Friday, December 11, 2009

Which way should the A's go?

Perhaps it is appropriate that one of the pictures of proposed sites for the A's new ballpark features arrows going in all sorts of directions.

But it looks like Mayor Ron Dellums and company are going to try and keep the A's in town and finally unveiled some places to stick a baseball only ballpark.

Maybe they should have had a plan when the Raiders came back to town 14 years ago. Let's face it, the Oakland Coliseum wasn't a great place to see a ballgame BEFORE Al Davis returned to town, but since then it has reached "Stade Olympique in Montreal" levels of "They can't POSSIBLY play a big league game there!

So now the stadium is half empty during playoff games (I went to a playoff game in 2003 where there were 18,000 tickets available AFTER first pitch... my parents went to a deciding Game 5 in Oakland where they bought tickets at the ticket window DAY OF GAME!)

And it is not filled for Raider games ever. It is as if they found the way to perfectly foul it up for BOTH football and baseball.

The sad thing is there was a lot of money flowing through California in the 1990s... might have been the right time to build a ballpark!

Their neighbors across the Bay were in a rancid stadium (the Stick, like the Boston Garden, was more romantic in memory than it was in reality.) And now they have arguably the best new stadium in baseball.

And the A's are stuck...
And California is handing out I.O.U.s and Ah-Nold is more likely to get a budget for Last Action Hero 2 approved before getting a working budget for the state.

Not the best time to be spending dough on a new ballpark.

Maybe if the A's had built a new ballpark in the 1990s there would have been enough dough to keep the early 2000s teams together.

But now the city is scrambling to find some space along the Bay to stick a park and maybe put a few people to work.

And as I wrote before... where the hell are the A's going?

Frankly I was hoping the A's would move to San Jose. There would be nice sports symmetry there. Each Bay Area city would have 2 teams.

San Francisco would have the Giants and the 49ers.
Oakland would have the Raiders and the Warriors. (And the Warriors should change their name to the Oakland Warriors... Golden State sounds like a Cal State school scrambling for cash.)
San Jose would have the Sharks and the A's.

I hope they find a new place soon... the A's are a proud franchise and they deserve better than being the OTHER team ruined by Al Davis!





2 comments:

  1. I live in San Jose and I do not want to see the A's here, especially if they taxed us more. We can just hop on the train and go to the best stadium in the bigs. We have the Sharks and thats all we need. A's owners...look elsewhere

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  2. Even though I live in San Jose and am an A's fan, I want the A's to stay in Oakland so I am hoping they can get something solved there. Even though things aren't well there now as far as attendance goes... they have amazing history there.

    As for the Warriors, they started in SF and then went to Oakland, hence Golden State... I have no problems with that.

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