Tag Archives: Oakland Athletics

The ten million-to-one shot comes in

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Domingo Germán

German’s uniform number must have felt like adding insult to injury to the Athletics Wednesday night.

When the late Don Larsen pitched his perfect game in Game Five of the 1956 World Series, New York Daily News writer Joe Trimble was stuck for an opening line. His News colleague Dick Young handed one to him, practically in a glass case: The unperfect man pitched a perfect game.

That pretty much robs anyone of using it as a headline for Domingo Germán, who became the fourth Yankee pitcher to come away with a perfect game Wednesday night. Which is a shame, because Germán can be seen as having made Larsen resemble a saint.

Before he married in 1960, Larsen was a wild oat whom no less than Hall of Famer Mickey Mantle called the greatest drinker he’d ever known. That was saying something considering Mantle’s own prodigious taste for distilled spirits. The night before he went to a no-windup delivery and reached baseball immortality, Larsen went out—still steaming over an early Game Two hook—and got smashed.

Germán’s is a more grave backstory. He missed 2019’s final eighteen games plus the entire pan-damn-ically shortened 2020 after slapping his girlfriend during retiring Yankee legend CC Sabathia’s charity party late in the 2019 season. His 2021 return didn’t thrill all his teammates, even though there’d been Yankee fans swearing that a lack of formal criminal charges meant he should have been back in 2020.

“Sometimes,” relief pitcher Zack Britton said, before Germán’s 2021 return, “you don’t get to control who your teammates are.”

The Yankees entered spring training this year without figuring Germán in their starting rotation plans. Not until Frankie Montas needed shoulder surgery, Carlos Rodòn injured his forearm and then his back, and Luis Severino incurred a lat injury. And Germán himself—who has said he started undergoing treatment for depression following his 2019 incident and counseling to improve as a husband and father—dealt with shoulder inflammation last year.

Nothing in Germán’s 2023 entering Wednesday suggested he’d have anything coming such as what he’d do in Oakland’s RingCentral Coliseum—pitching the 24th perfect game in Show history and the fourth in Yankee history, following Larsen, David Wells, and—with Larsen and his Hall of Fame catcher Yogi Berra in attendance for a ceremonial pre-game first pitch—David Cone.

Germán was ejected, then suspended ten games, for too much of that new old-fashioned medicated goo on his hand after a May outing in Toronto. Before that, in April, he was suspected but allowed to wash his hands during a game against the Twins.

From early May through mid-June, Germán became, perhaps surprisingly, the best Yankee starting pitcher who wasn’t named Gerrit Cole, including a two-hit performance against the Guardians 1 May and six and two-thirds one-run ball against the Dodgers on a Sunday night game in June that was televised natinoally.

Then, his two outings prior to Wednesday night saw Germán abused by the Red Sox for seven runs in two innings; and, bushwhacked by the Mariners for ten runs including on four home runs.

I don’t know what Germán did on Tuesday night. I do know that he went out to the mound Wednesday night with absolutely nobody in the sparse-enough RingCentral house, perhaps including himself, expecting him to come away with the first perfect game ever pitched by a man whose previous start saw him take a ten-run beating.

That includes factoring that the A’s were the opposition. This year’s A’s have become such a pathetic set after long enough dismantling and disembowling under the all-thumbs hand of their owner that a perfect game against them might be considered doing it the easy way.

Especially since, during the top of the fifth, the Yankees made bloody well certain that Germán could go back out to the mound, pull up a lounge chair, and pitch from a sitting position serving up balls on tees without incurring serious damage.

They entered the inning with a mere 1-0 lead thanks to Giancarlo Stanton’s fourth-inning, two-out, first-pitch home run. They finished it with a 7-0 lead following an RBI double (Kyle Higashioka), a run home on a throwing error off a bunt (by Anthony Volpe, who stole third during the next at-bat), an RBI single (DJ LeMahieu), a two-run single (Stanton) after another A’s error enabled the bases loaded, and a two-out RBI single.

The Yankees then scored once in the top of the seventh (on Josh Donaldson’s sacrifice fly) and thrice in the top of the ninth (a run-scoring throwing error, an RBI double, a run-scoring ground out) to finish the 11-0 pile-on. It’s the fattest winning score in a perfect game since the Giants staked Matt Cain to a 10-0 conquest in 2012 and only the second time a perfect game pitcher had double-digit run support to work with.

All the while, Germán kept feeding the A’s things onto which they couldn’t attach sneaky eyes through the infield or wicked distractions in the outfield. He struck nine batters out, all before the eighth inning, and should have handed his defense at least equal credit for the perfecto as he might have accepted for himself. This is Germán’s gem with a win factor assigned, result of his strikeouts divided by the sum of his ground and fly outs:

  Score K GB FB WF FIP
Domingo Germán 11-0 9 8 10 .500 5.30

Essentially, Germán himself was responsible for half the game’s perfection. Which actually places him well enough ahead of Larsen’s perfecto (WF: .350) but behind those of Wells (.688) and Cone (.588).

Among the perfect games pitched in the World Series era (1903 forward) with available game logs, Germán’s win factor is higher than six perfecto pitchers (Larsen plus Charlie Robertson, Tom Browning, Dennis Martinez [the lowest at .227], Kenny Rogers, Mark Buehrle, Dallas Braden) but lower than eleven. (Cain, Wells and Cone, plus Jim Bunning, Sandy Koufax [tied for highest with Cain: 1.077], Catfish Hunter, Len Barker, Mike Witt, Randy Johnson, Roy Halladay, and Felix Hernández.)

You might care to know that Germán shares a .500 WF with one perfecto pitcher, one-time Yankee Philip Humber. But Germán’s curve ball, considered a sharp pitch when it’s thrown right, was responsible for nineteen of his 27 outs, including seven of his strikeouts.

“He threw that curveball in any count that he wanted to,” said A’s infielder Tony Kemp postgame. “It was spinning differently and moving differently. He put his fastball where he wanted to. Changeup as well. He just kind of mixed them.”

Larsen beat a somewhat aging but still formidable Dodgers team who’d ground their way to their final pennant during their Brooklyn life. Germán took on an A’s team that’s been compared often enough to the 1962 Mets—while lacking that team’s circumstantial popularity and flair for inadvertent ensemble comedy.

Those Mets merely got no-hit by Hall of Famer Koufax—who threw one of the most voluptuous curve balls in history himself—while Koufax’s Dodgers slapped eleven runs out of Met pitching . . . on 30 June 1962. These A’s accomplished something on 28 June 2023 that those Mets didn’t. They were victimised by Germán and the Yankees without the relief of the five walks Koufax surrendered.

Washington Post sportswriting legend Shirley Povich led his story of Larsen’s World Series perfecto with, “The million-to-one-shot came in.” It’s not unfair to suggest Germán was the ten million-to-one shot.

But you wonder whether his unusual uniform number—the only available single-digit number on the Yankees anymore, chosen when he gave Rodón his usual number 55 to indicate a new beginning for himself—didn’t look more swollen in the A’s eyes, adding insult to injury, than it looked on Germán’s back. Zero.

The Las Vegas Athletics of Oakland

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Oakland Athletics

Will the owners do the right thing and block John Fisher’s final betrayal of the fan base he abused?

Now we know Nevada governor Joseph Lombardo lacks either a brain or a veto pen when he needs both. We’re about to discover—or rediscover, as the case probably is—whether major league baseball owners have brains and vetoes enough to do what Nevada’s legislature and governor couldn’t or wouldn’t do.

Lombardo signed off on the state pledge of $380 million tax dollars toward building the Las Vegas Athletics of Oakland a new playpen on the fabled Las Vegas Strip. That, as more than a few social media crawlers have snarked, makes Lombardo the rookie of the year. Not.

The only thing left to plunge the knife all the way into Oakland’s back are the owners. Are they willing to rubber-stamp A’s owner John Fisher and baseball commissioner Rob Manfred’s insistence on finishing Fisher’s betrayal of Oakland and, by the way, waiving the $1 billion dollar relocation fee the A’s would normally have to pay MLB to make the move?

You’d better not ask Manfred about that. All indications are that the commissioner has long surrendered Oakland as a lost cause without bothering himself to ponder that the cause wasn’t lost, it was discarded witlessly. And A’s fans smothered in frustration, rage, and sorrow alike have learned the hard way what Manfred thinks of them after all.

Almost 28,000 fans poured into RingCentral Coliseum Tuesday in a “reverse boycott” aimed at letting the world know the A’s atrocity wasn’t their doing. That they weren’t the ones who let the team and the ballpark—whose usefulness disappeared years if not decades before the A’s might—turn into the city dump.

Manfred himself didn’t see the game. He was occupied with dining with some of the owners after their week of meetings ended in New York. But he did see the game’s coverage. And it impressed him this much: “It’s great to see what is, this year, almost an average Major League Baseball crowd in the facility for one night. That’s a great thing.”

Was Commissioner Nero even mildly aware that Fisher reduced the A’s to rubble while trying and failing to strong-arm Oakland and its home Alameda County into handing the A’s a new home practically on the house? That Oakland called his bluff and compelled Fisher to think about sticking it to Las Vegas and its home Nevada?

“I think if you look at the A’s record over time and the economic circumstances, including the state of the stadium that they’ve operated in for a very long time, they had a very good record up through the pandemic,” he said.

Translation: Oakland wasn’t willing to just build Fisher a delicious real-estate development in Howard Terminal with a new ballpark thrown in for good measure. Except that that wasn’t the only option Fisher blew sky high. “Wasn’t Fisher committed to Fremont not that long ago?” asked The Athletic‘s Tim Kawakami—in April. “Then to San Jose? Then to rebuilding at the Coliseum? Then to the Laney College site? Then to Howard Terminal . . . ? This is the Death Lineup of squandered and blundering stadium efforts.”

Kawakami then was perversely optimistic that Fisher would fall on his face in Las Vegas and thus be compelled to sell the A’s if only because he wouldn’t be able to meet Manfred’s deadline of getting new digs by 2024 or else. Except that Fisher and Manfred and Fisher’s parrot David Kaval picked their Nevada marks well. Nevada’s cactus juice-for-brains lawmakers and governor fell for it hook, line, and stinker.

Oakland itself (the city, that is) isn’t entirely innocent. They were quite prepared to make $375 million worth of commitments to a new A’s stadium if only Fisher and Kaval left it at that. But no. Fisher and Kaval insisted on pushing the $12 billion Howard Terminal development project. That, said mayor Sheng Thao, turned the simple into the too-complex.

“There was a very concrete proposal under discussion,” Thao’s spokeswoman Julie Edwards said in a formal statement, “and Oakland had gone above and beyond to clear hurdles, including securing funding for infrastructure, providing an environmental review and working with other agencies to finalize proposals.

“The reality is the A’s ownership had insisted on a multibillion-dollar, 55-acre project that included a ballpark, residential, commercial and retail space. In Las Vegas, for whatever reason, they seem satisfied with a nine-acre leased ballpark on leased land. If they had proposed a similar project in Oakland, we feel confident a new ballpark would already be under construction.”

If you need me to explain why Fisher and Kaval are settling for just the ballpark in Las Vegas, remember my beach club in Antarctica? You can have it for a song now. Maybe just a short medley.

Thao’s statement said, essentially, spare us the crocodile tears, Mr. Commissioner. “I feel sorry for the fans in Oakland,” Manfred says.

I do not like this outcome. I understand why they feel the way they do. I think the real question is what is it that Oakland was prepared to do? There is no Oakland offer, OK? They never got to the point where they had a plan to build a stadium at any site. It’s not just John Fisher . . . The community has to provide support, and at some point you come to the realization that it’s just not going to happen.

“This,” tweeted retired (and one-time A’s) pitcher Brandon McCarthy, “is [fornicating] pathetic. How is this not disqualifying? This toad is the steward of a glorious sport, dripping with history and he feels entitled to mock fans who are making their voices heard as he sits by and caters to hiding billionaires?”

Why does Manfred think Oakland “has to support” a team reduced to pathos by its owner, in a ballpark allowed to become a dump for too many years, with its host city responsible for building a new ballpark and just handing it to the team on whatever terms the team demands—even and including a $12 billion development where the ballpark would have been oh-by-the-way?

All that was Fisher’s doing. He did his level best to make things unpalatable for A’s fans. Including but not limited to the abject gall of inflating prices after last year’s A’s finished 60-102; two years and more worth of shipping or letting walk any viable A’s players who now perform well for other teams; and, ten years worth of fielding baseball’s 26th highest payroll with only one postseason game win to show for it.

(For the curious, the win was Game Three of the 2000 American League division series against the Astros—when courageous Liam Hendricks was still an Athletic, and kept a late two-run lead intact pitching the final two innings to nail the game.)

“[T]he A’s could have made money in Oakland,” writes Mark Normandin in Baseball Prospectus, using Tuesday night’s “reverse boycott” game as a classic example, “but chose not to.”

They stopped trying a long time ago, and began to try even less after that. No matter how many executive fingers are pointed at the fans in Oakland for not attending games, it doesn’t change that there is money to be made if you simply give the fans a reason to give it to you. Nearly 28,000 people paid an average of $29 just to show up on TV and tell John Fisher he sucks and should sell the team; do you know how much more positive energy and money could be out there for the A’s if they had a team worth paying to see? This is a city that, after all the team has done to them, was still willing to give them hundreds of millions in taxpayer funds to stick around even longer!

All that stands in the way of the A’s hosing Las Vegas and the entire state of Nevada now are the owners. (You think $380 million tax dollars is a fortune? Just wait until the almost-inevitable cost overruns begin to make themselves manifest. Three guesses whom the A’s and MLB will try to stick with those bills.)

I say again: I’d love nothing more than major league baseball in Las Vegas. But not like that. Not by way of a taxpayer hosing. Not a team whose often colourful history was betrayed by an owner who treated the team and its fans who’ve loved them like nuisances. I don’t want major league baseball in Vegas that badly. I’m perfectly happy having the Triple-A Aviators.

An optimist may now be described as someone who thinks enough owners will a) wake up and decide, after all, that there’s something transparently stupid about billionaires unwilling to build their teams’ own digs without a taxpayer soak; and, b) show enough spine, accordingly, to stand athwart Fisher (and Manfred, their hired hand, after all), yelling “Stop!”

Keep your veto pen wet, Gov. Lombardo

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Once the Athletics’ uniform insignia, this now represents what John Fisher has made of the A’s. And, what Nevada’s cactus-juice-for-brains lawmakers approved for taxpayer financing to move to Las Vegas. It’s your move, Gov. Lombardo.

Let’s put it this way, as Deadspin‘s invaluable Sam Fels has, in more words than I’m about to sketch: Nevada, you’re being had. You have better odds playing for the Megamillions slot jackpot ($14 million) won two months ago by a man in a Reno casino than you have that the Oakland Athletics will make it worth soaking your taxpayers for $350 million plus to build it when they may not come the way the A’s think.

Fels wrote before the state Assembly gave its blessing toward enabling A’s owner John Fisher and his enabler, baseball commissioner Rob Manfred, to count on that minimum $350 million tax soak to build a ballpark on the Las Vegas Strip that isn’t liable to draw anywhere near what Fisher and Manfred think it will. The Assembly approved it a day after the state Senate signed off on it eyes wide shut.

Newly-minted Nevada governor Joseph Lombardo is expected to sign it all. Before he does, you wish he’d read Fels’s warning. Not only are the A’s moving from a large market they threw under the proverbial bus, when they couldn’t shove their once-planned Howard Terminal project of mass real estate investment with a ballpark thrown in for good measure down Oakland’s throat, but they’re planning to build the smallest ballpark in the Show.

Fels warns properly that the A’s may be counting on most of Las Vegas, if not most of Nevada, having just as much cactus juice for brains as their state legislature and, apparently, their governor. The forthcoming ballpark, as planned now, and as Fisher and Manfred want you to believe, means 27,000 tickets sold per game, which is ninety percent capacity for 81 home games. Not so fast, Fels hollers: Nobody sells that much per game all home season long.

You know who doesn’t sell 90 percent of their seats on average? The Dodgers (86 percent). You know who else didn’t? The Best Fans In Baseball, Cardinals (87 percent). Neither did the Yankees (also 87 percent). Are we really supposed to believe that the A’s, run by the duopoly of knuckleheadedness that is John Fisher and David Kaval, are going to produce a team that’s going to draw 90 percent capacity through July in the desert?

Fisher, Kaval, and Manfred say of course you’re supposed to believe it. They’re a trio of Mad Hatters. Except that the Mad Hatter was unapologetically honest about inviting you to come have some tea because he had no tea. The disingenuity from which Fisher, Kaval, and Manfred spring is enough to make smarmy politicians the essence of candor.

Maybe the lawmakers should have asked a major league ballplayer who just so happens to be native to Las Vegas. He grew up the son of a Yankee fan and with friends who became Braves fans (thanks to superstation TBS); Dodger or Padre fans (since each team is a mere four and a half hour reach from Vegas by car); or, Cub or White Sox fans, thanks to lots of Chicago people moving to Vegas over three decades prior to his 1992 birth.

“Are they really going to sell out for a Yankees game on a Friday night?” asks Bryce Harper, now a Phillie for life and hoping to keep things that way. “Is it going to happen? I don’t know. I have no idea. I don’t think anybody knows . . . Do you think people are going to drop the Cubs or the White Sox to be A’s fans? There’s no way. No chance. But that five- or six-year-old, in the next ten years, they could grow up A’s fans. In ten years, you could have a lot of fans.”

Depending, of course, on one small detail nobody’s convinced the A’s can tend so long as Fisher ownes the club and Kaval is his trained parrot. “You can’t have (out-of-state) fans having to push this team,” Harper goes on. “You can’t have that. You need a fan base. They’re going to have to build a fan base, big time . . .”

They’re going to have to build behind a player. Who is that player going to be? Because it has to start next year . . . If they go to Vegas next year, you have to be able to go, ‘We’re going to get this player. We’re going to spend $300 million on him. And this is what it’s going to be.’ And he’s your guy. You have to build around that player. But it has to be a dude. It can’t be a middle-of-the-road guy. It has to be a dude. And it should be two.

Some people seem to think that if the NHL’s Golden Knights could thrive in Las Vegas—not to mention win a Stanley Cup Tuesday night, the second-fastest Cup win for an expansion team in NHL history—there’s hope for the A’s. Uhhhhh, not so fast, folks.

The Knights were born as an NHL franchise in 2017. In what’s surely one of the most grotesque cases of timing in this century’s sports history, great misfortune led to unforeseen reward. The Mandalay Bay atrocity of that year brought the best out in the newborn Knights, whose organisation from the front office to the men on the ice dove headfirst into helping a shattered city rehorse, financially and spiritually.

That cemented the Knights in turn as a “Vegas Born” city favourite. So did smart administration and solid play enable reaching the Stanley Cup final in their newborn season. The A’s won’t be Vegas born, they’ll be Vegas imported. (A joke since I moved to Las Vegas in 2007: if you’ve lived here seven years, you’re considered a native.) And it’ll be like importing pestilence, not princeliness.

When the Dodgers and the Giants went west for 1958, Los Angeles and San Francisco at least had the pleasure of welcoming teams whose owners believed in true competition and were recent World Series winners. (The Giants in 1954; the Dodgers, 1955.) When the A’s move a little ways east, unless Lombardo gets whacked with a wake-up stick, Las Vegas may have the dubious pleasure of welcoming what was once just the team’s uniform breast insignia: a white elephant.

(Harper: “I don’t think they should use the A’s name. I really don’t. I don’t think it’s fair to anybody in Oakland for that to happen. I really don’t. I think they should rebrand it. That’s my own personal opinion. Maybe people in Vegas might think differently. They might love the Las Vegas A’s name. You already have the [WNBA’s] Aces and they’re really good. You’re not going to take a New York Yankees fan and change them into an A’s fan overnight.”)

RingCentral Coliseum reverse boycott night.

Part of the scene from Tuesday night’s “reverse boycott” at RingCentral Coliseum. “Vegas Beware,” indeed!

On the same night the Knights secured the Stanley Cup by flattening the battered Florida Panthers, 9-3, in the finals’ Game Five, frustrated A’s fans in Oakland turned out large enough for a “reverse boycott.” Perfect timing: The A’s won (beware the shock factor) their seventh straight game. (“Break up the A’s!” became an immediate punch line.) The day after, of course, they reverted to their 19-51 form losing to the Rays.

“It was never going to stop the [relocation] process,” writes The Athletic‘s Tim Kawakami of the “reverse boycott,” never mind fans hoisting their now-customary banners demanding Fisher either sell the team or pay for his own relocation fully. “But the sights, sounds and emotional flavor of that 27,000-plus crowd were all indelible and important.”

MLB owners will not be persuaded by it, of course. They see the free win in Las Vegas, and they’re going to take it. But sometimes civic defiance just needs to happen. Sometimes the moral moment lingers even in the wake of a larger loss. Maybe especially then.

. . .This is a bad deal for Las Vegas, not only because of potential shortfalls that Fisher isn’t required to cover but also because I’ve not seen any deal language about who’s paying for overruns—which isn’t the only thing about this deal that seems to be unsettled. Do you trust Fisher in a $1.5 billion deal with tons of gray area? I wouldn’t.

. . . Oh, man, the final few months of this season are going to be brutal at the Coliseum, and possibly through next season, which is when the lease expires. I expect Fisher and Kaval to come up with a plan to play their home games somewhere in Nevada next season. But the most likely options are the minor-league stadiums in Las Vegas and Reno, and I can see the players union not being in love with those scenarios.

So there will be a lot of bumpiness in the coming weeks, months and years, to be sure. But soon, it’s likely to be all Nevada’s headache, not Oakland’s anymore. And Fisher will still be Manfred’s headache, too. That’s not going away. Manfred got one problem solved Wednesday, but he gave up a lot for it—that is, if you consider legacy, honor and moral standing important.

Legacy? Manfred’s legacy is liable to be trying to fix what wasn’t broken; ignoring what was and might remain broken; surrendering to the attention-deficit fan rather than enhancing the fan who knows baseball is a thinking person’s game requiring patience and the long view; and, now, enabling a billionaire who trainwrecked a colourfully-historic team and a fan base that loves them to move it out of town and jam too much of the cost down another town’s throat.

“This thing has the potential to be an absolute disaster,” Fels writes, “that will rob a passionate baseball city that’s been [screwed] over repeatedly of its team to give a team to a market that likely won’t want it after too long. But hey, Rob Manfred’s happy as long as Fisher didn’t have to pay for a stadium himself.”

Look. We in Las Vegas would love major league baseball. We’ve made the minor-league Aviators either the Pacific Coast League’s top draw or near enough to it since their lovely little ballpark was built and opened. And we know the only way the Show would work would be in a ballpark with any kind of retractable roof. The summer game would be played dry roasted otherwise. (The average Vegas temperature between the final third of June and the end of August: about 101 degrees. The known highs: As high as 120.)

But I think we in Las Vegas, and in Carson City, should have told Manfred, Fisher, and Kaval, “Halt right there,” when they decided they were going to abandon their Oakland loyalists—after abusing them no end—to come our way and stick us with a bigger bill for a bigger deception than they think they can deliver.

Manfred has spoken lovingly about expanding the Show to two more teams. That’s what Las Vegas should have had if he was that bent on planting a major league team here. Gov. Lombardo should awaken himself, be certain his veto pen has a full tank of ink, and tell Manfred, Fisher, and Kaval: If you want us to come, you build it and you pay for it.

No free lunch for the Sinkin’ A’s

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This was once the Athletics’ uniform insignia. Now the A’s themselves are a white elephant—whose owner wants to jam down Las Vegas’s throat after he couldn’t strong-arm Oakland for new digs while deflating the team.

Look, again, to your non-laurels, 1962 Mets. The Oakland Athletics, proud owners of a nine-game losing streak and possibly counting, are off to the worst start of any major league team since the turn of the century. The turn of the 20th century, that is.

After losing 5-2 to the Astros Friday, the A’s sit as the none too proud owners of a 10-43 record after 53 games. The 1962 Mets sat with a 15-38 record through their first 53, after splitting a doubleheader with the Cubs. This year’s A’s stand a chance at knocking the 120-loss ’62 Mets out of the books for baseball’s most beaten team.

The Original Mets, of course, were formed of the National League’s flotsam and jetsam in its first expansion draft and became baseball’s last unintentional comedy troupe. These A’s, in all earnestness, are born of an owner’s ten-thumbed-and-toeless touch. They’re as entertaining and funny as the “Daddy, Daddy” joke about the missing Cabbage Patch Kid and an order to eat the cole slaw.

It’s anything but funny that the A’s may be on the threshold of a free lunch in Las Vegas. Commissioner Rob Manfred says the rest of MLB’s owners could vote some time in June on whether to allow the A’s to move to Vegas—if Nevada’s state legislature is blind or fool enough to approve soaking Nevada’s taxpayers to hand the A’s a new ballpark whose early indications show disaster a distinct possibility.

The preliminary design shows a partially retractable-roof, 30,000-seat park to stand where the soon-to-be-gone Tropicana Hotel & Casino stands, with a long walkway to the home plate entrance and nothing substantial in the way of parking. It’s not unattractive. Even if you’re reminded of early Mets manager Casey Stengel’s reaction to seeing Shea Stadium for the first time: “The park is lovelier than my team.”

All indications seem to be Manfred and his minions thinking the A’s will draw their support purely from walking tourists. Oops. Las Vegas has a population above and beyond the travelers making their pilgrimages to the city’s famous casinos, resort shows, and other entertainment along the fabled Strip and the almost-as-fabled Fremont Street Experience. The city’s real population (653,843) is a little less than half the population of the Bronx. Those who don’t live behind the Strip like coming to the Strip, anyway.

They also like baseball, seemingly. The AAA-level affiliate of the A’s, the Aviators, have led the Pacific Coast League in attendance ever since they became an A’s affiliate, playing in a charming, newly-built Las Vegas Ballpark since 2019. They averaged about 532,000 fans a year in the ten-thousand seat park. Those who think there’s little market for baseball in Vegas, think again.

Double oops. Maybe they did think about it. The artist rendering of the ballpark-to-be lacks parking. Let’s hazard a guess. They think the locals who won’t be walking to the park from the Strip will have to park in adjacent hotel-casino parking garages and then walk to the park. Too many of those garages charge hefty for parking now. Wait until they think about jacking the charges on game days. (Earl Weaver, Hall of Fame manager: This ain’t football. We do this every day.)

An artist rendering of what the A’s propose to soak Las Vegas to build. Where to park? Nearby hotel casino garages? Oops.

It would be nicer if Las Vegas was to get a major league team that behaves and thinks like a major league team. Under John Fisher’s ownership the A’s have behaved and thought like . . . a Triple-A team lacking affiliation. Fisher’s too-well-recorded shenanigans in Oakland have made rubble of a storied-enough franchise and fools of baseball’s Lords, who usually do splendid work making fools of themselves.

Las Vegas isn’t a huge television market. Baseball’s self-immolating television rights and restrictions don’t make things simpler. But the National Hockey League’s Las Vegas Golden Knights, now playing the Dallas Stars in the Western Conference finals, left cable television for free TV. They’re also tapping national as well as regional advertisers. Assuming Fisher isn’t prepared to sell the A’s any time soon, it’s not a given that he’d push toward the same things. More’s the pity.

I’ve lived in Las Vegas since 2007. Would I like major league baseball in town? You might as well ask whether I love playing a Gibson guitar. But here’s another jolt of reality for you: Las Vegas is a lovely place to live, climate-wise . . . from about the second week in September through about the second week in June. Around that are summers that mean a classic Beach Boys ode to having fun all summer long is greeted by a Las Vegas listener with two words. And they ain’t “surf’s up.”

The Aviators in their open ballpark play predominantly at night, when the heat is only slightly less oppressive than Vladimir Putin’s Russian regime. The A’s in Vegas, if they get the park toward which they aim, would probably not even think of opening the dome from about 10 June through about 8 September. Not unless they want to hand out buttons along the lines of those the Giants handed hardy fans in their ancient, oppressively chilled Candlestick Park: Veni, vidi, vixi—we came, we saw, we survived.

That, of course, presumes that there are a) Nevada legislators with something more than oatmeal for brains; and, b) baseball owners with likewise. It’s frightening to think you stand a slightly better chance finding brains among lawmakers.

(You’re laughing at the idea of the A’s being “storied?” They had a dynasty or three during their Philadelphia tenure. They had a couple of well-chronicled and well-remembered powerhouses in Oakland: the Swingin’ A’s who won three straight World Series from 1972-74; the Bashing A’s who owned the American League West from 1988-90 [and won a World Series around an earthquake in 1989]; the Moneyballers who made frugality and on-base percentage virtuous and owned the AL West from 2000-2003.)

That was then. This is now. The Sinkin’ A’s have a tentative agreement with Nevada governor Joseph Lombardo and other local muckety-mucks to seek a mere $380 million in tax dollars toward a ballpark estimated to cost $1.5 billion. Said muckety-mucks, writes The Athletic‘s Ken Rosenthal, “evidently consider it a win that public financing might account for less than 25 percent of the 30,000-seat ballpark’s construction cost. To which I ask: Have they seen the A’s play?”

Or, have they seen how the A’s in their non-glory might distort the championship picture? The American League East is a division in which the weakest team is two games above .500 at this writing. They could have three wild card contestants under the dubious new system. But only one might earn a card, as Rosenthal points out, because, in the AL West in which the A’s now play, the Rangers could win that division but the Mariners and the Astros could claim the other two cards by going 13-0 each against the A’s, which is doing things the easy way.

Don’t laugh. It could happen. As of this morning, the Mariners are 7-0 against the A’s and the Astros, 4-0. “[T]he A’s are so horrifyingly bad,” Rosenthal writes, “the possibility of them having an outsized impact on the postseason should tick off the owners of the AL East clubs, and frankly all of the other owners, too.”

It should also tick Lombardo, local Vegas leaders, and Nevada lawmakers off, too, that a man whose team opened the 2023 season with a team payroll only $17 million higher than Aaron Judge’s 2023 salary, and can’t be trusted to put a genuinely competitive team on the major league field, can even think about such a sad sack drawing in Vegas.

The tourists are liable to think soon enough that, if they’re going to get fleeced, they may as well get there the old fashioned way—at the tables. The locals, of whom there are far more than Fisher, Manfred, and even Lombardo think, know that, if we must see a white elephant, we prefer it on the A’s chests during throwback uniform days.

Some of us, too, have smarts enough to know this: The days of municipalities being soaked for sports stadiums must end. Team ownerships aren’t exactly impoverished. The NFL’s Las Vegas Raiders (they, too, came here from Oakland) got themselves a new playpen called Allegiant Stadium. Tourists will be paying for it for three decades to come by way of Vegas’s notorious room taxes; locals will pay for it by way of “bonds that are a general obligation of Clark County, putting taxpayers on the hook once the reserves run dry.”

In other words, Las Vegas gave the store away to get the Raiders. To get the A’s, it’s not unrealistic to think Las Vegas might give the shopping mall away.

A franchise relocation requires 75 percent of baseball’s owners to approve. The AL East’s owners could make note of the wild card kink described earlier, decide the A’s and their addlepated gnat of an owner are more trouble than they’re worth, and vote no. (They might also ponder that they’re being soaked, too—for revenue shares to a team whose owner won’t return the favour with legitimate competition.) But that would be only 16 percent. If they’re smart, they’re going have to do some smooth maneuvering to get another nine percent to do the right thing.

Brains now require telling Fisher and his minions, not to mention Manfred and his:

You reduced the A’s to the kind of rubble that attracts protestors to the near-empty park and boycotts otherwise. You failed to strong-arm Oakland or Alameda County or California whole into building you a new real estate paradise with a ballpark thrown in for good measure. You want to bring your POS (Planned Obsolescence Show) to Las Vegas? Pay for it yourselves, or stay the hell out.

Vida Blue, RIP: “You deserve it. But I ain’t gonna give it to you.”

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I’m talkin’ baseball—like Reggie, Quisenberry
Talkin’ baseball—Carew and Gaylord Perry
Seaver, Garvey, Schmidt, and Vida Blue
If Cooperstown is calling, it’s no fluke—
they’ll be with Willie, Mickey and the Duke.

—Terry Cashman, “Willie, Mickey and the Duke (Talkin’ Baseball),” 1981.

Vida Blue

A Time cover star one season, Vida Blue became a poster child for Charlie Finley’s caprice and cruelty the next.

Out of 24 major league rookies to throw no-hitters, Vida Blue had the greatest sophomore season of the group—including the only Hall of Famer among them, Christy Mathewson. That sophomore season made him a national phenomenon, a Time cover star, a Cy Young Award winner, the American League’s Most Valuable Player . . . and a particular victim of then-Athletics owner Charlie Finley’s notorious caprice.

Blue died at 73 Sunday. He’d never again equal that surrealistic 1971, after his owner left him feeling worthless during offseason contract talks that took a turn called nasty even by Finley’s contradictory standards. He’d be a good pitcher who never again got anywhere near the greatness his 1971 promised.

On 21 September 1970, Blue struck nine Twins out (including Hall of Famer Harmon Killebrew twice), walked one, and landed a 6-0 gem supported by a run-scoring double play in the first and a five-run eighth, finished when A’s shortstop Bert Campaneris—in the middle of a very unlikely 22-homer season (he averaged five per 162 games lifetime)—yanked a three-run bomb with two out off the Twins’ Jim Perry.

Slightly over a year later, Blue finished that Time season credited with his 24th win, before what looked like a certain American League Championship Series Game One triumph turned into disaster: leading the Orioles 3-1 entering the bottom of the seventh, Blue and the A’s were torn for four runs, two scored by Hall of Famers Frank and Brooks Robinson, en route a 5-3 loss that led to being swept out in three.

Still, Blue sat atop baseball’s mountain. No Show sophomore sat higher. As Time put it with a corner banner on his cover issue, the 21-year-old lefthander put “new zip in the old game.” He’d posted a staggering 1.82 earned run average, a 0.95 walks/hits per inning pitched rate, and a 2.20 fielding-independent pitching rate. On the mound he looked taller than his six feet with his knee-up, arm-whip delivery. And, with a fastball considered the hardest that didn’t belong to Hall of Famer Nolan Ryan.

As would be said of another ill-fated child prodigy, Dwight Gooden, over a decade later, Blue was great before he’d even had much chance just to be good. He stood at 22 as the youngest man ever to win an MVP and the youngest (until Gooden over a decade later) to win a Cy Young Award. Analysts determined that one out of every twelve tickets to American League games were sold for his starts.

Even President Richard Nixon got into the act, when learning Blue’s 1971 salary ($14,500) was barely above rhe rookie minimum. Nixon called Blue “the most underpaid player in baseball.”

Then it came time to talk contract for 1972, in the days before Curt Flood lost his reserve clause challenge at the U.S. Supreme Court and well before Andy Messersmith pitched contract-less and prevailed to finish what Flood started. No player that offseason would better evoke the once-fabled malaprop of radio comedy legend Jane Ace: “You’ve got to take the bitter with the better.”

Audaciously, Blue engaged an agent and asked for a $100,000 salary for 1972. It happened, according to Jason Turbow’s Dynastic, Bombastic, Fantastic: Reggie, Rollie, Catfish, and Charlie Finley’s Swingin’ A’s, when Blue’s veteran teammate Tommy Davis—seeing him drowning in endorsement offers—introduced him to a California attorney named Bob Gerst, who agreed to represent Blue for a flat fee instead of percentages per.

You can only imagine how little Finley loved that idea. The same Finley who’d crowed during Blue’s sensational season, “Don’t you worry about him making money. He is going to make money. He is going to get more than money. He is going to get great things from this game. I’m going to see that he gets great things. I’m going to protect him.”

Come 8 January 1972, Finley proved just how much he’d protect Blue. Aghast as it was that Blue had Gerst in tow, Finley simply couldn’t resist talking down to the earnest lefthander.

Well, I know you won twenty-four games. I know you led the league in earned-run average. I know you had three hundred strikeouts. [Actually, 301, but let’s not get technical.—JK.] I know you made the All-Star team. I know you were the youngest to win the Cy Young Award and the MVP. I know all that. And if I was you, I would ask for the same thing. And you deserve it. But I ain’t gonna give it to you.

“He said it with a smirk,” Blue would say later, “and, man, it made me want to slide under the table.” This was the kid who’d gone on a USO tour of Vietnam with comedy legend Bob Hope and, when Hope asked how come he didn’t get more money from Finley, cracked, “Well, Mr. Finley claimed I was only using one arm.” Who knows how much of a strand of truth that crack contained?

The talks became contentious enough that Finley took them public while Gerst helped swing a profitable non-baseball job for Blue to prove he wasn’t kidding around. A’s players were torn between believing Blue should get every dollar he thought he was worth and wishing he’d sign for Finley’s proffered $50,000 just to be among them.

Gene Tenace, Vida Blue

Vida Blue (right) with catcher/first baseman Gene Tenace, at a 40th anniversary celebration of Oakland’s first of three straight World Series championships.

Blue even announced he would leave baseball for that job with a successful bathroom fixtures manufacturer. (Wags suggested Blue was going down the toilet.) Finley’s pressures included making Davis—maybe the team’s most valuable bench player in 1971—a scapegoat for introducing Blue to Gerst, and rather nastily. He ordered a very unwilling manager Dick Williams to wait until the A’s arrived at the ballpark, for a spring exhibition game three hours from home, before telling Davis he was released—and leaving Davis to find his own way home. (Turbow recorded that the A’s traveling seceretary loaned Davis his car.)

Blue got some relief from baseball’s first-ever players strike, over a 17 percent pension hike, the players finally agreeing to settle for a little over half that. Finley kept the pressure up, acquiring once-glittering but shoulder-ruined righthander Denny McLain and trading popular outfielder Rick Monday to the Cubs for pitcher Ken Holtzman. Finally, commissioner Bowie Kuhn interceded.

“It wasn’t that Finley’s $50,000 offer was outrageous, the Commissioner said,” Turbow wrote, “but that ‘Finley had a way of making it seem so’.” Blue finally came away with a $63,000 1972 salary. “He treated me like a damn coloured boy,” the lefthander told two California newspapermen when the deal was done. “Charlie Finley has soured my stomach for baseball. Tonight isn’t tell it like it is. Tonight is tell it like I feel.”

After being part of three straight A’s World Series titles, after being one of the players whose sales post-Messersmith Finley tried but Kuhn foolishly blocked*, and after a trade to the Giants that saw him become the first pitcher to start All-Star Games for each league, Blue would move on to the Royals—and become one of five teammates sent to the slammer on drug charges after the 1983 season.

Blue struggled with cocaine addiction until he retired before the 1987 season. He became a pre- and postgame television analyst for Giants games; he became known for philanthropy in the Bay Area and as a role model for children he worked with through a Giants’ outreach program. His marriage (the couple walked under a an arc of bats held by Giants players as they walked to the Candlestick Park mound) ended in divorce; he may have beaten cocaine but struggled further with drinking.

Maybe the Finley contract contretemps roots it. He became “bitter and withdrawn,” noted John Helyar in The Lords of the Realm, “eventually developing a drug problem that landed him in court.” Except that, somehow, away from the field, Blue remained likeable and magnetic.

“Vida’s such a wonderful guy,” said Hall of Famer Orlando Cepeda to the San Francisco Chronicle’s John Shea in 2005, after Blue was dinged for driving under the influence. “He’s been through a lot, but he likes to keep things inside. I went through some tough times myself, and sometimes you’ve got to open up and accept help from your friends.”

And, your children. Blue had a son and two daughters; the son, Derrick, told Shea, “He’s got great people skills, and I think that’s been a downfall. People have let him get away with more. People come to me and say, ‘He’s a great guy. He took us out drinking and partying.’ I cringe. That’s what’s wrong with being professional athletes, my dad included.”

A one-time A’s teammate, ill-fated pitcher Mike Norris—one of the early 1980s “Five Aces” said to be ruined by temperamental manager Billy Martin’s callousness toward pitchers and their workloads and by his own issues with drugs—wondered to Shea just how much substance abuse ruined Blue when Finley hadn’t.

I wanted to be the best black pitcher in the history of baseball, the first to win thirty games, but I screwed it up. So you kick yourself in the ass about it. Maybe I could’ve been in the Hall of Fame. It sounds cocky, but winning twenty games wasn’t hard for me. [Substance abuse] led to my arm injury. Being addicted, you’re not going to eat or sleep. You can’t play this game without eating or sleeping. Vida had the best fastball I’ve ever seen, and that includes [Hall of Famer] Nolan Ryan or anyone else. It was inevitable he’d go to the Hall of Fame. I believe . . . Finley turned him off to baseball. If he left him alone, there’s no telling what would have happened to this beautiful person.

Most recently, Blue took part in an A’s celebration marking the half-centenary of their 1973 World Series winners. Who knows what went through Blue’s mind and heart, riding in a classic, antique Thunderbird convertible, around a ballpark left gone to seed, hosting an A’s team left in ruins by an owner who might, maybe, make Finley resemble a kindly grandfather by comparison?

“I know he hung on for that last anniversary celebration like the absolute gamer he was,” tweeted Dallas Braden, another ill-fated A’s pitcher, whose Mother’s Day perfect game was the highlight of a career rendered brief by a shredded shoulder, and who’s since been an A’s game analyst for NBC Sports Bay Area. “Rest easy, Mr. Blue.”

We wish Blue’s family comfort in knowing the man will be remembered for what he was, for what his boss did to him, and for how he tried every time his addiction demons flattened him to flatten them right back. And we wish Blue nothing less than a deserved rest in the Elysian Fields, with the Lord’s embrace, forgiveness, and love.

———————————————————————————-

* In The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, James probably said it best about Bowie Kuhn’s quash of the notorious Charlie Finley fire sale bid of 1976:

[It] was an ignorant, bone-headed, destructive policy which had no foundation in anything except that Kuhn hated Charlie Finley and saw that he could drive Finley out of the game by denying him the right to sell his [star] players.

What Kuhn should have done, if he had been thinking about the best interests of the game, is adopt the Landis policy: rule that players could be sold for whatever they would bring, but 30% of the money had to go to the players. Had he done that, the effect would have been to allow the rich teams to acquire more of the best players, as they do now. But this policy would have allowed the rich teams to strengthen themselves without inflating the salary structure, and would have allowed the weaker teams, the Montreal-type teams, to remain financially competitive by profiting from developing young players.

“The Landis policy” refers to longtime commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis’s suggestion—un-acted upon, of course—after Pacific Coast League star Earl Averill refused to report to the Cleveland Indians unless he got a percentage of the sale price the Indians paid the San Francisco Seals to buy him. It may have been the single smartest idea Landis ever had, and it fell on the proverbial deaf ears.

The players on Finley’s fire-sale market were Blue, Hall of Fame relief pitcher Rollie Fingers, and outfielder Joe Rudi.