If you were holding your breath waiting to see if Oakland A’s owner John Fisher could finalize his Las Vegas stadium agreement by next Monday to meet his January 15 deadline to keep collecting MLB revenue sharing checks, you can stop now, after the league went and changed its definition of “finalized”:
The A’s binding agreement with Tropicana owner Bally’s Corp. to construct a new ballpark on the Strip met a mandate to keep the team in the league’s revenue sharing program set by the latest MLB collective bargaining agreement, people with knowledge of the situation confirmed to the Review-Journal.
The A’s had until Jan. 15 to get a binding agreement for a new stadium deal in place, or the league planned to remove the team from its revenue sharing system. The deal with Bally’s Corp. met the mandate set by the league.
That’s a whole lot of unsourced statements and passive voice, but in the absence of MLB making any statement to contradict it, it’s safe to assume that the league did indeed change its rules, and as SBNation’s A’s blog put it, team execs then “used their external PR department, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, to disseminate their message.”
The revenue sharing deadline was always a bit of a red herring — it’ll be worth about $50 million over the next two years, which while hardly nothing is a drop in the bucket compared to the $1 billion Fisher is currently trying to find under sofa cushions — but dispensing with it reduces the time pressure on him to actually finalize a stadium deal, meaning if he has to he can wait out the referendum and lawsuit set to unfold later this year. We’re never going to see those stadium renderings, are we?
So, being perpetual benefactors of revenue sharing (in Vegas?) means MLB has created the basesballs version of The Washington Generals…or am I missing something here?
There are plenty of perpetual revenue-sharing recipients (benefactors would be the opposite) in MLB: Pirates, Marlins, etc. The bit where the A’s weren’t allowed to get revenue sharing was mostly other owners being pissed that Fisher was just sitting on his butt in a huge market collecting checks from them, and wanting him to actually build a new stadium, there or somewhere, to see if fans would maybe show up. But now apparently “talk about building a stadium” is good enough, and once he moves to Vegas he won’t be in a big market and will be eligible for revenue sharing regardless, so yeah, Fisher has gamed the system well.
MLB is hell-bent on getting to Vegas, aren’t they? They will rewrite rules, dismiss market size, basically cut off their noses to spite their face. But dammit, they’re going to Vegas. It’s Elon Musk buying Twitter-levels of “BECAUSE I CAN, THAT’S WHY!!” No one has stopped to think what the meh result is going to be? Answer: no.
Look, this is unfair. To suggest that we have modified or in some way changed a deadline or rule to benefit one partner at the expense of another is just wrong.
Like all binding concrete deadlines, this one had a tremendous amount of flexibility and that kind of thing built into it. As you all know, we are a modern and adaptive sport that thinks well on it’s feet. The deadline we gave the A’s was not really a deadline for the A’s. It was for the rest of you. So we didn’t modify any deadline, we just modified the language around the deadline a little bit. Mostly the dates.
And I think that there are some people who would like to think that we are breaking our own rules because that is the kind of thinking that they like to think. And we don’t. Aren’t.
Anyway, the important takeaway here is that we aren’t ‘reserving’ a spot for the A’s at the MLB welfare buffet at the expense of someone else. Certainly not. So don’t think that. And the other two or three owners who could theoretically occupy that final position in the welfare line aren’t being damaged or encumbered in any way. There’s expansion money coming, don’t forget, and lots of it. So we can always put another back end tax on this clown to compensate the other teams for what his inability to get this thing done would theoretically cost them. Although it won’t cost them anything, of course, because I already said that. Listen People!
Enough with the renderings already. Do you know how much those things cost? You can easily spend $15-20k on renderings. Sure, it’s ok for you people to spend that on a club suite or a ten pack to a Yankee game or something, but we trustees (oops, almost said Guardians! I have to pay for using that one now… didn’t before) of the great bame of gaseball don’t just throw money around like that.
No sir!
You don’t get to be in this club by wasting money. Well, not your own anyway.
Since we’re talking about cash anyway-
Well done.
This reminds me: Neil, is there a limit to the number of revenue sharing teams?
Ugh, the contrast on a comment needs work…..
Does anyone know the details of the “flip tax”? Cuz if there’s no tax regarding selling it before the team moves to Vegas- the smartest business move would be to use Vegas and the Tropicana deal to get the revenue sharing, then sell it to someone who then has the option to move to Vegas or stay in the Bay Area.
But this is Fisher here, he’s a big ole dum dum.
It’s reportedly 20% of the sale price until 2028, then scales down. Not sure what happens if he doesn’t actually move to Vegas — my guess is since then he’s not using the relocation approval, he doesn’t have to pay any tax?
OOOOH.
Wouldn’t it be fabulous if he had to pay the tax regardless… and his binding failed moves to multiple locations (in Vegas or elsewhere) end up costing him 20% of the price he could have gotten for simply obliging fans who have been holding “SELL” signs at the stadium for several years?
Naw, I don’t except it to happen either… but as Christmas presents go, this would be a goodie.
Because clearly the most effective way to get the best from Fisher and crew is to go easy on them and not hold them to any deadlines or other requirements. What could go wrong?
this suuuuuuuuuuucks. phoo on MLB. glargh
Changing the relocation rules gave St. Louis the opening they used to file a successful suit against the NFL and the Rams. Oakland should go ahead and lawyer up now. They won’t keep the team but then can get millions and embarrass MLB at the same time.
If MLB can do anything they want (apparently), then why not make the Bay Area a complete SHARED territory (like all the other two-team markets) and allow the A’s to relocate 40 miles down the road to $an Jose?! That way they can stay in the Uber-wealthy Bay Area market and leave poor @ss, do nothing Oakland!
(I know Neil, this doesn’t fit the “Fisher sucks!” narrative everyone loves to throw around, but the truth must be told)
Fisher does suck. That’s just a demonstrable fact to everyone except him and his cronies.
Oakland is not poor. It was offering way more than Vegas to keep the A’s even though it never should have offered a dime. Certainly, the whole area served by the A’s is not poor – not compared to Vegas or almost anywhere else.
MLB cannot “do whatever it wants.” It does what the owners, collectively, want. And what they want is to let each of their fellow owners to do whatever *they* want. They don’t create a precedent of MLB actually looking out for the best interest of the fans rather than the owners, because that might end up constraining their own ability to extract economic rents.
As has been repeatedly established, the other owners want to let Fisher move a team to a marginal market because they want to show their own cities what will happen if they don’t hand over hundreds of millions of dollars to them. Also, for reasons that don’t make sense to non-rich people and people who don’t like to be baked to death, they think Vegas is really cool.
So making up new rules on revenue sharing just facilitates their more important priorities, namely shaking down the public and never being held accountable for their own decisions.
That is not just a “narrative” – the new favorite word of right-wing no-nothings when they don’t like the truth. Fisher and MLB have repeatedly shown that they do not know what the hell they are doing and Fisher cannot afford what he is trying to do without enormous public support.
These guys are not actually all that smart. Some of them were actually good at some other kind of business other than baseball. But some of them can’t even claim that. They get by on dumb luck and free money from the taxpayers who actually have real, productive jobs, including all those “poor a$$” people in Oakland that you think are beneath your dignity.
The Giants claimed San Jose, yes. MLB cannot just change that without provoking a fight with the Giants ownership. Why would they want to do that and set a precedent that owners can’t just arbitrary claim territories? That might come in handy for any of them. They care far more about that that A’s fans.
Because, again, all they care about is not making any enemies with the other owners. They don’t care about the fans or the future of baseball.
But since this is America and we have lots of sports and other distractions from the grind of life, so there’s no need for any of us to continue caring about baseball. It was a nice thing while it was, but now it’s been ruined and we all need to just recognize that and find something better to do with our time.
I’m aware the term is “know nothings.” But I’ll leave that mistake in there. Mainly because I have to.
The A’s would be just as dead to me in San Jose as Vegas. Just sayin’.