The New York Mets visited Oakland this weekend to play the A’s, and yesterday the teams marked the 50th anniversary of the 1973 World Series, in which the A’s beat the Mets in seven games for their second of three consecutive titles. Reggie Jackson was among the A’s alums on hand, and he had a lot to say about the team’s need for a new stadium, which owner John Fisher has promised to build as soon as he gets a billion dollars or so in government infrastructure money:
“No, they’re not going to have a team here. You can’t play with three, four, five six thousand people in the stands,” Jackson said Sunday at the Coliseum before the A’s held a celebration for the 1973 World Series championship team. “You have no suites sold, you have no revenues here. What’s the signage look like? You’ve got to have revenue.”…
I’m very disappointed. I’d love to see the team stay here,” Jackson said. “But I don’t care who you are. You can’t lose $100 million a year. Can’t lose $50 (million). You can’t do that. You can do it once in a while, do it for two to three years.
“You’re not going to be a billionaire long as you keep losing $100 (million) a year.”
Harsh words! And important to hear them from a beloved baseball legend who doesn’t work for Major League Baseball in any — oh, hmmm. But still, he’s just a team employee, not an owner or anyone who hopes one day to become — oh, hmmmmmm.
(The San Jose Mercury News didn’t mention Jackson being an executive assistant to Houston Astros management, but it did mention that according to Forbes’ estimates, Fisher isn’t losing $100 million a year on the A’s, he’s turning a profit of about $30 million a year. Details!)
For the record, this isn’t even Mr. October’s first go-around at publicly stumping for stadium funding. Back in 2006, as the New York Yankees‘ stadium project neared its final approval, it was Jackson who went before the city council as an executive assistant to George Steinbrenner to explain why spending over a billion dollars in public money on tearing down Yankee Stadium and building a new one would be, in fact, a gift from Steinbrenner to the people of New York:
“The Yankees weren’t always a good partner in the Bronx,” admitted Jackson, who said community members now had a chance to “create a new template” to “get what you want” and “share in the revenue.”
Jackson claimed George Steinbrenner was now trying to make amends. “There is some embarrassment in the Yankees,” he said. “The Steinbrenner family has financial wherewithal to make things happen. I see an opportunity now to get engaged, and to ask the Yankees to help you.”
This did not work out at all for the Bronx community, either in terms of direct community benefits spending or in getting new parks built promptly to replace the ones Steinbrenner bulldozed, or the city getting paid for fan parking on public land or, really, anything. But Reggie was never about strict factual accuracy so much as getting in the papers — “they made the tabloids just for me,” as the song goes — which may help explain his 29-years-and-counting career as an executive assistant.
Ah, good old Reggie.
Still stirring that drink…..
Gifts from billionaires?
LOL LOL LOL!!!0
Good old Reggie.
Simultaneously a master of understatement and overstatement… (there is ‘some’ embarassment in the Yankees…. You can’t lose $100m a year).
All, strictly speaking, true. But, as Neil notes above, Fisher isn’t losing money. Given his payroll for the mainly AA team he is fielding this year, he will probably turn a record profit in 2023 – with 5,000 in the stands.
And about that… as Reggie surely knows, the A’s averaged in the 20,000 range (sometimes a couple of thousand above, sometimes a couple of thousand below) for most of their history in Oakland – including the world championship years in the 70s (when they averaged just 11-12k/gm… itself a significant bump from the 6-8k they drew in Kansas City the last couple of seasons). Prior to 2019, the last time the A’s averaged less than 17k was 1998.
And until Fisher adopted the poison pill of fielding AA players while increasing ticket and concession prices, the A’s were lurking in the 20,000 range still. This is a direct parallel with the Charlie Finley years, where he sold off the teams best players (until Bowie Kuhn intervened to prevent it) and fans responded by staying away… attendance dropped to 4-6k for about 3 years. It picked up again after Charlie O sold to the Haas family.
So when Reggie says “you can’t”… he really means yeah, you can.
Fisher has enough wealth that he can carry on as owner indefinitely (of course, he is not losing money… but his fellow owners could get fed up with his actions and start tightening the revenue sharing purse strings – at least the ones that are available to them), unlike some past owners.
Fisher could double current attendance simply by increasing payroll back into the $80-90m range (where he would still be making significant profit). When you have a cheapskate owner with a $50m payroll (and two of the higher priced players likely to be shipped out soon), why should baseball fans in Oakland pay increased prices to watch?
If McDonalds offered you a special $20 Big Mac that had no burger and no cheese in it, would YOU buy it?
It would have helped if Charlie O had hired more than one person to sell tickets in the ticket booth
(this was way before computers).
He even did that during World
Series games!