I was all ready to celebrate.
The fighting Ron Washingtons and their collection of premium players at premium salaries, sprinkled with a heavy dose of misogyny with one Mr. Matt Garza blowing up Twitter like it was a 1930s social etiquette convention, choked away the A.L. West once again to the scrappy jigsaw-puzzle-of-awesome Athletics. The A's look primed to shake the ALDS blues and look like sincere favorites to reach just their second ALCS since 1993.
And then:
SAY IT AIN'T SO, BUD?
Ok, wait, no--stick with the original plan.
Baseball will be losing its proverbial bag of Milwaukee beer farts as Bud Selig will retire when his contract expires in January of 2015.
Concessions must be made to some of Selig's solid business decisions before we send him flying into the sky like a firecracker from a slingshot.
Realignment and the first incarnation of the Wild Card were necessary. Overdue perhaps. As baseball expanded to thirty teams, having just a handful of markets with a legitimate chance of reaching the postseason is bad business when entire swathes of the map were turning to football in August with their teams stuck in hardball purgatory. Expanding from four to six division winners along with giving each league one "best of the rest" entrant revitalized August and September baseball. It made the trade deadline THE TRADE DEADLINE, making sellers into buyers and buyers into analytical measurements of success and failure.
There was still a sense of exclusivity, as with only 26.6% of teams making it into postseason play, baseball was (and is) still by far the most stringent of the major sports when it came to awarding postseason spots. The current plus-one WWE cage match Wild Card Extravaganza tastes, squawks, and poops like a gimmick, but at least insanely wonderful baseball markets like Kansas City get to play meaningful baseball deep into September. Postseason glory stays exclusive from a relativity standpoint (33.3%,) and a deserving market like Cleveland gets an extra cat life to play with.
Now, with that out of the way...let's play...
Name....That...Gaffe!
In no particular order: All-Star games that mean less when they mean something, I love steroids/I hate steroids/we like expanding heads/expanding heads could explode! , leveraging relocation and contraction as a means of siphoning taxpayer dollars for new stadiums, 1994, unbalanced schedules, and so forth.
Add to this list a revelatory conversation that our lovely commissioner had recently on the John Feinstein show.
In regards to the Coliseum, Selig stated "it's a pit.” “It reminds me of old County Stadium and Shea Stadium. We need to deal with that. I've had a committee working on it for two or three years, and there's no question we're going to have to solve that problem,” Selig added.
Baseball solving problems involving competitive balance issues from an ethical and financial standpoint? Stadiums that solve these issues magically, like a giant concrete box of hope, kittens, and jumping high-fives? Every market with a magical bag of monies to build a Camden Yards-clone complete with Cal Ripken animatronics?
Mr. Selig, Miami would like to have a word with you. Houston has been in line for a bit. And, if you can get to the situation in Tampa Bay without chastising the few fans that can make the trek to St. Petersburg, I will pencil it in for your four o'clock.
The Oakland Coliseum is an antiquated slab of multi-sport sadness. But, it is a baseball stadium housing a team competing against large odds in such a way that even Vegas would cry "FIX!" You're not supposed to be a legitimate World Series contender in this stadium, with these existential threats pushing for you to not represent a city that desperately needs representation. Your words have weight, Mr. Selig. Use them to acknowledge the good that can come from all the ugly.
The "committee" that Selig speaks of wants no part of the A's in Oakland. San Jose, Fremont, Timbuktu...these are markets that can give the A's what Selig and perhaps Lew Wolff wants--a new, tech-forward market that isn't struggling with the weight of financial strife, along with massive unemployment and homeless problems.
But, the "pit" isn't Oakland, nor the Coliseum. It's Selig. It's a commissioner who is doing very little to protect a fan-base, that when treated to a winner, does this:
[embed]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTP7T4gtb0A[embed]
Using a stadium (which you have basically resigned the club to until the Giants give up their right to San Jose as a territory) as ammunition to force the team out of a city that can't acquiesce to the Vanderbilt finger-pointed-out-while-sipping-tea demands of Major League Baseball is pitiful. The A's have seen attendance rise this year, despite all of this, because Bob Melvin, Billy Beane, and the 25 to 40 guys who bust their ass to give Oakland a reason to cheer. Just because a fair contingent of Oakland fans can't afford to make 81 home games a year, does not make them any less of a group of fans. You try drawing 30,000-a-night with the Giants just up the BART line, and a cultural epicenter of entertainment and distractions sucking away expendable income.
Selig is the quicksand where markets who cannot afford to cut themselves into pretty MLB-approved shapes sink into. The A's may not be able to survive in the Coliseum for much longer, but if you could build a committee that, you know, actually had the best interests of the actual market which the team plays in work on stopgap renovation and creative solutions to bring businesses and revenue to a city that needs it, a legacy of something other than folly and avarice could be forged.
Oakland is a city which needs to be believed in. Stop pulling them down with cheap rhetoric and pointed remarks, and give the loyal fans who stick it out a reason to fill the seats and stomach the sewage issues. If they are willing to do that, they deserve a solution that keeps their best interests in mind, rather than dragging them into the muck.
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