Oakland A’s stadium czar Dave Kaval has already been playing public footsie with Las Vegas and blaming the media for reporting on his team’s stadium demands, so what is left in the stadium playbook for him to pull out of his hat? How about claiming that the lack of a new stadium is keeping the team from being successful on the field, that’s one we haven’t heard in a while:
“We can go from having one of the lowest five payrolls in the league to a top-five or 10, depending on the year,” Kaval told this news organization on Tuesday. … Kaval said Tuesday of reaching a stadium deal, “Once we do that, all the things that fans have been concerned about, which are fair, can be solved,” he said. “Hopefully people can get on board and see the ballpark is the solution for the concern and will enable us to retain our players for longer and that will be a positive thing for our fans and players themselves.”
Okay, so a couple of things. First off, rational team owners don’t spend money on players because they have the money to spend — they’re pretty much all billionaires, after all, so it’s not like their checking accounts run dry — but rather because they think it will make them more money by selling tickets. (We’ll ignore for the moment the fact that pretty much every MLB team owner seems to spend more on player payroll than is rational.) If ticket prices at a new stadium go way up, that could be an incentive to spend more on players; or, it could be an incentive to sit back and say, “We have a beautiful new ballpark, people are going to show up whether or not Matt Chapman is still on the team.”
The Mercury News, in fact, notes that new stadiums have largely not led to immediate surges in player spending:
None of the four teams who have built new stadiums since 2010 — the Texas Rangers, Atlanta Braves, Miami Marlins and Minnesota Twins) have a Top 10 payroll. In fact, the Braves are the highest (14th).
Petco Park in San Diego, Progressive Field in Cleveland and Oracle Park in San Francisco are ballparks the A’s often point to as examples of their downtown, urban vision, and those teams have shown mixed spending habits after opening their new ballparks. … The Indians opened Progressive Field in 1994 and ranked in the top ten for payroll from 1998 to 2002. But the Indians’ payroll has dropped below league average for every season since 2003 and this season only the Pirates and the Orioles had smaller payrolls on Opening Day.
“We need a new stadium so we can spend like the Cleveland Indians” maybe isn’t the best argument to be making right now, yeah.
Still, threatening that the team’s best players will leave if your team doesn’t get a new stadium is a time-honored gambit: Remember that time the Florida Marlins tried to sign then-star third baseman Mike Lowell to a contract extension that would only take effect if they got a new stadium? Besides, it’s the perfect time to make such a threat what with the A’s having let star shortstop Marcus Semien walk last winter and currently languishing in … huh, first place? I’m starting to think that Kaval may not be very good at this whole extortion racket.
It would be somewhat believable from almost any other team. Weren’t the A’s the chief architect of the Moneyball concept? All of sudden they’re going to start throwing money around?
The more Kaval imitates David Sampson, the more pols are going to be reminded what happened when they gave David Sampson what he wanted. (didn’t the mayor of Miami lose the next election) and how he bragged at a party about getting 500 million for a ballpark nobody goes to
Starting sometime after the Marlins first World Series, ownership started babbling about increasing payroll *if* someone would just build them a new stadium.
They even went as far as tying a popular / good players (Mike Lowell) contract to a deal.
Of course you know that their payroll went to the lowest level just before their new stadium was built – and while they signed Giancarlo Stanton to a mega deal, it was so backloaded that their payroll never really went up.
It was all just words.
I just had a duh moment. Thursdays. Whaddya gonna do?
Jeff Loria spent money on the Marlins after the new stadium was built, for about six months. Then it turned out Jose Reyes and Mark Buehrle weren’t a guarantee of winning, or of fans showing up, and he blew it all up and went back to cheaping out again.
I enjoyed the SoE article, thanks. I’ve never really put much faith in the confabulated and MBA (or wanna be MBA) driven derivative stats industry.
Sure, listing players by WAR can make for some interesting conversations. But like all stats, it can be highly misleading. Is player X – 8th on this list – really a better hitter than the 10 guys below him?
Well sure, he’s 8th, so he has to be. Unless, of course, he used to be 151st on the list before he was moved into a line up that features much better hitters both ahead of and behind him, so now he is the ‘break’ in the lineup rather than being the guy opposing pitchers avoided throwing strikes to.
Baseball is not golf or olympic weightlifting… there are many factors that cannot be quantified that impact any given play, game, or season. The ‘securitization’ of major league baseball is likely to end the same way it did in the mortgage market. Good thing MLB can always count on taxpayers to cover it’s losses just like the finance world did.
WAR doesn’t rely on most context-dependent stats (like RBI or wins), and is adjusted to compensate for others (like park factors or quality of fielding defense).
The interesting thing about the calculations that went into that SoE piece, and the Baseball Prospectus article that preceded it, is that team owners seem to on the whole be spending a whole lot more on players than they’re getting in increased return from winning ballgames. Or to put it more simply: Some people will still show up to see even a bad baseball team, so why bother spending on players at all?
More here:
https://deadspin.com/baseball-doesnt-need-collusion-to-turn-off-the-hot-stov-1831644811
re: “I’m starting to think that Kaval may not be very good at this whole extortion racket.”
He spent years trying to undo the damage that previous leadership had done to the relationship with A’s fans, and managed to blow up the goodwill with a single email (the press release threatening to leave Oakland unless they got what they wanted was emailed to all of us who have ever used the A’s website to buy a ticket).
I’m sure Kaval wished that there had been a different person who could play bad cop, while he kept playing good cop, but I think Fisher prefers not to be that guy (anybody else remember the “Slumdog Billionaire” signs that the fans in the bleachers used to have?). The end result is that the A’s now have Kaval as their bad cop, and there is no more good cop.
NdM. Are you acting as a paid consultant to Dave Kaval? He’s following the FoS playbook very closely.
“By the way, good strategy to pretend Moneyball doesn’t exist.” It’s not like we don’t all know that the A’s employ this philosophy (thanks for the shoutout LA Steve. Around these here parts, we jokingly refer to them as the “Triple A’s.” We never get attached to a ball player. We know as soon as he begins to emerge as a star with an expiring contact, expecting a bigger payday, his net worth to the A’s is 5 more wins a year, he’s gone to be replaced by a Triple AAA leaguer).
By the way, we still miss Charlie Finley.
Was he a SOB who only cared about making money? Absolutely.
Did he keep us entertained at the ballpark? Absolutely.
Did he give the middle finger to the MLB commissioner when he felt another franchise had an unfair advantage? Absolutely.
Didn’t he twice have the A’s packed and ready to move first to Denver and then to New Orleans? Absolutely.
Did he pretend he was anything other than a SOB? Absolutely not.
John J and Dave, take a lesson.
Talk about bad grammar.
Thanks. Shoutout to LA Steve.
This means going from a $38,000,000 payroll to $40,000,000.
Most likely, yes.
“We can go from having one of the lowest five payrolls in the league to a top-five or 10, depending on the year”
You no doubt noted that at no point did Kaval say they would go from having a bottom five payroll to top five… just that they ‘could’.
Big difference.
And, of course, even if they do get their subsidy and want to honour such a commitment (weak though it is), they can do so simply by spending money in one off season, then shipping out the high priced players again the following winter (or July, for that matter).
It’s the definition of a non-promise.
Except from Bill Veeck.
In 1977 Veeck found an angle and nearly rode it to glory. His plan was “rent a player.” He acquired players who were a year away from free agency, knowing he could not afford to keep them. With sluggers Richie Zisk and Oscar Gamble, the “Go-Go Sox” were transformed into the “South Side Hit Men.” The team belted 192 homers, second-most in the majors, and won 90 games. They contended for the Western Division championship for much of the season before sinking to third place. Veeck broke his own Comiskey Park attendance record with more than 1.6 million and was named Major League Executive of the Year by The Sporting News.
It was downhill from there. He told the fans, “We will scheme, connive, steal, do everything possible to win the pennant — except pay big salaries.”
I remember those Sox… Ralph Garr, Chet Lemon, Jim Spencer… I think I still have some of their baseball cards in the basement someplace. Possibly even some of the (now nearly 45yr old) unused chewing gum with them….
Oh my gosh! Save the gum! :-)