An ambiguously phrased letter from Commissioner Bud Selig leads many in the Bay Area to assume that if the attempt by the Oakland A’s to build a new ballpark in Fremont fails, the owners will be able to negotiate with any other community — including San Jose.
An ambiguously phrased letter from Commissioner Bud Selig leads many in the Bay Area to assume that if the attempt by the Oakland A’s to build a new ballpark in Fremont fails, the owners will be able to negotiate with any other community — including San Jose.
In the letter to Lew Wolff dated Dec. 3, Selig writes:
Of course, it’s the "other communities" phrase that has tongues wagging, as columnist Mark Purdy — a tireless advocate of bringing the A’s to San Jose — has all but scheduled the moving vans. (City officials, meanwhile, say they have no money to build a new ballpark and are decidedly less enthusiastic than Purdy.)
The biggest impediment to such a move, and a factor Purdy downplays, is the existing of baseball’s territorial rules, and under them the San Francisco Giants control San Jose and the south Bay area. Can Selig override these territorial rules? Not by himself; they need to be approved by other owners. He could muscle a change through, but it would set a bad precedent, and the owners of the Giants would find plenty of sympathy among other owners (i.e., the Steinbrenners and the Wilpons) with their own territorial issues. So it’s not quite the done deal Purdy thinks, and by opening that barn door you’re giving other cities, like Las Vegas and Charlotte, the chance to make their own play for the A’s.
And you must remember this: if a Fremont ballpark plan collapses, it won’t be because Fremont officials killed it: it will be because Wolff and crew failed to anticipate an economic slowdown and stuck with a development plan that was highly speculative even in the best of times. That’s not likely to engender a lot of sympathy among other MLB owners.
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