This morning, I wrote the below letter to the Commissioner of MLB, Robert D. Manfred. He quickly actually replied, a very brief comment that simply stated he appreciated my thoughtful letter, that he agreed with some of what I had to say and disagreed with other things. Below is the letter I wrote to him within the previous hour. Note that per the email time stamps, my email was sent at 6:19 AM Eastern and he replied 18 minutes later.
Good morning Mr. Commissioner. Before I get to the main concern of my letter, I do want to thank you for getting others at the league to respond to my concern about the Audacy audio service. I do regret to inform you that as of today, two months after my first letter, the conditions with this concern over Audacy have not improved. I have continued to provide feedback to the customer service response team that reports to be sharing my feedback with the provider.
I want to get to the main topic of my letter though and this concerns the situation with the Rays and Athletics and future ballparks. I have to tell you, having been to every big league market, the problem in Oakland is not the fans. The problem there is the owner and I understand that in order to do your job, you must make all of the owners happy, something that is an almost impossible task. But there is an old basic truth about business, if you sell something that the buyers don’t approve of because the consumer thinks it is substandard, they are going to at some point realize that it is not worth their trouble to buy the product. That is what has happened with the Oakland situation.
Tampa Bay is different, it is a bad ballpark location and many fans even now are not showing up, even though that franchise has tried and continues to try to put a truly big league product on the field. Why they are considering building a new venue near the current one that most folks don’t want to attend is questionable, but that franchise is trying. The Athletics franchise has not been trying. That team drew more than 20K a night in 2019 and had a 55K sellout for a playoff. No one had fans in 2020 and when baseball begin to come back in 2021, choices made by the Athletics limited them to just 12K per game on nights when the Coliseum was able to sell every seat, that’s based on a USA Today analysis. Then they gut the team further and increase ticket prices while threatening to move to Vegas. Economics 101 says that is not at all how you are going to grow your business. In fact if this were a regular business not part of a league and prop up by a league, it would no longer exist under its current management, it would have just died or a new owner and management team would have taken over.
Now we come to today, the team trying like crazy to force itself upon the people of Vegas. But Las Vegas has been told by many fans, in and out of Oakland, including this one, that they would be better off with an expansion owner. Why? The Athletics owner clearly only wanted to use the team as a way to try and get more money into his pocket. Now he’s in a situation where the team went from wanting lots of land and a Oakland style Battery, which was the first mistake, to now wanting just nine acres in the middle of a piece of land owned by a Vegas hotel builder. The whole presentation about Vegas has been in my view done in such a way that no one there wants that franchise. Starting games at 4PM so the tourists can come to a partially retractable roof park on a 100 degree day, no thank you, especially since many of the hard working tax paying public this has been forced upon would not be able to get away from work to attend the games if they were scheduled like that. The drop in attendance due to the abuse of the fans by the owner due to no effort in fielding a truly MLB capable team in Oakland is why the attendance has crashed, not the ballpark. The Oakland situation is very much like Montreal, it was not the fans there either, it was the owner and the fans eventually gave up. But more damning is the fact that we see the results of bad ownership and owner abuse of fans playing in Miami. I have pointed out to others online that some of the worst seasons for attendance in Miami have been after the franchise got what it wanted, a bran new stadium. The Marlins club has not had a winning season in a standard 162 game campaign since 2009 and the top three seasons for Miami attendance were 1993, 1994, and 1997 at the former venue it called home.
It has also been pointed out by others that the new Marlins ballpark is on 17 acres, you won’t get a retractable park in Vegas on just nine acres. So the people in Vegas have been told, an expansion owner would be better. With that, I want to share my ideas and proposals to get you out of a bad box you are in. Let’s start with the big elephants in the room, the Athletics and public dollars for building new stadiums. It has been proven time and time again that spending big public dollars on a ballpark that might be torn down or replaced by another one in 20-30 years Rangers and Braves style is no longer sitting well with the public. Many conservatives view it as a waste of tax dollars, liberals like me view it as a completely unnecessary grift and corporate giveaways to the uber wealthy who have the resources to build anything they want. Mr. Manfred, you are going to find that many communities would love to have baseball, if Austin could get a team, I’d love it for the city I call home. But I won’t support using government money to build something where all the risk is on our tax base and the benefit goes to the private pockets of a man who lives the life of a royal king. We fought in this nation for freedom and for the ability to not be ruled by a class of kings. So you are going to have to find ownership that can privately afford to build the stadium.
About Oakland specifically, I think you need to treat Mr. Fisher similarly to what was done with the McCourt family that used to own the dodgers. Make him sell the team and give it to a local buyer that will keep it in Oakland or the East Bay. We are talking about one of the most wealthy parts of America here, this team should not be operating like it is a small market team and it used too be one of the great franchises in all of baseball during the Haas ownership. That glory can be returned with the right owner.
Now I want to go back to the component of stadium building and tie this to expansion fees. I know you have said before the fee for an expansion team could be up to two billion dollars. That might drive off some potentially great owners, especially if they are in a region that is not going to just hand out free dollars for building a ballpark. So what I am going to propose here is two new prongs in terms of how you think of expansion. First, lower the expansion fee to 650 million per owner, that way they can put a lot more of the resources they have as an ownership into building the actual stadium. Then, if the league wants to collect four billion in expansion fees, simply expand to 36 teams rather than 32. If you expanded to 36 and charged 650 million for each team, the league gets nearly the four billion it would have received from just a pair of teams at two billion each. That four billion divided by the existing owners comes out to more than 130 million per owner, or if part of the cut was taken by the league, each existing team of the 30 could get 130 million and the league central fund pulls in 100 million of its own.
Some will say expansion to 36 is too much, but you have said you want to operate baseball like a growth business. In 1969, the league expanded from 20 to 24, an increase of 20 percent. A growth from 30 to 36 would also be an increase of 20 percent. I would propose that the timeline and mechanics for expansion work like this. Award the six teams in 2025 or 2026, to begin play in either 2028 or 2029. The six teams would allow for the league to maintain a three division per league alignment with six teams in each of six divisions. You can maintain the everyone plays everyone approach, scheduling 54 interleague games against 18 opponents. Teams would still alternate sites each year, but the home and away in the same season between designated rivals would be canceled. Within the same league outside the division, all teams would face 12 opponents for six games each that gives you 72 more games on the schedule. This would leave you 36 games to play within the division. The division contests would then consist of seven games against four teams and eight against the fifth.
Given the high cost of expansion with fees and the cost of building a new stadium, this is not 1991 when the Rockies and Marlins had homes to move into or 1995 when the Rays did, all these teams would be in a situation like that faced by the Diamondbacks, you need to treat these teams the way the NHL did the expansion Golden Knights. IN the two drafts prior too their first season, give the expansion teams the top six draft positions, the year the franchises begin play they would be in a lottery with the remaining franchises. IN terms of an actual expansion draft, the existing teams would be able to protect nine players from the first round of selections, two primary starting pitchers and two primary relief pitchers, one catcher, one 1b/dh, one player who played infield other than first base, one outfielder and one utility player who plays a variety of positions. Teams would be able to then add four players to this list to protect prior to round two and five prior to round three. This means 90 players are selected, like in prior drafts, teams would lose three players from their organization. Rules about which recent amateur signings would be excluded could also be figured out.
I love baseball, I want to see it grow, but I want it done in a way that is sustainable and this means thinking differently when it comes to how the game operates, especially when relying on the use of public dollars. There are millions and millions of us who love baseball, but the men who own the teams are worth so much money now, in the view of many, they should be required to treat their team like an investment and if they have to take on the risk of building the stadium, they will hopefully in theory be a better and more invested owner than the man who operates the Athletics at this time. The league is in a box right now because of what has been done to the Athletics, I believe selling the team to a northern California group solves that issue, then the focus can be on how to expand in a way that gives the league a national foot print while showing that it respects the will of its hard working, tax paying fan base.
Have a good day and thank you for your time.
Reggie