Manfred warns Oakland: Approve stadium by 2024 or we’ll … take away money from A’s owner, that’s our threat, yup

Apparently that “bottom of the ninth inning is rapidly approaching” article from Monday was part of a bigger MLB push to pressure the city of Oakland to act now on an A’s stadium or else. League commissioner Rob Manfred followed up yesterday with a threat of his own, declaring Jan. 15, 2024 as a deadline for getting a deal done:

“We’re past any reasonable timeline for the situation in Oakland to be resolved,” Manfred said. “If you read the collective bargaining agreement, there’s a natural trigger in there. I think it’s Jan. 15, 2024. They need to have a deal by then. So this is a very, very important year if Oakland wants to keep the A’s.”

The MLB collective bargaining agreement with the players union? What does that have to do with the A’s stadium situation? As it turns out:

As per the terms of the CBA, if the Athletics don’t have “a binding deal” for a new ballpark in place by January 15, 2024, they will no longer receive any revenue-sharing funds.  If an agreement for a new stadium has been arranged by this date, the A’s will retain their revenue-sharing recipient status until they move into that ballpark.

This is, by any measure, a strange kind of threat. First off, the A’s cut of revenue-sharing money — which is a special pool of league funds that gets redistributed to lower-revenue teams to make up for the New York Yankees and their ilk hogging all the local cable money — isn’t like some time-honored revenue stream that is now under threat: They were phased out of it starting in 2016, after complaints from other owners that a team in a top-four TV market shouldn’t be getting league money meant for small-market teams, then only got back in the revenue-sharing pool in the new CBA this March. And this time it came with that stadium caveat, presumably to placate other owners that, okay, sure, we’re taking a cut of your profits and giving them to A’s billionaire owner John Fisher, but only because he’s promised that this time he’s really building a new stadium, which hopefully will increase team revenues to the point where he won’t be eligible for revenue-sharing anyway!

If that’s not weird enough, it gets weirder when you consider that this isn’t really a threat against Oakland so much as a threat against Fisher, since he could lose $40 million or so a year in shared revenue if he doesn’t get a stadium deal in place in the next 13 months. (He’d still be collecting $60 million a year in cash from MLB’s national TV contracts.) In a normal world, that would be expected to put pressure on Fisher to sweeten his end of the deal instead of holding out for more than $1 billion in public infrastructure funding, but in bizarro Manfred land, this is a deadline that the city needs to be afraid of, not the A’s owner.

And it gets triply weird when you consider that it’s not even like Fisher would necessarily be spending that money on making the A’s better: He already celebrated getting revenue-sharing restored in March by immediately trading all his best players. This is a long MLB tradition, as teams like the Miami Marlins have made a practice of collecting lots of revenue-sharing money and then spending none of it on players while instead padding their profits.

If there’s a genuine threat to Oakland here, it seems to go: If you don’t approve a new A’s stadium soon, we’ll cut off checks to the team owner, who then will have more incentive to move someplace else like Las Vegas, where he’ll be eligible for revenue-sharing again if and when it turns out no one wants to see ballgames in the desert in the summer. (Manfred accompanied his deadline warning by reiterating last month’s threat to let the A’s move without imposing a relocation fee, bwahaha.) Which Fisher would totally do, because he could never survive in Oakland without revenue-sharing, he hasn’t done that since, uh, last year, okay, bad example. But deadline! Really! Don’t make me come in there! (That oughta hold the little bastards.)