Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1957: Owners’ Groaners

Episode Date: January 19, 2023

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about passing the halfway point of the offseason, another way in which baseball is unusual among team sports, a few minor transactions, and (11:15) recent PR missteps by the Reds and Orioles owners’ respective sons. Then (39:16) they talk to writer Dan Moore about his reporting on public stadium […]

You call me, I'm not waiting If you need me, I'm not even here If you want me, I'm not even there There's a light in the night That I see That I know that we're halfway there. I know that we're halfway there. Hello and welcome to episode 1957 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters.

I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs and I'm joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? I'm doing great because, I don't know if you know this, but we are officially more than halfway through the offseason. Wow. Yeah, Tuesday was the milestone. So we have a listener and a member of our Facebook group, Kyle Lobner, who every day he does a countdown to opening day. And he does it with a little theme where he looks up the average of baseball reference war and fan graphs war and baseball prospectus warp.

And then he looks for who, let's say, if it's 71 days until opening day, which is the case Wednesday when we were recording, then the average of those three metrics tells us that the 71st best player of the 2022 season was Yandy Diaz. So it's a fun little themed way of tracking our progress through the off season. And Kyle noted on Tuesday that as of that day, we were officially halfway to opening day. And James Smith on Twitter,

he pinpointed it even more precisely. He tweeted as of 6.11 a.m. Eastern Tuesday, we are closer to the first pitch of the 2023 MLB season than we are to the last pitch of the 2022 World Series. So that's nice. We've turned the corner. That's something to look forward to. And that's, of course, if you define the end of the offseason as opening day, which technically it is. But if you're someone who looks at the start of spring training or even pitchers and catchers reporting as a significant milestone, then we're very close to that.

Though I would argue that maybe the first month and a half of the offseason is actually more entertaining. There's just more baseball stuff to talk about that is actually interesting than the last month and a half or so of the offseason. Because even though there are people in uniform and stretching on the grass and playing games that don't count, I think ultimately you get a little jolt of excitement when that happens and when you see it for the first time, and then it kind of fades into the background and you just want to get that over with so the real games can

begin. Whereas there's a lot of intrigue, especially this past offseason in November, in December, as most of the major moves of the offseason start to shake out. Anyway, however you calculate that, we're getting there. In this episode of Effectively Wild, Ben gives Meg a panic attack. Not a lot to do between now and opening day, Ben. That's true. Yeah. For you, I guess it comes with some time pressure.

There's no off season for Meg. For us too, depending on what sort of team preview series we do this year, which we will have to figure out sometime soon. We're thinking thoughts about it. That's for sure. For most people, that is purely excellent news. And mostly for us too. We look forward to baseball being back. So we have a guest today and we have a little bit of banter. Before we get to that, we have yet

another, our daily episode-ly submission for a way that baseball is weird and different. So Tom is the latest to write in and Tom says, I've been thinking about what makes baseball unique and different. While many you have discussed have been interesting, I keep finding myself thinking And Tom says, is placed on an elevated surface above the other players who are all on the same plane. I realize in individual sports you have platforms, such as in diving, but nothing in a team sport comes to mind. So we've talked about the irregular dimensions, the very irregular dimensions, as something that sets baseball apart as not unique but unusual. And then we've also talked about the multiple playing surfaces as another distinguishing characteristic. So having both grass and dirt and being able to go freely from one to the other,

or even have the same player standing, straddling the two surfaces at the same time. But this is a new little wrinkle that I had not considered. It is not a level field. So you might have a slant, you might have a Tal's Hill sort of situation, but you also, on every field, you have a mount, you have an elevated surface, which no perfect compass come to my mind. There may be one, but that is unusual. Yeah. When we got this email, I was like, well, surely I will think of one and i haven't just because the show i should be less skeptical of our listeners because yeah it's like you do have them in like sports like diving right because you have the the heart of the concrete which makes me very nervous uh when i watch it and then the well depending on how high up you are the the seemingly experientially hard uh water but yeah it's a it is a weird

little bit a bit of business so i don't know there's no pit but right there is a amount there is a mount yeah so there's a there's a convex part of the field if not a concave part that you can fall into and potentially hurt yourself but But yeah, if any perfect analogs to that come to your mind, listener out there, please let us know. But that's a pretty good one. Yeah. There has to be something, right? I mean, if we want to get pedantic about it, which we usually do, I guess there is some variability in the surface of probably most sports, right? If you were to have highly accurate, sensitive laser measurements, right, then there would be some slant or some little bumps and valleys. But like an intentional one.

Yeah, which is specified. This has to be no higher than this amount over the rest of the field, but it's sort of standardized and is part of the game and a player derives in advantage from that. That is unusual. Yeah, it's so weird, man. Baseball is so weird. It is weird. Yeah. It's weird. Look, it's possible that every other sport, if this were a volleyball podcast or a badminton podcast or whatever, that they could have equally long lists other major American sports that are not in baseball. I mean, like hockey and football and basketball and even soccer. I mean, these are all, you know, you have sort of a mostly symmetrical field and you have, you know, one team trying to defend its side of that surface and the other team is defending its side. defend its side of that surface and the other team is defending its side. And then you march down the field and you try to put the ball in the end zone or the ball in the hoop or, you know, the puck in the goal or the soccer ball in the goal. Like there are some parallels there that

I think baseball is different in a substantive way from those things. So maybe just the fact that it has a different origin and an earlier origin and a non-American origin, maybe that makes baseball more different than other sports are different from other sports, if that sentence made any sense. But again, I don't know if it's uniquely unique, but it is unusual in a lot of ways that we like. If we're big baseball fans, then I think there's almost like a jingoistic, like our sport is special because it's different from all the other sports sort of thing. Some of these are not necessarily pluses or minuses. Right. They're just things.

Some of them are, though. I think some of them are kind of cool that baseball is different in that way. So again, we will hopefully find a place to compile all of these many submissions, the many good ones that we've talked about. Maybe there can be a space carved out on the Effectively Wild wiki just to keep track so that we don't have duplicates over time. But this is fun. So if you got them, keep them coming. fun. So if you got them, keep them coming. So there have been a few transactions, but I don't know that any of them rises to the level of got a banter about this unless you have hot Trey Mancini or Adam Duvall or Tommy Pham takes. We're kind of in that part of the off season. Yeah. I don't know that I do. I hope everyone found a new home that is to their liking, you know? Yeah. I'm interested in the Adam Duvall full season center fielder experiment, which is apparently something that is happening. Man, I mean, you take Trevor Story away and then maybe Kike Hernandez is a shortstop and

maybe Adam Duvall is a center fielder, which he's been okay out there in limited time, it seems like in the past. Duvall is a center fielder, which he's been okay out there in limited time, it seems like, in the past. But to have him become a full-time center fielder at this age, like he hadn't even played center fields before he was 30 or 31, I think it's an odd trajectory. Anyway, we've talked about that just being a mismatched roster in some ways, the Red Sox. So those players have found homes. And these have all been players that we've talked about for one reason or another. Sometimes it's because someone slapped someone else over a fantasy football dispute, sometimes not. Who can say? So that's great for those guys and great for those teams, but we don't have a ton of material on them. And I think that's fine. However, we do have a guest. And our guest is Dan Moore, who wrote three really long and comprehensive and thorough and engaging pieces for The Ringer last year that sort of summed up the state of the sportsises to cities and what it means when they leave those cities. Dan is a Bay Area resident and an A's fan, so obviously that is important to him. He also wrote about the 30th anniversary of Camden Yards and the many ways in which that changed ballpark

construction. And he talked about the rise in valuation of sports franchises and just how great a business that has been to be in for the past few decades. But not always. It wasn't always the case that that was a guaranteed great rate of return, but it certainly has been the case recently. So there have been some developments lately with ballpark funding and team sales being explored. And so we will bring Dan on for an update on the A's stadium situation, but also just these larger trends in sports economics and why cities keep forking over money to sports owners who are richer than ever and profiting mightily. There were a couple, I guess the internet would probably dub these guys fail sons. Maybe that would be a popular bit of lingo to use to describe these executives. What is the difference?

There have probably been entire podcasts devoted to this question. What is the difference between a fail son and a nepo baby, Ben? Yeah, or a large adult son. That's different too. Well, that one feels the most clear, Ben. Yeah, or a large adult son. That's different too. That one feels the most clear to me. Yeah, right. I mean, a nepo baby, I think- Doesn't necessarily fail, right? Right, right. Can be quite successful, can be quite competent. Which is sometimes part of the problem, right? Yes. A fail son, I think canonically is sort of an incompetent or unsuccessful person who is given the gift of inheriting great wealth of some sort.

And I guess it's kind of tough to tell if you're a fail son or not, because, again, like you're too big to fail at that point. So, you know, people don't ask to be born extremely rich. And it's great to be born extremely rich, I'd imagine. But also people sort of assume some things about you. And look, there are some people who were born extremely rich who were also very good at their jobs, even if their jobs happened to be part of the family business, let's say. I don't know that we can pass judgment either way on the two men we're about to discuss. But I can say that when they talk to the media, great things tend not to

happen. So what we had this past week or so, we had stories involving the Orioles and the Reds. So the Reds story involved Phil Castellini, the Reds president and son of the Reds owner, Bob Castellini. And Phil is probably best known for less than a year ago stepping in it when just like on opening day again, I think it was right around then. Yeah, I think it was exactly opening day, in fact. Yeah, right. When the mood is great and spirits are high and you're supposed to be drumming up interest in your team. We just survived the lockout, you know. Right, exactly. And he was asked about the fact that

the Reds had done a mini fire sale of sorts and basically was like, well, like it or lump it. He was like, where are you going to go? Reds fans were the only major league game in town here. And then I think in a later interview, he doubled down on that and said the only thing that would make the team more profitable and competitive would be to pick it up and move it somewhere else. So be careful what you wish for. So just basically threatening the fan base and just calling them ingrates, essentially. And so this past weekend, I guess it was, he was at a Reds supporters group. So again, consider the audience here and the venue. This was a Rosie Reds luncheon.

And the Rosie Reds, I think, are maybe the longest extant fan group surrounding a team. This was originally a women's group, although it hasn't been for quite some time exclusively women. But it's a philanthropic and social organization that is basically boosters of the Cincinnati Reds and was formed in 1964 because the then owner of the Reds was playing the game that we're going to talk to Dan about and threatening to move the team to San Diego if he didn't get what he wanted. And so this Rosie Reds organization was started to try to prevent that from happening and drum up interest and local support for the Reds. So that's the group that he's talking to here. These are like committed Reds fans, right? People who like the Reds. Granted, people who like a team can often be among its most vocal critics, but I don't get the sense that that was the case here. And he came out with a few groaners, it seems like, that were's like, oh, this is fine. And actually we're kind of enjoying it. And then you'll look at the tweets about that event and you might get the impression

that it was a complete disaster and everyone was tearing their hair out. And this is a case where this is not public. This was a private event. So we cannot watch the whole thing and evaluate it ourselves. And a friend of the show, C. Trent Rosecrans for The Athletic, he did a good piece where he talked to people who were there and also organizers of the event. And there were some differences of opinion about how what Castellini said was received in the room and how disastrous this actually was, right? But a lot of the comments that came out, and again, maybe we're missing some element of tongue-in-cheekness or intonation or something, but it's hard to read them as very positive, right? So one comment he made was that

the Reds are running the team like a nonprofit. And I guess that was kind of a joke to some extent. He said this team operates as a nonprofit. And I guess what he meant by that is that the Reds are not making money, he's asserting, right? But obviously not a nonprofit organization in the technical sense, right? And then he also said he bemoaned guaranteed contracts. And he said, is anyone here paid to not do their job? Which is, of course, coming from him, pretty rich, literally, right? As the owner's kid's son who has a guaranteed job and guaranteed wealth, right? And then he showed a graphic relevant to us using Fangraph's playoff odds, right?

And he tried to say— Well, isn't there some dispute about whether they were really Fangraph's playoff odds? Yes, they purported to be, at least. Keep us out of this, please, sir. Right. He's trying to make the case that MLB is a business in crisis, quote, right? And, you know, this is pretty ridiculous. I mean, MLB just announced record revenues, maybe not inflation-adjusted record, but record revenues in raw dollars,

although I guess he was speaking about discrepancies and disparities between teams more so than the health of the overall industry. But he had a slide where he made the case that there had been a 75% increase since 2019 in teams that are out of contention on opening day. And he used Fangraph's playoff odds, and his criteria was teams listed as having a 25% chance or lower of reaching the playoffs as of opening day. And people have fact-checked this. I was going to do a mini stat blast to see if this actually held up, but I didn't have to because someone on Reddit did this. And the numbers do not check out. It's not clear what he was looking at. It's like they were accurate for the past few years, but he was comparing that to previous years. And it looks like maybe he was just looking at NL teams for those years. The numbers seem to match up if you just look at NL teams, which is obviously a skewed way of looking at things.

So I don't know whether that was intentional, just dissembling and misleading, or whether this was just fail-sun behavior and looking at the wrong list or what, but seemed to present a misleading picture of actual competitiveness. And beyond that, like, again, he's speaking to a Reds fan group here. Like, shouldn't he be trying to make these people excited about the future of the Reds? Instead, he's like, we have no chance. We'll never have any chance to compete. And then even when he talked about the Reds' young prospects who were coming up, and they do have some promising ones, he said, as one of the attendees recalled, of course, we're going to lose them. So he's already looking forward to when those players will leave or when they'll trade them away because supposedly they can't afford them. So really just a master of PR here. afford them. So really just a master of PR here. I like how the ownership class looked at Kevin Mather and was like, I think we can do the same sort of thing as long as it's not recorded on

Zoom. We can just kind of give the same vibe. It's also rich coming from a club that was literally in a playoff spot two years ago, years ago i guess at this point and managed to trade away the pieces of that competitive group most of whom relative to sort of league salary numbers were not particularly expensive and then looked around and we're like i don't know you just can't compete these days you know we're you know it's like we're like, I don't know, you just can't compete these days. It's like we're all looking for the guy who's responsible for this. And it's like, I don't know, man. I think that you had a competitive club like three years ago and have sort of engaged in a cost-cutting measure that is harsh even by the standards of some of the cheapest teams in baseball.

And then are like, I don't know, it's just really hard to compete. And it's like, you know what, if that's your perspective, once again, just sell the team. Sell the team. Sell the team. If you're sitting there saying we have no hope of competing, there's no way that this club can do what we need it to, the jersey patches aren't competitive, our broadcast deal doesn't hold up

like okay it sounds like you've assessed this to be a losing proposition for your family sell the team and see if someone else can try their hand at it but they just want to keep cash and revenue checks right so like if you're going to elect to talk to people, they are going to assess your statements within the sort of rubric of this is a representative of a professional baseball organization that is making claims that can be falsified. So that's how they're going to approach you, dude. And the people in that room don't like you because you're you. They like you because you're a representative of the Reds, a team they like. So their sort of, you know, sort of grading scale for what you say is going to be that of a fan.

So, you know, as C. Trent noted, like not everybody had the same interpretation of the tone that he did. And you're right that we don't have his comments in their entirety because because again, like they've at least learned to not record them on Zoom. Like prior representatives of the team have, I know Mather wasn't technically an owner, I don't think, but you know, it's like we have what we're given, but like taken within the context of what this particular ownership group has said in the past, there's nothing here that is like disrupting my understanding of how they view the team or their fans or their players. And, you know, it's just such a funny thing.

It's like, here we are, we're sitting in the middle of January, which I have just been reminded is terrifyingly close to opening day. And within the context of Cincinnati sports, you literally have a playoff team in the NFL. Like there are alternatives for the people of Cincinnati to care about. What are you doing, dude? What are you doing? Yeah, right. And I think it's certainly true that the Reds are not one of the more valuable MLB franchises. So Forbes had them as the fifth least valuable and Sportico had them as, I think,

the eighth least valuable, but still somewhere between $.2 and 1.4 billion dollar valuation. And that was last year. And so, yeah, if you can't compete, if you think that's actually the case, then you can get out and you can cash in quite nicely. And also, he's not going to talk about all the money that the Reds and every other team gets, whether they win or not. Right. So there's that. And also, I think, yeah, the Castellanis are maybe the least wealthy or among the least wealthy owners or ownership groups. But again, there's a richly rewarding exit strategy for them if they want to get out.

rewarding exit strategy for them if they want to get out. And as people pointed out, there are other teams that do not make any more money than the Reds or are not worth any more money than the Reds or do not spend any more than the Reds and in many cases spend less than the Reds. You don't even have to look outside of the state of Ohio to find one of those teams, right? And so even if the system were totally stacked against the Reds and the game were really rigged as Castellini is suggesting here, still even working within the constraints of that system,

there are teams that have done a far better job of putting competitive teams on the field and keeping them there. So it's just sort of self-defeating as a message to send to your fan base. Like, we can't win you know like and if you don't like it we'll just leave or you can not come i mean at least try to make your

product sound appealing which i know is difficult to do after you make the product a lot less appealing by trading away a lot of good players but geez just sell the future talk about your young players talk about joeyotto. Send some sort of positive message to your fans while you're speaking to a fan group and you're trying to put a positive spin on things and do some good PR here. So again, yeah, things that go viral often tend to be more negative things, but it doesn't sound like he is a good spokesperson for this organization. And perhaps not coincidentally, he hasn't done as much speaking. He hasn't done a whole lot of public addresses in the last year since his opening day comments. And I guess this was not

a fully public address either, although parts of it became public. So that was one incident. Then in Baltimore, we have John Angelos, who is the son of Peter Angelos and really has been the managing person for the Orioles for some time now. And he was at an event, and this event was about an Orioles donation. This was on Monday, MLK Day. Do you think it's okay for us to discuss this two days after MLK Day? Do you think it's not disrespectful to bring this up now? I have so little patience for this kind of stuff, Ben. It just is galling in a particularly irritating kind of way. Because he doesn't give a... I'm going to do this work. He doesn't give a shit about gonna do a swear he doesn't give a about this having

taken place on mlk like i don't wanna i don't know the man right so maybe i'm being unfair perhaps this interpretation lacks generosity on my part but the issue was that the question was asked not that it was asked on a particular day and what a really good way if if it were a sincere objection right that we are here we are gathered here today you know and he really were frustrated that it was detracting from what he thought the spirit of the event was then make yourself available on other days you know when you paint your beats into a corner and say the only time you get to talk to me is is now and you're you know i'm going to take questions and you are here to ask them of course they're going to ask you about relevant stuff

to the club like what other opportunity do they have to do that right yeah so to give the full context here this is uh the orioles were making a donation a five million dollar commitment to Do they have to do that? I understand it. They've been quite philanthropic, and that's one of the redeeming aspects of their ownership. So this was an event at Camden Yards on Monday morning set up to announce this, but there was a Q&A and it was open to the media. And John Angelos, who is the sole chairman and CEO of the Orioles at this point, he doesn't talk to the press. He does not talk to the press except seemingly when the Orioles announced that a dinosaur act, and I say that with a lot of love, No. actually address the media, the Baltimore media in person was in January of 2019 when they announced the Billy Joel concert at Camden Yards. So that's about it. He doesn't make himself available for questions. And there are a lot of questions because there's a question about the Camden Yards lease, which we will mention with Dan later. And then there's an ongoing lawsuit where John Angelos' brother, Lewis, is suing John and his mother about control of the

Orioles. And so there've been questions about the long-term ownership of the franchise, not necessarily whether the Orioles would move, but whether the Angeloses will continue to own the Orioles. And so there haven't been a lot of venues and opportunities to ask him questions about this. So Dan Connolly, who covers the Orioles for The Athletic and has covered the Orioles for decades at this point and is from the area, he asked John Angelos about this. And instead of answering the question or even just kind of saying, you know, giving kind of a boilerplate uninteresting answer and moving on. John Angelos took minutes, and this we did actually see, there's a video and a transcript, just to dress down Dan Connolly for having the impudence to ask this question on Martin Luther

King Day of all days. And this is neither the time or the place to ask these questions, et cetera. So you're not going to take me up on the Martin Luther King Jr. part, are you? No, but seriously, I'm going to take you a little bit to task on it, okay? With all due respect, that's not an appropriate subject matter for this day. I find that to be highly inappropriate, and I think that your focus is completely out of touch and has no perspective whatsoever on what real world people face. My family owns over 70% of the Orioles. You want to write that down? I know that. Keep going.

Well, that's funny you do. I don't think most people know that, actually. Well, I get paid to cover your team, but go ahead. But today, on MLK Day, I'm not answering any of those questions. Okay, well, let me just respond very quickly. No, no, I don't want you to respond. I'm not going to entertain those questions on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Which is the day that you set up for us to talk to you. This is the second time that we have spoken to you in four years.

Let's take another question. Let's take another question. Look, if John Angelus were available to the media all the time, then sure, you could ask him about that some other time and focus on this donation on that day. But he does not ever make himself available. And the sports media asked, like, can we attend and can we ask questions? And we're told by the team that they could. There were no ground rules or you can come, but you can't ask about this or anything that was agreed to beforehand. It was all fair game. And so because of that, I think it was an okay time to ask the question. And Angelos goes on this long, just really condescending kind of rant about even asking the question. And yeah, as you said, is it really that he is so offended by being asked this on MLK Day? Or is it that he just didn't want to be asked this question, didn't want to answer the question and was kind of hiding behind the occasion. So it's not to answer the question. And really, ultimately, it had a Streisand effect

and it brought much more attention to this because, again, if he had just quickly said, let's sidebar about this later, or let's do an interview next week or tomorrow or whatever it is, or, you know, we're not planning to sell the team or something like that, fine. Then everyone would have moved on probably. But instead, he sort of sidetracked and hijacked things to have this long address about how it wasn't even proper to ask the question at this time. So it was quite ridiculous, I think, to go on at that length about this. I also just think that if you are

positioning yourself as, well, first of all, if you're bringing media there and you have indicated to them that they can ask questions and you have not established that there's any topic that is off-limit in advance, it is pretty galling to be like, I can't believe you're not here to provide the appropriate public relations bump that I was asking you for. Like, get out of here with that. And also, you're at an event with a civic leader. And broadly, these questions are about like, what is the team's commitment to the community that they operate in, right?

Like, how are we to understand how you're going to operate within the city of Baltimore? How you understand yourself relating to this place? And I think that, like, that line of questioning sort of broadly understood is completely appropriate, particularly when you have representatives of city government there, right? To say, like, what are we doing here? What do you, How do you understand yourself? What is your commitment to this place? I don't know. That strikes me as totally reasonable, right? Sure. Yeah. And in the same genre as Phil Castellini lamenting guaranteed contracts,

Angelos said to Connolly, I think that your focus is completely out of touch and has no perspective whatsoever on what real world people face, which again, coming from him. Not to say that billionaires can't be aware of the plights of less financially fortunate people too, but again, being lectured by a multi-billionaire who inherited his wealth from his father on the challenges that real world people face, having perspective on that. Come on. And he also didn't seem to know that Dan Connolly was from the area and has a long history of covering the team. He's like, are you from here, et cetera. So he offered to open up the books. He said that he is very transparent, which kind of goes against the evidence of him

never really talking to the press. But he invited Connolly and other members of the media to meet him next week on the third floor of the warehouse and to, quote, show you the financials of the Orioles. I'll show you the governance of the Orioles. I'll show you everything you want to know. And I'll answer all your questions, which is something that team owners never do. So I am skeptical that this will happen, but people should try to set up that appointment. I think that they already have attempted to. So we will see whether that happens or anything like that happens or whether once he's out of the spotlight again, he just ducks that which would not be at all surprising but really just kind of great examples of uh what we're about to talk to dan about because

the underlying subtext to all of this is always just kind of you should be grateful to have us and if you're not then we will leave and you will be bereft. And that is how teams, including the Orioles, have managed to extract a ton of public funding for ballparks. And people care about sports. They got us over a barrel. They know that. They've got us where they want us because people who are fans of teams, they really value having those teams in the area and they will put up with a whole lot. having those teams in the area and they will put up with a whole lot and they won't put up with you trading away everyone and basically giving you no reason to come to the park. Reds fans and A's fans will say, all right, well, where are we going to go? We're not going to go to your ballparks because you're not giving us a reason to. But at the same time, those owners will just

pocket the money that they make without having fans come to the park because they don't even need that so much anymore yeah it's just you gotta pick a lane right and i know i'm not saying anything particularly revelatory here and i understand that it was always mostly cynical and profit motivated so i'm not pretending there's some like halcyon days we can hearken back to when it was all green fields and the cut of grass. And you know, like I get it. I have my moments of being Pollyanna-ish about like what human beings are capable of, but I swear this isn't one of them. But it would just be nice if they would pick a lane, right? Like are you a hyper-efficient, efficiency-maximizing, profit-maximizing entity, or are you a community institution that also makes money? Because in Baltimore's case in particular, at least in the

way that the front office is conducting itself, in terms of the actual on-field, here's what we are as a baseball team, they have leaned toward the Astros part of their DNA, right? And it has redounded to their benefit in terms of the on-field product, but it has also had some of the same sort of blind spots that Houston had in the early days, right? Where you're trading away guys who are good when you're on the cusp of the playoffs and you're playing service time games and you're doing that stuff. Or are you, you know, a team that views yourself as sort of woven into and

critical to the fabric of the city that you operate in? And you can be clever and you can make money while being a civic institution, but you, you know, I think you can't lean quite as far as they seem to be leaning right now in the direction of the hyper, you know, I think you can't lean quite as far as they seem to be leaning right now in the direction of the hyper, you know, efficient profit maximizer. So like pick a lane. And if you're going to be the one thing, like do us the favor of not being so wounded when we dare ask questions about it, because that's what this is. Like, you know, you have decided to participate and be forward facing, right? And if you're going to do that, people are going to, if for no other reason than it is their literal job, ask you questions about the franchise that you own. And they might do that at your PR

opportunity. And that isn't to say that like funding scholarships isn't good, but I think we can be clear eyed about at least what part of that motivation is on the part of an organization that is trying to, you know, be the beneficiary of tax dollars. Like, you know, part of the galling thing of this era of sports ownership is that, like, we actually are reasonably smart, you know? We're pretty savvy as both a media core and as fans. So we know what's going on. You could treat us like adults and pretend that we're all coming to this with eyes open. Yeah. I think fans care less about whether owners are likable or good quotes than they do about

whether they invest in the roster. But if you're not investing in the roster and you're also not likable, it's just not a great compo. Yeah, yeah. So we will take a quick break and we'll be back with Dan Moore to continue to discuss these issues and the state of ballpark funding and the A's and why, even though owners continually tell us that they're not in a good business, they're all lining up to get involved in that business, and their franchise valuations seem to have no ceiling. Elevation, don't go to my head. Elevation, don't go to my head. All right, we are back and we have company. We are joined now by freelance writer Dan Moore,

who has contributed to The Ringer and many other places. He's a Bay Area writer and fan of Oakland sports teams, or I guess I should say sports team, which is what we kind of have him here to talk about. Hey, Dan. Hi, guys. Thanks for having me on. So you wrote a trilogy of features for The Ringer last year, and they're so intertwined that I almost don't know which one to start with, because I think they are kind of a constellation in the same sort of part of the sky here. Because in April, you wrote about what cities lose when they lose pro sports. And this was mostly pegged to the A's threatening to leave for Las Vegas. And then in August, you wrote about the 30th anniversary of Camden Yards and

how significant that ballpark has been, not just architecturally, but also when it comes to public funding of parks. And then in late November, you wrote about the exploding prices of pro sports franchises and how owning a sports franchise became such great business, contrary to what you will hear from a lot of sports franchise owners. So all these things really do go hand in hand in hand. And we wanted to have you on to talk about them because, as always, they're relevant to what we talk about here, right? And there are a few franchise sales in MLB specifically that might be in the works. It was reported by Will Carroll not long ago that we could have announcements of two franchise sales sometime early this year. Of course,

we know that the Angels one is ongoing, Diamondbacks also potentially two, and maybe a stadium announcement there, and the Nationals are exploring a sale and might end up selling minority stakes because their team isn't set up in such a fortuitous way for franchise sales, et cetera. So this is always relevant. And I guess maybe we can just start with the ballpark funding aspect, which just really always seems germane and never seems to change. So tell us how you got interested in this and sort of the evolution in thinking about how good a deal funding a ballpark is. And of course, this is relevant to what it's worth to a city to have a sports franchise. So that ties into one this was indeed Oakland and sort of what's been happening here, which in many different ways is a perfect microcosm of this larger story of how team owners go about, to use a nice word, arguing in favor of giving them lots of public money to build

a new stadium. And then where, you know, it reaches back through history to Camden. And then you see it, you know, you mentioned one of the pieces I wrote about exploding prices. That's sort of the result of a lot of this. And so, you know, there is a larger story. Oakland and what's happening here really does epitomize many aspects of it. I approached story at first just as the you know through the lens of a fan you mentioned I'm a lifelong Oakland sports fan today that means I'm an ace fan and for years now our ownership has been angling by a variety of means to secure public funding for a brand new stadium. And I just started reporting on it for local magazines and outlets like

Oakland side magazine and the San Francisco Chronicle out here. And what really intrigued me at first was how interconnected the sort of all the moving parts were with, with the city. And so, you know, building a new baseball stadium, I quickly realized, did not just have implications on baseball, but like in Oakland, it impacts the port. It impacts the city's ability to pay for other things. And on the more positive side, you know, having a team here bolsters community, creates pride. And so, you know, it's just, it attuned me to how integral pro sports are and have become to sort of everyday life and to our conception of place and what makes for a city or what makes a city unique, and in some cases, what plagues a

city. And so it's just a fascinating kind of all-encompassing topic. And as it turns out, it has a long history in this country as well. And so anyway, I'll pause there. That's what got me interested. And one thing I will say too is that, or the last thing I'll say is that I was very concerned about the fate of the A's when I started in this process. And the more and more that I've reported on it and the more I've learned about the science of all this, the more it's made me concerned about the fate of Oakland as it is connected to this deal. Yeah, I feel like there are so many places that we

could go, but I guess maybe one that we can start with, and if you want to relate this back to Camden and how the sort of dialogue around Camden Yard sort of gave a blueprint for other sports owners to, I will use less polite language, export other municipalities for public funds. You know, we can maybe start there or we can talk about it within the context of Oakland and the way that the arguments are being laid out by the A's in the city. But, you know, can you talk about sort of how

the thinking and dialogue around municipalities need to retain these teams has changed over time? And you note this, I think a couple of the pieces you wrote that we had this like brief window where it felt like we weren't maybe going to do this anymore, right? Where the tide had sort of turned in the public consciousness around public funding of these stadiums and the sort of dubious economic claims, but it seems like that maybe didn't stick as you've noted in a couple of places and has been noted in our intro here. So how did Camden Yards sort of change

the sort of baseline expectation of these sports franchises and how has the public's expectation of our funding of them maybe changed over time? That's a very big question. I'm like asking you like college seminar semester question. Sorry. I got it. I got it. I'll give you the most important cliff notes. So there are nuances to this, but things really by and large changed in 1984. And so Baltimore is integral to understanding what happened here. But in 1984, that's when John Irsay moved, or Mr. Irsay, moved the Colts from Baltimore to Indianapolis. And when he did that, you know, it sort of created this great political fear in Baltimore, but also elsewhere, where there was this dawning realization that, hey, team owners can and will do this, move

locally beloved institutions, such as the cults, from the city to somewhere else for the pursuit of private profit. And so that fear translated in Baltimore to this kind of new logic where it was, if we want to keep our teams, we need to capitulate to our team owners, varying economic demands, which often revolve around building them a publicly funded new stadium. So that's what kind of laid the groundwork for Camden. Similar logic was happening elsewhere, like in Chicago with the White Sox stadium at the time. But the reason Camden is so important is because what manifested in all this logic was, of course, Camden. A renowned, beautiful, objectively beautiful stadium that once Camden was built, it was like the logic was reinforced. It was like, oh, okay, you know, of course we need to do this to build team owners, their stadiums,

not only to keep them, but also to derive benefit from stadiums. Camden was seen as a success. It was, you know, thought to revitalize Baltimore. And so what happens after Camden is just, you know, that's when the stadium construction boom really begins in earnest. And so that's not long thereafter. People and our political leaders in Oakland approved an expansion to the Coliseum. Had a bit of a different result than Camden Yards, but you also see it happening in Houston and cities all across America. San Diego, San Francisco, beautiful new stadiums are being built for the large part with

lots of public funding and typically set in urban cores like Baltimore. What you mentioned about the period not long ago when we thought, oh, maybe we'll stop all this public funding. That was a product of two things. One, as we went kind of gangbusters with building all these publicly funded, expensive stadiums, economic consensus became, economic consensus became it crystallized uh very clearly around the fact that building big publicly funded stadiums is not a uh good means of uh galvanizing an economy in fact new stadiums are not really economic generators at all as exemplified by many cities, they can hurt the city. That's what you see happening in Oakland. Something similar happened in St. Louis, where far from stimulating development around the stadium or increasing property values, which are all things that, thanks to Camden, were assumed

would sort of inherently accompany stadium development. Actually, in Oakland and St. Louis and many other places, the development impoverished the city. It took lots of money out of the general fund. In Oakland, we are still paying off the debt that we took out to build the expansion to the Coliseum in 1995 to get the Raiders back. And again, that was sort of informed by the Candidate of Logic. So it became clear, this is not a good way to stimulate an economy. This is not a good way to help a city economically. But at the same time, however, there comes a slight caveat with that. And it's when stadiums are a majority privately funded,

and the city doesn't need to take out debt, or the state doesn't need to take out debt or the state doesn't need to take out debt to facilitate their construction, that can be beneficial to the city. That's what you see happening in San Francisco, where the Giants privately funded a lot of their stadium construction. The city still kicked in some for infrastructure improvements and site reclamation, you know, around the stadium. But in my mind, what that represented was a bit more of a symbiotic partnership where the team or the team owners, you know, provide most of the funding for the stadium and the city helps. But that dynamic makes sense because, you know, traditionally all of, or many, most of the profits from these stadiums have gone to team owners. And so, you know, I'll backtrack just a bit. When the Raiders

deal, for example, served to plunge Oakland into all kinds of destabilizing debt, it was by and large a boon for the Raiders who are now worth, you know, $5 billion or whatever they are today. So the period in time in which, you know, we kind of awoke to all this and we said, okay, we need to, we need, you know, we need to stop doing these crazy deals. That's what that was a product of. And as you say, we, it seems have drifted back more into the paradigm where we are willing and in some cases, apparently eager to shovel lots of public money at team owners and to help them build new stadiums. That's what you're seeing right now in Nashville and recently in Buffalo. And we can get into, I think, why that is happening, but I hope that I came close to answering your question around

the sort of long history of that. Yeah. And the public funding is ongoing in Camden's case, because even last year, there was another outlay, the Maryland General Assembly allotted $1.2 billion in public funding to reinvest and reimagine the Camden Yard Sports Complex, which is Oriole Park, and also the Ravens Stadium, M&T Bank Stadium. So that's still happening. And this is also newsy, I suppose, because the Orioles lease on Camden Yards actually expires after this season, and they have until February 1st.

So very soon to exercise a five-year extension on that that would take them out through 2028, which presumably will happen. But you also note that it seems like stadium construction tends to go in roughly 30-year cycles. And because Camden Yards inspired a wave of ballpark building in MLB in the years after Camden Yards opens, then we're coming up on that time, right, where a bunch of teams will probably start pushing for new ballparks. And I mentioned the Diamondbacks and the Royals. Of course, Kauffman predates Camden Yards, but the Royals are trying to drum up interest in a new ballpark closer to the city in Kansas City. And although they have said that they would be privately funding some of that, there's still a big chunk of it that seems like the construction costs, etc.,

would have to be made up by public funding of some sort. So I don't want to undersell the positive aspects of Camden Yards in that it's a beautiful ballpark. And I think it inspired a lot of other really nice ballparks and it's still a great place to go to a game even when the Orioles are not good and now they're getting good again. So it'll be a really good place to go to a game. But you were bringing attention to these other aspects, just the ways that it was so influential and they were able to extract that deal in part because they were afraid that the Orioles would leave Baltimore,

the city officials. It's the old playbook of we will leave if you don't give us what we want. And that's an effective playbook because it sucks to lose a sports team. It does. I mean, it's hard to put a value on it exactly, but there is a great value. Anyone who's rooted for a sports team knows it can be really devastating when your sports team loses. So does that mean that you just hand over a blank check and say, do what you want with our public funds? And if we can't afford to pay for public school or whatever, at least we'll have the sports team? No, but there certainly is some leverage there. That's undeniable. So when cities and when teams use Camden Yards as an example of a success, How accurate is that just when it comes to the revitalization of the area and the economic development of the area?

Because we know it's a really nice ballpark, but did it actually do what it is said to have done for Baltimore, for the city itself? I think that the evidence would suggest that the impacts were overstated, that the area around Camden Yards, it is not as brimming with new development and corollary development, certainly not to the extent that it was believed would happen immediately after. I've talked to folks who have talked about how their property values in condos and apartments that they've owned around the area have actually gone down since then. And so I do think that that was probably overstated a bit. I will say that there are, to be fair, there are examples. Again, I go back to San Francisco and San Diego where that auxiliary development has occurred, the downtowns of the area around San Francisco, the downtown of San Diego. The ballparks have, I think, undeniably benefited those places. And I think that that really is the Camden model manifest. In Baltimore in particular, I do

believe though that those effects were sort of overstated. I'm curious how that interacts with, you know, the potential benefit that it might redound to the city and the people who live there interacts with the teams and their owners increasing desire to themselves privately own those areas, right? Because, you know, if you have a bunch of businesses that sprout up and, you know, I've been to the area around Petco and you're right, it's, it's lovely. There's cool stuff to do there. And, you know, there's stuff to do there when the Padres aren't playing. But, you know, if you look at a lot of the teams, especially in major league baseball, one of the ways that they have tried to supplement their income away from the product on the field, which you touch on in one of your pieces,

is to have these areas that are largely owned by them, that offer them real estate development opportunities. And it's not like you have a mom and pop going into that spot. I don't think the businesses in the battery are around Atlanta Stadium or local longstanding ones, right? So how does that interplay tend to work? Well, I think that this new era that we're entering, you know, I think Camden, the Giant Stadium, San Diego, those are sort of examples of what might be thought of as like the previous chapter of stadium construction.

What you're hinting at now, like what Atlanta represents is that's the new chapter. And that's right where you're creating these kind of self-contained baseball or sports and entertainment districts. And, you know, I think that the jury is very much still out on the symbiotic economic benefit of those places. In my reporting for The Ringer, I think that what you're seeing in Atlanta, for example, is it's been very costly for taxpayers there to fund and support the battery and all that development.

And you're right that what economic development it has spurred or supported tends to have what the economist Greg Leroy told me were small ripple effects. And so it's less seismic in influence or less widespread in positive influence than perhaps subsidizing other kinds of employers, like a complex manufacturing plant or, you know, some other kind of corporate headquarters where it might create long-term jobs and, you know, other supportive businesses. I think we were seeing in the battery is an example of high public investment

in probably low ripple effect development. And I think what it highlights is actually something that just we need to recognize about this paradigm. It's something that Roger Knoll, a professor at Stanford, talks about a lot, where if we're going to build and invest in things like the battery or these kinds of ballparks, cities and states should just be very clear about what they're investing in. We would be wise to just recognize plainly that these are not going to be meaningful economic generators, that team owners and the economic impact reports that they commissioned to support their proposals, they say certain things about how their stadiums are going to impact and benefit

the economy. And that largely doesn't happen, especially if the public investment that they're asking for is very high. What you are investing in as a city or as a state, to Ben's point earlier, you are knowingly investing in the intrinsic benefits of having a team rooted in your community for a long time. And those are meaningful, but we should just be very clear, you know, about like if you're selling, like, again, this is top of mind in Oakland right now, but right now what Dave Cavill and John Fisher

are asking for are roughly, are hundreds of millions of dollars in public investment to support their stadium proposal. And while there very well might be and could be economic benefits to that, really the gist of the investment is we are maintaining the intangible benefits of sports. And I think there are lots of people in Atlanta that would tell you that that investment has been worth it. But the reason it's worth it is for keeping the Braves and all of that entails has less to do with the outsized economic benefits of the battery development. whole dichotomy between economists and media members. You mentioned Roger Nolan and J.C. Bradbury and Neil deMoss, the co-author of Field of Schemes, who are sort of sounding the alarm or banging the drum or just exposing the facts about what the actual economic impacts are. And then

there are these very motivated reports, as you mentioned, kind of this cottage industry of people who will churn out these reports that say that it's creating a zillion jobs and it's going to result in a zillion dollars. And these things tend not to be so true for many reasons, which we've touched on. You know, there are only so many game day events at a new stadium. And so it's just going to be empty and not bringing in people a lot of days of the year. And then the construction jobs are temporary. And then a lot of the spending that will go towards just going to the team and spending on things at the game and in the neighborhoods, that will not be necessarily an influx of new dollars from outside the area.

It'll be people in the area spending on that instead of spending on something else. And so the net gain won't actually be that great. If they were just to come out and say, hey, this is going to cost a pretty penny here, but you like having the sports team, right? It's like, again, I don't know that that would make it better, but it would make it a little less galling maybe just that they weren't trying to sort of sell you this bill of goods here. If they were just coming out straight up and saying, yeah, we're not going to turn a profit on this, but you will turn a profit in the sense that you get to enjoy having this sports team and that's worth a lot to you. So I guess it's just that the ballparks and the games are very visible and not everyone in a community cares about sports and roots for the sports team. But those who do really, really, really care and the opportunity costs are just a little less visible, I guess. Maybe

it's visible if you're closing libraries or schools are underfunded, but it's maybe just a little less salient, at least to some people, and that's sort of spread around. Whereas it's a very binary, either we have this big league team or we do not. And there's just a real gaping gulf in people's lives. If that's something that's, that's been a part of, of their whole life and their day and their family tradition. Yeah. And that fear is, is, you know, fear of not having a sports team of having a, a team ripped about from your community. It's very real and it's totally valid. I mean, we have felt it here in the Bay Area. Other places have felt it.

And team owners, you know, very much leverage that to note is that historically, we have as cities and as a citizenry gotten a bit better about this. I don't want to cast too dismal of a pal on this, but the original kind, the leases in the developer agreements that cities and states were signing with team owners during the Camden Yards stadium boom were remarkably one-sided. I think in Baltimore, it resulted in both the Ravens and the Orioles getting to play in totally publicly funded stadiums without having to pay any rent for a period of time while also funneling much of the profits from the stadium ticket sales advertising all those things to the team owners and so the only benefit really that maryland was getting in that instance was the intangible benefits of having their team and you know i don't know i think that the more that we state that plainly, you know, I think that it gives people who are not billionaire team owners, sports teams, a bit more solid footing to advocate for deals that are more two-sided.

That funnel at least a bit more of the spoils from these things to the community, to the people, as opposed to just to team owners. to the people as opposed to just the team owners. I'm from Seattle, so extortion feels like the proper term having lived through the Sonic Saga. I wonder now if we could spend a little bit of time talking about your other piece where you were trying to track just how these teams got to be so profitable. And a big part of that is the corporate welfare that we end up seeing on the stadium and tax subsidy side.

But I think that if, to a point you made in this piece, if you were to talk to, you know, a team owner in 1900 about what sports franchises might be worth in the future, they fall over. Right. I mean, billions would sound like a big number no matter what. But the trajectory of these franchises and their fortunes has really shifted over time. And there's a lot that goes into that, but you identified a couple of key factors. So maybe we can start walking through those. Sure. So you mentioned the corporate welfare piece, which really becomes present in this calculus in the 1980s, as I mentioned. There are two other pieces worth mentioning. The first is the rise of television. Before TV and the influx of media rights deals into the economic equation of being a team owner, owning a pro team and profiting from it or attempting to profit from it was really a matter of kind of employing a huckster promotional mentality to get

people to attend games. And that was a much harder thing to do, you know, so far as a business proposition, basically to run a profitable team, you had to sell out, you know out a majority of your home games. That changes fundamentally with the introduction of TV and as it expands and becomes a more fundamental element of our lives and certainly the predominant method by which we consume sports. You know, today, media rights deals comprise the vast bulk of how pro teams make their money, such that persuading people to attend games is a tertiary concern at best. Like in baseball, thanks to, uh you know a variety of factors the owner let's say John Fisher uh does not need to worry about compelling people to attend games really because he knows that the media rights deals the MLB signs are going to direct money back to the A's and so that dynamic totally changed the prospect of owning a team. It created

a sort of passive income stream for team owners that only grew with time, such, you know, where today it's worth billions of dollars in some cases. There's also sort of the permission granted team owners across leagues to operate as cartels. And, you know, this has been widely reported. I'm not really breaking any news here. The fact that pro leagues in America and really teams in their regions enjoy monopolies. In baseball, their right to operate as a uh from a league perspective is enshrined legally but in the other sports it is you know grant to them effectively whereas you know there cannot legally be a competitor that rises up to challenge major league baseball nfl you do see

competitors from time to time you know the XFL might be an example. But it's gotten to the point now, thanks in part to the media rights deals, where no competitor at the NFL really has a shot. And so what team owners enjoy now, it's permission to operate a monopoly, which is a monopoly with these massive income streams that come in from media rights deals. That's a compelling business proposition. And I think it's why owning a pro team today is, as in the words of a few different reporters that I spoke to for that piece from Sportico, it's in a way the best investment a very rich person could make right now. And it's been like that for 40 to 50 years, depending on how far back you want to go.

You know, people thought Jerry Jones was crazy for paying like $180 million, I think it was for the Cowboys in 1989. The Cowboys are worth, you know, some crazy multiple more than that now. So that's sort of been what's changed and how it's changed. I hope that answered your question. Yeah, I think that skyrocketing rise in franchise values, that's really what makes the public funding of parks exasperating. Yeah, it's so galling. Right.

It's like if owning a team were just not economically viable and they really were struggling, if it were like a public utility, if it really were a nonprofit, not Phil Castellini calling the Reds a nonprofit, but actually a nonprofit, then you might be more understanding of, well, if we want to keep this in operation, then we got to fork over some cash. But where you have municipalities ponying up to keep these teams, and meanwhile, the owners of these teams, who are often extremely wealthy to begin with, are just making money hand over fist either year by year or whenever or if ever they sell the team, then I think that makes it a lot less easier to square because clearly they don't need the handout. And I think one thing that there's a sort of a parallel here, you note that there's just this unquantifiable but still very real and significant value to the community in having a sports team.

team, there's sort of a similar value to owners or prospective owners, which you note in your piece that, yeah, it's a great investment just because it gives you great returns, but also it's kind of fun to own a team, right? And you get to be part of this exclusive rich person club and you get to be a big shot and you get to be seen as important and people want to talk to you, right? And so that's kind of unquantifiable, but also clearly significant. So it sort of works both ways. It's just sort of people like sports. They like consuming sports and they like owning sports. Totally. And that aspect, the kind of unquantifiable value add of owning a pro team, of being in

this most exclusive of rich guy clubs, I think as Bill Simmons wrote back in the day, that's only becoming more tangible. That value is only increasing. And a few reasons come to mind. One is that, you know, as our attention spans collectively become more and more fragmented, pro sports are sort of ascending. They're like the only source of mon supremacy that no other that very few other you know roles in society grant and so you know i don't know that's definitely something that's very important to keep in mind as that benefit in addition to you know increased revenue in addition to the eventual payday that team owners get, you know, the value of teams obviously continuing to increase. That's just something for all of us to keep in mind when

we're having this conversation. And especially when people like Phil Castellini talk about how his industry is in crisis and how the Reds are, you know, this struggling nonprofit, you know, I think that that's just so obviously not grounded in truth. And it's just important for us to keep these counterweights in mind. I'm curious how long you anticipate it being as good a business as it is, because I, you know, I, obviously, like baseball is not a nonprofit, baseball is realizing tremendous profits, and those profits pale in comparison

to some of the profits that football or basketball are realizing. But we can see pockets of potential disruption to that when we think about how long are these cable deals going to be as lucrative as they are? And so do you anticipate this being something that just continues to, you know, rise up and up? Or is there a dip that might present itself within the roller coaster? Just to piggyback on that, you had some scenarios in your piece, like,

how does this, could this get disrupted? And some of them were like, civil war? Like that might do it. Decline of democracy. Yeah, it might take just like the fracturing of society i had a lot of fun talking to these you know professors and economists and throwing out scenarios like well you know what if you know there was a world war three would would that finally stop would that stop the ride like would that do it and uniformly they all express doubt as to whether even that would do it.

And I think, you know, one reason being that, at least in America, so long as pro teams enjoy the monopolistic privileges that they do, and, you know, so long as, like, competition is often, it's the reason for antitrust law. You know, it's often sort of what can be a counterweight to to this sort of thing. Right. And as long as competition is effectively outlawed in the context of pro sports in America, that's one reason this will likely continue unabated. will likely continue unabated. There were some other scenarios that some economists and professors brought up, like perhaps in the case of football, public, like the demand, the consumer demand for the sport falls off to a meaningful extent because people are so offended by injuries

or something like that. I don't necessarily think that's going to happen anytime soon, but there are some hypotheticals that you could put out there that might impact the demand side of the equation. But everyone else that I talked to was pretty certain and a little fearful of the fact that all signs indicate that this kind of continues for the foreseeable future. And that's sort of how it feels to me as well. Yeah. And just to circle back to Oakland, there was a development just recently where one way that Oakland was trying to satisfy the A's demands was to get this $180 million federal grant that was supposed to be for vital infrastructure projects. And I think federal

politicians, and this is, I guess, the Department of Transportation, they're maybe a little less receptive to the entreaties of a team or a city for ballpark funding than a local politician who might actually have their job at stake because of this would be. And so that grant request was denied. There are some other grant requests just through the state or more local level that they could still try to make up that difference in. So that was one thing. There is a deadline of sorts, which is just a little less than a year away now. This is

something that's in the CBA and it's not really a deadline from the city's perspective. It's more of an incentive for the A's to get something done because if they don't have a ballpark commitment by January 15th, 2024, then they would lose their revenue sharing, right? So what do you think will happen here? Because it doesn't seem like Vegas is super eager to just hand over a ballpark to the A's. So will there eventually be some sort of compromise here or will Oakland lose yet another franchise? Oakland is such an interesting, and this comes back to why I was so interested in it to begin with. What's sort of happening in Oakland is politicians here are, you know, a lot of people would say they're not doing this enough, but they are trying to arrange a relationship that's more definitively two-sided

than certainly what you've seen historically here and what you're also seeing in places like Buffalo or Nashville. There are lines being drawn in the sand about what Oakland wants from Fisher and the A's is X amount of affordable housing provided by the A's in their auxiliary real estate development. They want X amount of economic community benefits to go back to the neighborhoods that are going to be impacted by the stadium development and uh they've been adamant that they will not take out any debt or go you know into the general fund to pay for them and i i bring all that up because you know especially that last point not going into general fund that limits oakland's options so far as how they can assist with the funding for this. And that was one reason why the grants were so important. So where we have now is you have Oakland, the city, you know,

it's sort of an amorphous term, but political leaders here are, they have certain, you know, non-negotiables where they say, we need this in a deal. We need some form of investment from Fisher, the private side, to make it more symbiotic, to make it more mutually beneficial. On the A's side, they have been equally adamant that they're actually not going to pay any more than Y percent of affordable housing or set aside. They have differing perspectives on ultimately what should be expected of them in this partnership. And so that underlies a kind of philosophical divide, I think, that you're seeing play out here where Fisher and the

A's don't want to give up more than what they've already consented to. Oakland itself does not want to give up more and is asking for more from the A's than what they've gotten from team owners in the past. And so we're in the midst of a standoff. The standoff has been exacerbated by this grant. One reason these federal grants that Oakland applied to were important is because they comprised a big part of how they were going to fund the side of the infrastructure and the side of the project that they've already agreed to. So now you have a shortfall, which it highlights perfectly sort of the tension here, because one way the shortfall could be plugged is, let's say Oakland right now is on the hook, per their agreement, as it has sort of progressed, for roughly $600 million. That's what they need to find a way to

contribute to the project in particular for off-site infrastructure the a's have insisted that they're not going to kick back any more of their own money to that so it's on oakland to find a way to to pay for that john fisher the owner of the a's is worth more than two billion dollars he could very well find more money to contribute maybe meet oakland halfway with that doing so in my mind would represent what oakland is kind of going for which is a different kind of partnership between city and local team what's going to be really interesting to see play out is out is if Fisher consents to that, or if not. If he doesn't budge and Oakland has trouble plugging that gap, this grant was going to be, again, one way that they do that. That's a problem. And I don't think anyone is exactly sure what happens in that instance.

Oakland has talked about playing with other mechanisms for generating public funds. I'm going to butcher the details here, so I won't even go into them. Complicated financial things that they're thinking about doing to create more money. Fisher, again, remains resolute in his unwillingness to provide more money, but maybe he buckles on that. So I don't know. We're in the midst of a very interesting kind of inflection point. The last thing I'll say about Las Vegas is politicians there, by all accounts so far, are no more eager to subsidize the A's and build them a publicly funded stadium than politicians in Oakland are. So my money heretofore would have been that the vegas thing was sort of a bluff but what makes the vegas situation interesting is how involved major league

baseball has gotten um i believe they have said that they would waive the a's relocation fees if they went to go to las vegas and of course they're sort of pressuring that. And so if Vegas were to happen, you might even see John Fisher putting more of his own money into a stadium in Vegas, just because he's got MLB behind him and it's a little easier to build large scale public private projects there. So there's obviously a lot of moving pieces. I fear that answer was horribly convoluted,

but the high level is we are in a standoff in Oakland. No one's really sure what's going to happen. And the Vegas threat is looming with support from Major League Baseball. Last thing, there's the suggestion you consider in your piece that maybe sports franchises now are becoming not just the province of mere multi-billionaires like John Fisher, but mega multi-billionaires, the Steve Coens of the 0.1%, if they're the only ones who can't afford to buy these teams or they just become such prestigious little baubles to add to your vast hoard of wealth that they are the ones who outbid everyone else, that that might actually be a good thing in the long run

because you might have Steve Cohen-type owners who are not really trying to turn a profit as much as, say, the Castellanis are, or not trying to pocket as much money because they have so much already that they can just operate their franchise competitively. What do you think of that idea? Well, I have become sympathetic to it. The experience that people have undergone in Oakland has illuminated kind of one fundamental lesson, or at least one that's pertinent to our conversation here, which is that sports is a business, yes, but it's also way less

fun when it is, you know, only a business. When the concerns of the people who own your team revolve around tidy profits and always turning a profit rather than winning games or, you know, working alongside the community to put a product on the field that we can all be proud of and invest in. And so if we got to a point where it was only the Steve Coens of the world who owned pro teams and turning a profit was less of a concern in comparison to bringing glory upon yeah yourself as steve cohen but also the community that you represent that would at the very least be more fun and i think that you know it would for fans represent a more fulfilling experience of supporting pro teams. Yeah. So in that sense, I definitely am sympathetic to it. And the one thing I will say is that the opposite side of

the spectrum, you see the results in Oakland, in the stands, the A's not only were the worst team in baseball or among the worst teams in baseball last year, but they had the lowest attendance in all of baseball. That's a product more than anything else of this team being run the way that it's been run. And to the extent that if we get to a point where teams are not run like that, it would at the very least be a more rewarding fan experience. Kind of steer into the skids then. It's not that the problem is too many billionaires. It's that they don't have enough billions. We got to get.

And not like private equity billions. Like to be clear, we want, I mean, I know Steve Cohen's billions are hedge fund billions, but when it turns to P that's not much better. Right. All right. Well, we will link to all of these pieces because even though this was an in-depth discussion,

there is much more depth that we did not get into. And you can find Dan on Twitter at DMORiter. You can also find his website at danmorewriter.com. And we wish you the best as an A's fan and I guess there's always Oakland Roots SC no matter what happens to the A's there are lots of other great things about Oakland that are not sports team related so that's right and and if you're ever in Oakland and over the soccer season go check out a Roots game man they kick ass yeah I think they have outdrawn the A's at times recently. That's correct.

That's correct. All right. Well, thank you very much, Dan. Thanks, guys. All right. So let's wrap up with the Pass Blast, and this will be well in line with what we've been talking about for most of this episode, fortuitously. I did not tell Jacob what we would be talking about, but it just so happens

that this is right along the same line. So this PassPass is from 1957 and from Jacob Pomeranke, Sabres Director of Editorial Content and Chair of the Black Sox Scandal Research Committee, Jacob writes, 1957, funny like a clown. Despite winning four pennants in five years, the Brooklyn Dodgers continued to see their attendance drop at Ebbets Field throughout the 1950s. Owner Walter O'Malley made a desperate move to liven things up by hiring a new mascot to work at home games in 1957. He recruited a circus clown from Ringling Brothers named Emmett Kelly, who had appeared in many Hollywood films and TV shows. Kelly's stint as a Brooklyn bum, as Dodgers fans were often called,

began during spring training in 1957. He dressed up in sad face makeup and shabby tramps clothes and went through his routine joking with players and umpires before games and between innings. The Sporting News considered the whole idea to be unbecoming of a major league team, writing in an editorial on February 6, 1957, quote, Emmett Kelly has brought mirth and happiness to millions as the best-known circus clown in America, if not the world. He has won a well-deserved place in the affections of young and old alike. For all his talent, his employment by the Brooklyn Dodgers must be viewed with some misgivings by those who believe that baseball people should confine

themselves to selling baseball. The Dodgers are by no means the first to seek extra entertainment for their fans, not to seek extra entertainment for their fans, not to mention extra stimulation for their turnstiles. But one can't help wonder if the engagement of a professional clown is the right procedure for the champions of the National League. There was a time when one more clown on the Brooklyn payroll would have passed almost unnoticed. Is baseball in Brooklyn or elsewhere unable to stand on its own merits? Wherever attendance slumps, does the remedy rest in borrowing hypodermics from other fields of entertainment or in applying greater promotional and selling effort to the basic product? Jacob

concludes Emmett Kelly couldn't save the Brooklyn Dodgers, of course, whose attendance fell by nearly 200,000 fans in 1957. And Walter O'Malley had much bigger plans for Hollywood anyway. That fall, he announced he was moving the team to Los Angeles. Kelly did not go with the team to California, saying the L.A. Coliseum was too big for one clown. And the idea of mascots at ballgames didn't stick around either. It took another 20 years before the San Diego Chicken and the Philly Fanatic became a phenomenon that every team would soon copy. So even though Bill Veck was around doing his promotional efforts, and even though you had the whole tradition of the clown princes of baseball,

Max Patkin and his predecessors, they were people who apparently thought that for a team as successful as the Dodgers, it was sending the wrong signal to have a clown. So I guess now the owners kind of clown themselves sometimes. So that's the replacement for having a literal clown, although we have mascots also now. I think that it just goes to show how, I mean, there's a lot to this, but it's just threading the mascot needle ben it's so it's so tricky right because you're designing something so you have to make choices with like

real intentionality but often the choices go awry like i guess and this probably exists what i'm saying is i want to read the long form on designing gritty right because gritty manages to be so many of the things that at least people our age seem to want in their mascots right it's weird but it's not like hokey weird it's not hokey weird. It's not try-hard weird. It's genuinely weird. It's chaotic, but not in a way that feels, I don't know, like you're being granted permission for chaos by your parents, which sometimes they resemble. It's obviously horny. And that one does feel like it's on purpose. But again, that's a real hard one to thread,

because sometimes you like you know you end up with like mrs met where you know that someone sat in a room and was like look we want we acknowledge that there are going to be some number of people in the fan base who want to you know with the mascot and we want those people to feel seen but we yeah we can't make anthracon with uh andrew mccutcheon yeah but we know we can't go too far in that direction. But somebody decided how curvaceous to make her. That was a choice. They decided to...

So it's just really hard. I know this is not the point, but have you seen the mascot for the Seattle Kraken, Ben? No, I don't think so. Can you Google it real quick? I can. Just like real. Bowie the troll. Isn't this the most horrifying thing you've ever seen in your entire life?

And as an aside, both the fanatic and gritty would kick the crap out of this mascot if they saw it in real life. Like, it's just a horror show of previously unknown dimensions. It's supposed to be the fremont troll which is under the fremont bridge in seattle but again like that's a weird cultural institution almost in seattle and they tried to cutify it and so it's not scary and it's not weird and it's gotta i mean this troll is working with a badonk that just confuses me. Anyway, I'm just saying mascot design seems really hard. Yeah.

I think Gritty's googly eyes do a lot of work. I think that really conveys his unhinged quality. Yes, because it's just, yeah, man. Anyway, and you can't have a real clown because you want people to arrive at the clown conclusion on their own. You can't hand it to them because then you're admitting defeat, you know? So anyway, it's a tricky business, mascot design. Yeah, you can easily end up with Dandy, the short-lived Yankees mascot, who is a favorite of yours or a favorite in your nightmares.

Yeah, so just a mere 22 years or so in New York elapsed between Emmett Kelly, the Dodgers clown, and Dandy, the short-lived Yankees mascot, which, again, I guess was introduced when the Yankees had fallen on, well, I was going to say above such things at least briefly decided that we can get in on the mascot game before we can then have that backfire and be disturbing and then go back to being the Yankees. And we don't have mascots unless they're turtles. So I still think the worst current major league mascot is blooper blooper's the worst one going right now because it's like a weird fleshy it's a weird fleshy fanatic i don't know it's got the things in its ears i don't i don't like it that feels like it's you know i don't want, I don't want to incite a panic, but it feels satanic to me in a way. I enjoyed Blooper's wholesome relationship with new Red Sox center fielder Adam Duvall's son,

but now that Duvall's left Atlanta, we don't even get to enjoy that on a regular basis anymore. You know, little kids don't have refined taste. That's how children's television continues to persist. It's fine. They develop taste over time. But there's a reason that parents end up hating kids' TV sometimes because they attach themselves to anything. Sorry to that kid, but I don't think we need to take it as a mark of refinement.

I'm not making fun of a child. I'm saying that his lack of taste is age-appropriate. That's all I'm saying. I'm not making fun of the kid. The kid seems nice. Seems like a cute, nice kid. I'm just saying bloopers terrifying and sent from the devil. Yep.

That is why parents so highly revere Bluey because you can actually watch that as an adult and it is not painful and an assault on your senses. So maybe Bluey should be a big league mascot. The way that people talk about kids TV sounds like a hostage situation a lot of the time and as as the older sister who is much older than her younger brother like look i've been exposed to some bad stuff i think we've talked to this about this on this program before how i feel like i'm entitled to restitution for kaiyu like i i should get a check from PBS. I was so relieved when I found out that that character doesn't have cancer because I was worried that he was bald

because he was like sick. And then it's like, no, he's not sick. He's just like this. And I was like, oh, thank God. I can go back to hitting that kid. Yeah, well, I'm being exposed to children's programming myself more and more these days.

Some of it's really good. And then you get to revisit a lot of your favorites. I'm given to understand that that's one of the great perks of being a parent is having cause to revisit your own childhood favorites. So it's not all grim but some of it is the equivalent of blooper.

Okay, you can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going, help us stay ad free, and get themselves access to some perks. The great Riley Breckenridge of productive outs and thrice fame, I assume, unless it's an entirely different Riley Breckenridge. Brandon Wisley, MCS, Maxwell Elkis, and Kevin King.

Thanks to all of you. Patreon perks include access to the Effectively Wild Discord group for Patreon supporters only. If you haven't used Discord, it's like a private forum where you can chat with other listeners about baseball and everything else under the sun. It's a great active group, warm and welcoming. You also get access to monthly bonus episodes, one of which we will be recording soon. Plus, we offer playoff livestreams and goodies and perks, autographed books, appearances on the podcast, discounts

on merch, playoff livestreams, and more. Check it out. Patreon.com slash Effectively Wild. Public funding of Effectively Wild is something we support. If you're a Patreon supporter, you can contact us through the Patreon site. If not, you can email us. Send your questions, comments, and suggestions to podcast at fangraphs.com. Thank you. Effectively Wild on Twitter at EWPod, and you can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash Effectively Wild. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing

and production assistance. We will be back with one more episode before the end of the week. Talk to you soon. It's on and on For a coffee I turn to you For some reason For you to make down I'm so lost

In a world that's a horror It's on and on I'm so glad you walked into my world. It's only all I've forgotten.