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NoCalMike

The Oakland A's of Fremont/San Jose/Sacramento/Portland

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Guest Vitamin X
The hell you smoking? Portland is larger than Sacramento.

 

To expand on that further, Portland is the 23rd largest media market in the U.S., just a bit below Denver and Baltimore and larger than current MLB cities Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Austin, and yes fucking Sacramento.

Might want to cite a source on that because per DMA Sacramento is ranked ahead of Portland.

 

Oh sorry, I thought I linked you, here's Arbitron's market rankings:

http://www.arbitron.com/radio_stations/mm001050.asp

 

And Wikipedia cites the U.S. Census Bureau on cities by metropolitan population size:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_Unit...atistical_Areas

 

Regardless of how you look at it, Portland's a major U.S. city, especially when viewed in the eyes of the public. It's the only major city of note between the Bay Area and Seattle, and we support our state's only professional sports team pretty damn well to boot. Right now this city is clamoring for public funds to help renovate a beautiful, urban baseball stadium into a fucking MLS venue. No way, we should be demanding an MLB team as soon as humanly possible. Baseball is absolutely enormous here; the AAA team here gets good attendance, and college baseball, with Oregon State being as good as they are, gets way too much love, more than is deserved for minor league ball.

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Guest Vitamin X

Forgot to address these two points:

Austin hasn't a major league team. I'm sure it has a lot of major-league douchebags, though.

Whoops. Got Arlington confused with Austin. Fucking Texas.

 

Portland would be a good location for the A's, but I'd rather see them get an expansion team when the American League inevitably must expand. How is Portland in terms of outlying areas it can call its own? Would Eugene and the rest of the state of Oregon be reliably behind a Portland team, or would they stick to the Giants, Mariners, whoever?

No one in the Pacific Northwest is much of a fan of any California team unless they're originally from there, and even then. Judging by the support the Trailblazers get, Portland's sports sphere seems to extend all the way up and down the Willamette Valley, and spilling over into Eastern Oregon and Idaho, not like those are huge population centers or anything, but it does encompass the majority of the state, and Southwest Washington isn't to be left out either, as we're the largest population center for a couple hours here so anything from roughly Longview on down is pretty strong Oregon sports country, I'd say all the way down to Eugene. I don't know what Southern Oregon's deal is, since they're right on the California border.

 

For the most part, it seems like people begrudgingly support the Mariners or a college baseball team if they don't just give up and support someone else like I do.

 

 

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I think Portland should have an MLB team, but I'm convinced MLB won't give them one anytime soon, just so the owners can always hold out the possibility of moving to Portland if they need a new stadium built or whatever.

 

MLB will logically expand to 32 teams eventually though (although I dread the dip in the talent pool that will result). At that point I don't see how they couldn't possibly put a team in Portland.

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I think Portland should have an MLB team, but I'm convinced MLB won't give them one anytime soon, just so the owners can always hold out the possibility of moving to Portland if they need a new stadium built or whatever.

 

MLB will logically expand to 32 teams eventually though (although I dread the dip in the talent pool that will result). At that point I don't see how they couldn't possibly put a team in Portland.

 

 

No more expansion!!!!!!!!!! Baseball just tried contracting two teams 5-6 years ago. There are already a ton of talent on the Major League level who should still be in the minors. We do not need another 50 more.

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Well, that would be my big concern. They would surely have to implement an international draft at that point. It would be nice to have balanced leagues and divisions, though.

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I think Portland should have an MLB team, but I'm convinced MLB won't give them one anytime soon, just so the owners can always hold out the possibility of moving to Portland if they need a new stadium built or whatever.

 

MLB will logically expand to 32 teams eventually though (although I dread the dip in the talent pool that will result). At that point I don't see how they couldn't possibly put a team in Portland.

 

 

No more expansion!!!!!!!!!! Baseball just tried contracting two teams 5-6 years ago. There are already a ton of talent on the Major League level who should still be in the minors. We do not need another 50 more.

Contraction was a bullshit move to push cities for stadium money. Attendance is strong, and I maintain that those who contend that there is not enough talent really do not know what they are watching. I watch more AAA baseball than anyone on the board, and I can tell you that there are certainly 50 guys who can hold down major league jobs.

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This flew slightly under the radar in the last week. Apparently Lew Wolff has ruled out staying in Oakland long term.

 

The following excerpt is from the Unfiltered section at Baseball Prospectus' website:

 

That’s certainly the scenario that made the most sense, but apparently Wolff had other ideas. On Friday, after Oakland city officials expressed interest in opening stadium talks, the A’s owner shot them down with a letter stating that “we have fully exhausted our time and resources over the years with the City of Oakland,” and dissing the city for poor corporate and fan support. Wolff concluded: “Our goal and desire for the organization is to determine a way to keep the team in Northern California.”

 

This, needless to say, is pretty much unprecedented: It’s standard operating procedure for sports team owners to keep as many stadium offers in the air as possible, to create leverage for a better deal in their preferred location if nothing else. (It’s why, for instance, MLB kept on making pleasant noises about Norfolk, Virginia’s bid for the Expos a few years back, even after its backers turned out to have falsified their resumes.) And it’s doubly odd that when San Jose officials began organizing to lobby MLB for an A’s relocation, Wolff told them to can it as well — though he didn’t complain when San Jose later announced a more low-key baseball campaign.

 

This is getting into serious tea-leaf reading here, but one possible reason could be that Wolff is preparing for an all-out push to move to San Jose, where he has business interests and which has the largest untapped population center of anywhere in the region — but which, you’ll recall, is also officially San Francisco Giants territory, giving them veto power over any other team moving in. Given that Bud Selig has never violated that line in his time as commissioner (the Orioles never had territorial rights to D.C., only weaker TV rights), it may make sense for Wolff to try to keep everything hush-hush, while simultaneously salting the earth in Oakland so he can say to Selig, “It’s San Jose or the highway.”

 

 

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I almost posted this last week but I'm so sick of this subject I was hoping just to avoid it. Needless to say this isn't going to put more butts in the seats. We've dealt with two ownerships over the last 14 years who have done nothing but talk about how shitty the stadium they play in is and what shitty fans we are. And people still wonder why the A's season ticket base is so low?

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I'll probably end up repeating some of the stuff mentioned upthread, but for as good as Beane is as a GM, the rest of the organization is a mess. The team is probably in the bottom five of the league in terms of ownership commitment, promotions, medical staff, facilities and all the other stuff that goes into running a first-class organization.

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Well looks local 1380 a local conservative radio station has picked up the A's this season but for Nights/Weekends only. I work a swing shift so this will come in handy for me, catch an hour or two of the game at work on the radio and then go home for the home stretch, and for the day game I guess I can follow them through my phone on the internet.....?

 

Also yeah about the Balco shit, it should be obvious by now that just about the entire league was on some sort of roids during those years.

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I don't get this "territory" thing in northern California, by the way. The territories in other crosstown situations are coterminous: what belongs to the Dodgers belongs to the Angels.

 

The media territory may be shared, but the regions the Dodgers & Angels carry the lions share of their fan bases is pretty well divided.

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