…right around the time Slate hires a thoughtful editor. Neil deMause proposes relocating the Oakland A’s to Manhattan, given the latter’s status as “a television market that’s triple the size of the Bay Area,” but ultimately insisting, “neither the Steinbrenners nor the Wilpons would allow the A’s to move to New York.”
The Mets’ owners, ever protective of their territory, even rejected a much-needed payoff that would’ve allowed the Yankees’ top minor-league club to play in Newark for a year, leaving the team wandering homeless this season as the Empire State Yankees.
But that’s no reason that Selig and the other 28 owners couldn’t overrule them for the good of baseball, just as Wolff wants the league office to overrule the Giants. It’s reasonable, in fact, to assume that MLB isn’t forcing the Giants to let the A’s move to San Jose because the Mets and Yankees fear they’ll be next in line. Once you’ve conceded that territorial privileges aren’t a sacred right, there’s no re-closing that door.
It’s a fascinating idea. Just so long as you ignore issues of league/division realignment and where the fuck the New York Athletics are supposed to play. Given the New York metropolitan area has seen the construction of two baseball stadiums, one football stadium, one soccer stadium, two basketball/hockey arenas and the major refurbishment of a third, how enthusiastically do you think taxpayers would embrace the need for yet another glittering monument to a private company’s avarice & greed?
Getting to this late, but: The whole point of the article, if you read it, is that the New York area is the one place in the country where a team could legitimately build a stadium with their own money *and* turn a profit *and* be able to afford better players. (Especially if you did it in Jersey where land is a bit cheaper.) It’d come at the cost of the Mets’ and Yanks’ bottom line, but it’s hard to cry about that.
A even better solution would have been to just have a third MLB team in one of the existing stadiums while the Mets or Yanks are on the road. But NYC gave the Wilpons and Steinbrenners full control over who uses those stadiums as part of their leases, so even if Bud Selig somehow forced a third team down the Mets’ and Yanks’ throats, that’s not going to happen.