sox — for a bushelful of prospects and young players. All the deals were designed to have a contending-ready team in three years when, presumably, the A’s would be liberated from the gloomy, outmoded Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum and on their way to San Jose.
“For the last 15 years it’s been business as usual in Oakland except the cycles are closer payroll-wise versus revenues,” Beane said by phone from Arizona. “We had a two-fold problem. We needed payroll room to put together an entire new outfield (after the free-agent departures of Josh Willingham, David DeJesus and Hideki Matsui) and we needed to replenish our farm system. So we traded our three best assets and got back 10 young players plus payroll room to sign (center fielder) Coco Crisp (signed for two years, $14 million) and Cespedes.
Though most scouts contend Cespedes has a lot to learn about hitting a major league breaking ball, Beane says the 26-year-old Cuban center fielder is in camp competing for a job in the outfield that now also includes Josh Reddick, the erstwhile top Red Sox prospect who came over in the Bailey deal; Collin Cowgill, a .354 hitter in 98 games at Triple-A Reno last year who was part of the Cahill deal with Arizona; Seth Smith, whom Beane obtained from the Colorado Rockies for two other pitchers, Guillermo Moscoso and Josh Outman; and rookie Michael Taylor. As for Ramirez, believed to be a baseball pariah after he walked away from the Tampa Bay Rays last spring and tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs, Beane defends: “It’s a non-guaranteed, no risk ($500,000) contract for the DH spot where we didn’t have a young player ready to slip in. If he can’t do it, we can turn the page in one hour and release him.”
With or without Manny and Cespedes, however, the A’s are looking at another long, dreary season in Oakland as Wolf grows increasingly impatient with Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig’s interminable delay in ruling on the Giants’ territorial rights to San Jose. There are two reasons why Selig hasn’t ruled:
1. The Giants’ territorial rights to San Jose are part of the MLB constitution as a result of former A’s owner, Levi-Strauss heir Wally Haas agreeing to cede them in 1989 to Giants owner Bob Lurie, who, frustrated in his efforts to get a new stadium in San Francisco, was looking to relocate the team.
2. Even if Selig did invoke his “best interests of baseball” powers and allowed the A’s to move to San Jose, he probably doesn’t have the votes.
Lurie never did try to move the Giants to San Jose, but the fact that he now held those territorial rights to the rich high-tech Silicon Valley enhanced the Giants’ value, and was a prime reason why Lurie, who bought the Giants in 1976 for $8 million, was able to sell them for $100 million in 1993 to a group headed by former Safeway magnate Peter Magowan. The San Jose rights were also the reason why Magowan was able to secure financing for the new ballpark in San Francisco, as the Giants now maintain the crux of their constituency — season box and suite holders — is from the Silicon Valley.
To strip the Giants of their territorial rights to San Jose would require a three-quarters vote of the clubs, and as one baseball lawyer observed: “Clubs would realize what a terrible ‘there but for the grace of God go us’ precedent that would create in which all of their territorial rights would then be in jeopardy.” As an example of that, one can’t imagine the Yankees, Mets or Phillies voting to take the Giants’ territorial rights to San Jose away when it could conceivably open the doors for a team seeking to re-locate to New Jersey.
So, with no way to San Jose, where does this leave the A’s and Beane, who recently signed a contract extension through 2019 when he conceivably thought he’d be operating there? With the Giants adamant against making any financial settlement with the A’s on San Jose, Wolff and Fisher would appear to have only two options: Find a suitable site for a new stadium in their own (East Bay) territory, possibly right next door to the Coliseum, or sell the team. At least, if they choose the latter, the likely $1.5 billion-plus the Dodgers figure to fetch will help boost the value of the A’s well past the $172 million they paid for them in 2006.
Or, if everyone concludes the A’s financial survival anywhere in their own territory is untenable, there is the final solution: Contraction. In noting the similar plight of the Tampa Bay Rays, whose ironclad lease with Tropicana Field holds them hostage in St. Petersburg until 2027, one baseball official said darkly: “The A’s and Rays are both in hopeless situations, and there’s no place to move these teams. Hard as this might be to swallow for a lot of us, it would be in the best interests of baseball to contract both of them. You’d have a better game, and it would be two less teams we all have to subsidize.”
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/b...stuck-oakland-article-1.1032531#ixzz1o9KO8u1U
Who wrote this? It sounds like they have no idea what theyre talking about. Everything they said is opposite of every other article or report. It sounds like a whole lot of speculation, I call bullshit. Baseball is better when the A's are good, baseball is better when everybody is good. They dont benefit from having bad teams with poor attendence, and they dont benefit from teams folding all together. Contraction has never been on the table before, suddenly its a such viable option? Apparently this moron hasnt read any part of the new CBA, if the A's moved to SJ they wont need any revenue sharing money since theyll be in a top 15 market. Not to mention the years worth of lawsuits, and the most powerful union being expected to just roll over. Its impossible for the MLB to vote on the A's side? Sabean and the Giants are the least like group in the league. That "reason 1" is completely false. This dude is talking out of his ass.