Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 422: Is Oakland’s Ballpark an Embarrassment to Baseball?

Episode Date: April 7, 2014

Ben and Sam discuss MLB’s obligation to the Oakland A’s.

Don't you ever forget, it could be fatal, fatal, oh come back out and act out emotions and open the blackout. Don't you ever forget, it could be fatal, fatal, oh come back out and act out emotions and open the blackout. Don't you ever forget, it could be fatal, fatal, oh come back out and act out emotions and open the blackout. Don't you ever forget, it could be fatal, fatal, oh come back out and act out emotions and open the blackout. It could be fatal, fatal, oh come back out and act out emotions and don't look back out. Wait or pass, come back out. Good morning and welcome to episode 422 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives, presented by the Play Index at BaseballReference.com.

I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg. Ben, how are you? Great. Okie doke. Did you see, and I didn't hear this myself, and I guess I should be careful about sports talk radio hearsay or whatever, but somebody said that Dave O'Brien, one of the Red Sox radio guys, after Yasiel Puig showed up late on Friday, as it was relayed to me, sort of relayed to me, I mean, I saw it. I saw somebody say it.

He said, he was talking about how Puig is going to be out of the league in like two years or something like that. Wow. That is as hot as they get. I sent you a hot take by someone. Did you? Yeah. You got me an email.

There were some really hot ones. I mean, how long do you think it will be before the first article about Yasiel Puig, veteran mentor, when he settles down and he matures and he's mentoring a young player who is hot-headed? I would say that generally it's a pretty quick turnaround. However, I think that Puig is genuinely as bad as, I mean, like, I don't think that we need to vilify him the way that he is necessarily. I don't think that we need to vilify him the way that he is necessarily, and I don't think that the fact that he's crazy means that he needs to be DFA'd or anything like that. However, I do believe that he is just as crazy as he's made out to be. I think that Puig is completely uncontrollable and is going to do something to damage himself. It really does seem like this is probably a fairly realistic representation of him.

Now, the dancing on his grave aspect of it is tactless. But clearly the Dodgers think this is something of a problem. It's a pretty steady trickle of this stuff. So I don't know. I figure Puig, for the average player, I would guess four years. But I think Puig might actually require longer than that. I could see Puig being like seven years. Well, I look forward to it.

Yeah, so multiple people said that Dave O'Brien was speculating that he would be out of baseball in two years. Seems quite unlikely. Mm-hmm, yeah. I guess potentially he could be playing for a different team if he shows no progress. Not what Dave O'Brien said. He did not say out of Dodger Blue.

He said out of baseball. So, let's imagine, what will Puig be doing in two years if he is not playing baseball? I don't know. Maybe he'll be a race car driver? Or I don't know. Someone who shows up late to things.

I would say he will likely be training show dogs. Yeah, sure. Seems as likely as anything else. All right, so from one tweet to another, because my topic is inspired by a tweet as well. Dave Cameron, a couple days ago after the A's got rained out despite there being no rain, you saw this I assume

I saw that they were rained out because they didn't put the tarp on the field right yeah the night before it had rained the previous night and they hadn't put the tarp on the field and the infield didn't dry out so they had to cancel a game even though the skies were totally blue

and around that time and I'm presuming in response to that time dave wrote uh worth saying again mlb is more financially sound than it has ever been a's play in a dump for no reason embarrassing for the sport and i've been thinking about this and i'm not sure uh how i feel i'm not sure if i agree wholeheartedly or I disagree vehemently. So I wanted to know whether you think that it is Major League Baseball's obligation to get the A's out of that park and whether you think it is. And primarily I bring this up because I figure if Bud Selig is going to be doing his retirement tour, we have, in my mind, we have six months in which to process every

single thing that happens in baseball through the lens of whether or not it reflects badly on bud selig's legacy and so i want to know whether you think it reflects poorly on bud selig's legacy that the a's continue to play in a park that isn't very good in a city that isn't very interested in baseball, and whether you think this is a ding on him. I don't know if I feel that way about the park. I mean, I don't know. Baseball history is filled with ugly, terrible ballparks where teams played for a number of years.

And I mean, I don't know, it's not really, I mean, if the place were, were so run down that you literally could not play baseball there that it, which was the case in this, this one game, but I got the sense that that was only partially because of the, the park itself. And it was, you know, just a kind of a bad decision on the part of the grounds crew or they were given bad information or something and the field was just soaked. And maybe that could have happened anywhere. I don't know. Yeah.

I think this particular case with the rain is just a way of getting into the conversation. I don't know. This is not the, you know, the most damning thing that's ever happened to the Oakland A's ballpark, of course. The sewage stuff is a bigger deal in terms of optics. And the nobody ever going, no matter how many games they win, is a bigger deal in terms of effect. So I don't know what the league itself can or should do about a ballpark that's not as nice as the other ballparks. I mean, Bud Selig often will advocate for a team to get a new park or, you know, he'll celebrate that a team did get a new park or something. But I don't know that baseball should, you know, pay for a

new park or anything like that. And not really in favor of the whole public funding thing, just based on the fact that it usually seems to be a, a raw deal for the local community. So I guess the thing that you can ding him for is this, this so-called committee that has been reviewing the situation for five years now. Um, you know, whether, whether they should move to San Jose and whether another team would have to be compensated for that, or, you know, whether they should move to San Jose and whether another team would have to be compensated for that or, you know, it would be nice, I guess, to get some resolution on that one way or another. Yeah, the park isn't good by sort of modern standards, obviously.

But I personally, and I don't know if this is just being um you know nostalgic or whatever but um i i actually don't think that parks need to be very good and um it sort of bothers me slightly that um we kind of think that everything has to be uh designed you know beautifully and modern and and awesome in order to be good. Either that or it has to have this classic traditional history behind it so that we can worship it in another way. I mean, sometimes things can just be. If they serve the purpose, they can just exist. And I don't actually need baseball to be that much fancier for me to enjoy it.

just exist. And I don't actually need baseball to be that much fancier for me to enjoy it. And so as far as the park itself, I mean, the park was perfectly fine for decades. And it's not like in the 70s, anybody was going, well, this park's a dump. We'll never play baseball in here. And if it was good enough for our dads, it seems like it should be good enough for us. I mean, I generally just think that if the function works, if it can host baseball, then it's kind of good enough. Candlestick was replaced, but Candlestick

was impossibly cold. You actually could hardly survive a game there. It was not suitable for the sport of baseball. And Oakland is fairly suitable. It was not suitable for the sport of baseball. And Oakland is fairly suitable. It's plain. There's no bells or whistles, but it's a comfortable place. The seats face the field. You can get in and out. There's public transit that goes there. And there's places you can buy food, and that seems like it's plenty.

I always have sort of found that it feels slightly askew. Like, to me, it feels like the field is like, like the outfield is five degrees off center or something. But I've mentioned that to a bunch of people, and nobody has agreed with me. Like, it just feels like, it sort of feels, did you ever pitch when you were in Little League, and the pitcher's mound was just slightly off? It was just slightly, like a couple degrees off.

And that shouldn't have mattered because you were just standing there and you were pitching toward the plate. And yet it made all the difference in the world. When I'm at the Coliseum, I feel like it's just slightly off. I feel like something shifted the background. Anyway, so the park itself doesn't bother me. The sewage stuff, yeah. Right, that's not good. That's pretty bad, but I don't know.

I mean, to me, like, I don't know. I mean, a real team that really wanted to play baseball there would fix that, right? Like that's not that hard to fix, I wouldn't think. Like that's a, I don't know, that feels like that sort of need. Right, you don't have to build a new stadium to, you know, get new pipes or whatever it is that they need. Yeah, yeah, that seems to sort of fit with the idea that the A's simply just, they don't want to be there,

so they're not going to invest any, they figure they might not be there long so they're not going to invest anything in and and it kind of helps the the case that they're trying to make if it's if it's bad like when i covered schools school districts would tell you you know how awesome they were every single day they tell you how amazing they were except when they were trying to pass a uh a bond to build new facilities and then they'd invite you how amazing they were except when they were trying to pass a bond to build new facilities. And then they'd invite you in and show you how awful everything was and they'd show you all like the cockroaches and they'd be like, it's disgusting. We're in the worst school district in the world. Like this is one hour where they would completely bat.

So I kind of feel like with the A's, it's a little like that. And so when we both read Jonah's book about the expo. Yeah, I was just going to bring that up. And so Jonah writes about, he quotes somebody talking about how by the, I think it was by the 90s, you know, nobody was coming to games and partly nobody was coming to games,

or it might have been later. Partly nobody was coming to games because all the expos did was talk about how horrible the park was and how they needed a new park. And if they couldn't get a new park, they could never survive, much like the A's are doing. And so the person that Jonah quotes says,

it's like you have this restaurant that all they do is tell you that there's cockroaches in the restaurant. Well, nobody wants to go to that restaurant anymore. So people just quit going. They just take you at your word that there's cockroaches everywhere. And so there's this way that the A's are, I don't know, seem to be sabotaging their short-term ability to draw fans in the hopes that it leads to a long-term solution. I don't know. That's probably strategically sound for their business. But for our purposes, it does not actually make the park any worse.

I mean, the park is fine. That's all I'm saying. The park is fine. Right. I mean, its shortcomings are magnified by the fact that just about every team has since either gotten a new fancy ballpark with all the bells and whistles or has one of the few you know fenway wrigley dodger stadium historic places that have been upgraded and renovated and have the history and also look sort of nice um and so yeah it's it's drab and it's multi-purpose and it's not it's not a place that you really look forward to being in or seeing i suppose but it it works it

used to work it could continue to work um and there are many examples of worse places that were less suited to baseball i mean just thinking about jonah's book thinking about the the first place the expos played jerry park which was just like a park in a field where you would like play softball on the weekend or something and they just it was like a park in a field where you would like play softball on the weekend or something and they just it was like a converted high school stadium wasn't it it was like it sounded like it wasn't even really a stadium like it was just a a diamond that they sort of built stuff around um and then of course olympic stadium has the same shortcomings as Oakland, but also, you know, had no roof for much of its history and was in Montreal.

So it was even colder. And then when it did have a roof, it was like falling down sometimes. And the field was rock hard and there was no padding on the walls. And it was just kind of awful. So, you know, between that and all the parks in baseball history that have had ridiculous dimensions where you could just, you know, pull a ball 250 feet down the line and hit it out or something. It's not, you know, if you were ranking the worst ballparks or the worst playing situations of any team, I doubt the A's current one would be, you know, in the top 10. But so, so I mean, that just leads into the question of whether the market is the problem and whether they should have to, to move or whether they should be allowed to move and whether they should just be given an answer on that one way or another.

move and whether they should just be given an answer on that one way or another. Yeah. So I guess that's probably true. I mean, I don't think if they built a nice stadium in Oakland, it would have any real significant effect on their long-term viability. I mean, as long as I've been in the Bay Area, it's largely been a giant's market. been in the Bay Area, it's largely been a giant's market. It's been really, I would say, even more so probably in the last 20 years because KNBR, which is the mega sports station here, is a giant station. And so all the sports talk radio in the area basically goes through KNBR and it's a very predominantly Giants station whether you know no matter which team is winning it's more of a Giants station and

they broadcast the Giants games and you know the the Mercury News which is the Silicon Valley newspaper has always been in my opinion a Giants newspaper the Giants get better play and so there's just been this kind of way that over the last 20 years the the region has has you know declared itself a giant's region and it's not as much fun to go to oakland and the east bay as it is to go to san francisco and um you know people don't really associate with oakland the way they associate with san francisco so i don't know i i think that probably the solution was never going to be Oakland, and the park is probably the secondary effect of that. The park represents Oakland, and therefore it's a failing park. But I think if this park were in San Jose, they probably would do just fine in it.

So then is that a black mark against Bud Selig, that there has been no resolution to this, that the Giants having the territorial rights to San Jose is still an impasse here? came up in Jonah's book is just sort of the idea that you make this decision, like with the Expos, they made this decision in the mid-70s to support baseball in Toronto and to support another expansion team in Canada. And that really, kind of in my reading of the book, was sort of like the point where the Expos just began to die and their death was sort of inevitable. And so you have to appreciate that a business decision over the course of many decades, it can be devastating. And so to me, the Giants probably,

there's virtually no dollar figure that they could get for compensation that would make this worthwhile for them, that this is going to be a huge money suck for them when they lose the South Bay. And the only reason for them to negotiate is if they feel like it's an inevitability and then they're just trying to get as much as they can out of it. But you have to give the Giants credit for keeping it going this long. There's nothing in this for them. Assuming that baseball is going to be going for

the next century, this is going to hurt them financially. It would be dumb for them to give an inch. Bud Seelig, I don't know what his role is. I don't know who he's supposed to be on the side of in this case. I mean, you clearly have a franchise that is ailing financially, but for reasons that are more or less fair, I would say. I mean, they gave that territory away. It's not their territory to steal at this point. They gave it away. point it sounds like dumbly that was a mistake

that was their equivalent of having the Blue Jays come in and take their market but they did appear to have given it away and so I don't know if it's Bud Selig's job to fix that the A's are no less competitive than any other team.

I mean, we don't need equality necessarily throughout the game. And there's something, I mean, you could almost make the case that one of the greatest things that happened during Bud Selig's tenure is that the Oakland A's had to figure out a way to work with their limitations. And that there's something about inequality in baseball that leads to great outcomes, to great developments in strategy, to certainly a much different character in the competition. And that makes it a lot more fun. It's not necessarily more fun if you're in one of these cities, and of course the flip side of that is the Pirates and the Royals

and having an entire generation of fans who never get to see their team make the playoffs until they were 30. But yeah, it's hard to know what's going to make baseball better or what's going to make baseball worse, and I would say all in all, the Oakland A's situation to make baseball worth worse. And I would say all in all the Oakland a situation, uh, has made baseball really great. Yeah, certainly more interesting to people like us. Um, well, I don't know. I guess, uh, maybe his,

his primary goal or his, or the commissioner's primary goal should be sort of protecting the antitrust exemption and that maybe like that's their equivalent uh like once he gives once they lose that that's their equivalent of of having toronto right in the market like that's their one long-term thing they can't give up and so if you look at it that way, then I guess, you know, this could be a threat to that eventually if someone manages to put a lawsuit together about the A's not being allowed to move and that does get to the Supreme Court and that does get overturned, then, you know, that would be probably maybe the biggest way that a commissioner of baseball could screw up if on his watch the antitrust exemption is overturned.

But it hasn't gotten to that point yet. So I guess thus far it hasn't been a miscalculation. So, yeah, I mean, you're right. I don't know whether it's baseball's responsibility to make sure that every franchise is healthy and profiting and drawing as many fans as any other franchises. There's always going to be one or two that are not as wealthy, not as profitable, and not drawing as many fans, no matter where you put them, probably. I don't know whether there are 30 markets in the country where everyone could just be raking in money

and drawing tons of fans, or whether, inevitably, there will be one or two teams that will be lagging behind. And maybe there are more than one or two right now, but it seems like there's probably always going to be someone who's last. Yeah, so it seems to me that it was kind of BP's editorial policy in the mid-2000s that there should be much more of a free market approach to territorial rights and that like for instance it

was ludicrous that there would be no third or even fourth or maybe more team in new york for instance so if if everybody could just go wherever they wanted and it was totally free like what do you think that would do i mean would the royals pack up and go to New York? Would there be too many teams in New York? Would there be too much movement? Would there be sort of a crass way in which teams were hopping all over the place trying to chase the next big market? Do you think that the territorial rights ultimately are good for the game? I don't know. I mean, people don't like it when players change teams too often. It seems like people complain about roster turnover and how, you know, like my girlfriend's dad used to be a big baseball fan. And then post free agency, he sort of lost interest in it because he felt like players were just changing teams all the time. And, you know, you were never, the players that you got attached to and were rooting for had a good chance of being somewhere else the next year.

And that really accelerated in the 90s and early in the 2000s. And I don't know that that has really affected the health of the game all that much. But if actual franchises were moving, that seems like it would be a bad thing if that were happening often. I don't know how often it would happen, really, because it's a lot of trouble to move a franchise. You have to, you know, make sure you have a ballpark that works. And, you know, you have to build up a whole new fan base. And maybe, I mean, you'd have to go head to head with the other teams that were in that market and it would just be a real pain to uproot, you know, whatever tradition, whatever following you have in the market where you've been to go somewhere else. You'd have to really be pretty confident that you could profit from that move.

But I'm sure we would see it happen, and it would probably not be a good thing, I would think. I mean, if you are a fan of a certain team and that team just leaves to try to make a little more money, will you follow that team? Will you still be a fan of that team in whatever new market it is? Will you find some new team to root for? Or will you just sort of say, all right, well, they didn't want to stay here. I will not be a baseball fan anymore.

In the Rockies expansion year, they drew 4.5 million fans. That's crazy. That's an insane number of fans. Actually, the next year they would have drawn even more except for the strike. They were actually averaging 58,000 fans a game. Wow. Yeah, so maybe if you kept moving year after year to a new place, you'd do fine. The Rockies finished first in the National League in attendance their first seven years.

That's crazy. Yeah. People like offense, I guess. And Coors Field is nice. Yeah, so I don't know. Maybe you just keep getting that sort of honeymoon effect where you go to a new market that was excited about having a new team. And then you stay there for a new team and then you stay there for a few years and pull up stakes yeah yeah maybe you would all right i'm gonna go

think about puig a little bit okay i'm not done thinking about puig today you should uh tell people that you you did the reliever league stuff oh yeah yeah uh so the reliever league standings are up there's a google doc i'm updating them uh so far every day but it'll probably be every couple days um and so if you have a um reliever league team and you want to find the you know your standings you can either what go on the facebook page and there's instructions for how to get there or you can just get in touch with me and I'll send you a link or something. Yep. Go to the Facebook group, facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild.

Ben's in second place. Ben's in second place out of 130 teams right now. Pretty excited about that. It's early. Are you at the point where you're tracking your team as the day goes on? but um are you at the point where you're tracking your team as the day goes on uh i'm not quite at that point but when i do see that there's a situation shaping up where one of my guys might get in the game um i'm definitely thinking about it i'm not not to the point where i've like added alerts for when these guys are coming in but i might get there i'm kind of

excited um so yeah it's fun i mean, baseball, like this has done an awful lot to make the boring parts of baseball days not boring to make. Yeah. So you can find that note in the Facebook group or yeah, just email Sam or email podcast at baseball perspectives where you should be emailing your questions

for this week's email show in a couple days Adam I believe I do just struck out eight of ten batters faced this year love it that was one of my favorite picks we never people wanted us to talk about strategies

that we used or that other people in our leagues used and we never got around to that. Yeah, I don't think we have enough information to start processing. Yeah, I mean, the way that I did it was just, first I just went for the high strikeout guys, so I just sorted a leaderboard by strikeout percentage and just kind of went down and took the guys who were at the top

of that and then i sort of stopped doing that and i took innings guys just guys who had you know like uh like out of you know or like craig stammen who maybe don't have the best strikeout rates but had pitched you know more reliever more innings than is typical for a reliever um and then in the in the late rounds i don't know i picked up some some converted starters big fan of those um and i don't know just some guys who throw hard it might be okay but a few people in my league at least i mean one one person just stopped taking people um like several rounds before the end, just started drafting position players, which was an interesting strategy

because you might figure that that late in the draft, you are just hurting yourself. You're getting guys who might tank your runs aloud. But I felt like that was kind of early to just sort of punt strikeouts at that point because you kind of need the quantity also did anyone did you notice anyone doing anything weird no i didn't the 25th pick a lot of teams 25th pick was just a throwaway like roger clemens got drafted and uh chris davis got drafted and

tracy mcgrady got drafted twice and and Skip Shoemaker might have been drafted. I can't remember. Prince Fielder was drafted. Prince Fielder was drafted, yeah. So Craig Council was drafted. But no, not really. I mean, I think that people were just trying to think of names they'd heard of. I mean, there were a number of pitchers who were only drafted

like once or twice and they and i'd never heard of them and they tended to be like uh you know double a or even high a guys who had who were like 26 year old relievers totally not even close to prospects but had like crazy strikeout numbers in triple a or double a or single a so some people went with the the minor league speculation i tended to just uh i basically just drafted like toward the end i just drafted whatever starter had just been converted to relief yes me too big fan of those guys um all right should we should do you think they should sign up for play index? Yeah, I'd be in favor of that. Go to baseballreference.com, subscribe to the Play Index, use the coupon code BP to get the discounted price of $30 for a one-year subscription.

And we will be back tomorrow.