Iiiiiiiiiiiiiinteresting. MLB promises to pay for spring special election. If it’s necessary. That’s … weird.
20 thoughts on “DuPuy asks Reed to stop the vote”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Iiiiiiiiiiiiiinteresting. MLB promises to pay for spring special election. If it’s necessary. That’s … weird.
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Well, a premature San Jose election can only impede Selig’s plans, regardless of the outcome of the vote, and regardless of Selig’s plan.
Say Bud wants SJ to happen, or to at least remain viable: a failed vote obviously hurts that, but a premature passing vote could also hurt, as having that issue decided before a Giants-A’s deal is worked out changes the leverage equation between the teams (to SF’s disadvantage).
Say Bud wants Oakland to happen, or to at least remain viable: a successful San Jose vote obviously hurts that, at least perceptually. But a failed SJ vote also hurts, in that it removes the South Bay specter which has become a significant motivator for Oakland to get its shit together.
Selig and MLB have an interest in keeping all options open as long as possible, to play off one another and maintain an equilibrium from which the Giants and A’s might reach a t-rights deal. Asking SJ to call off the vote helps preserve all of this until MLB is ready to propose a deal Bud knows will get close to unanimous owner support. It also occurs to me that the formal request might be a face-saving thing on Wolff’s behalf, since otherwise he’s put himself out on quite a limb vis a vis Selig, the league, and quite possible Fisher as well.
Today’s snapshot of the process by ML is pretty accurate.
I kind of like being right all the time.
{snerk}
It seems like they’re risking a worst case scenario – giving Oakland too short a time to actually get their deal done, but long enough to significantly delay progress on SJ.
Still, this
seems like a big improvement over the “San Jose is a done deal” narrative that most people have believed for a while.
… unless the whole thing is about buying time for consensus on contraction (which ML parenthesizes as a non-zero possibility).
Oh, give it a rest.
Unless San Jose does something really stupid and irrevocably pisses MLB off (like, say, by not withdrawing the ballot measure now), it will still be in good shape if Oakland fails. If anything, it could put SJ in a better position, because then they’d no longer be competing against some possible indeterminate future Oakland ballpark idea.
So, I don’t follow this much/understand what’s going on at all. Is it correct to say that it’s looking better for Oakland than any time in the last 4-5 years?
Yes, by far. But if it goes down the way I (and now ML) predict, Oakland will need to actually deliver in a pretty short period…control of 100% of the site, financing for land acquisition, financing for infrastructure improvements, and environmental issues in hand (with an EIR under preparation at least, if not fully certified by the end of the +/- 12 month window).
So yes, this is the best the prospects for an Oakland ballpark have looked probably since the Coli was built, but for those (including me) who worry that Oakland has a problem getting shit done, it is also an opportunity for the city to fail and then be written off forever.
Isn’t this shit that should have happened several years ago?
Thanks, and go As.
I’ve heard tell it’s Jerry Brown’s fault it didn’t happen.
Huh. Turns out Jello was right.
In the sense that if it had happened several years ago they could already have a ballpark, sure. The sooner the better.
For parts of that time, the city lacked the political will (as LB alludes, this was certainly true when Brown was mayor) or just the basic competence to put together a plan.
And for other parts of that time (basically since Wolff took over, except for his initial baseball potemkin village at 66th street proposal) A’s ownership hasn’t been interested in cooperating with Oakland: after Fremont fell through, but before any official interest from San Jose was announced, Wolff was still telling Oakland “don’t even bother trying to put together a plan, I’m not interested.” And as recently as a couple weeks ago, he still claimed to be unaware of anything happening with Oakland.
That created a kind of chicken-or-egg problem: Oakland wasn’t going to spend the money and effort acquiring a suitable tract of land and preparing an EIR for a stadium plan that the team said it didn’t want, but no one seemed willing to take their proposals seriously if they hadn’t already done these things. It sounds like their strategy of going behind Wolff’s back and presenting a preliminary plan directly to MLB has worked, and now it makes sense to go ahead with the expense of working out the details.
huh. So would this be semi-accurate sort of list of events for an igorant idiot like me, then?
1. Raiders come back. Mount Davis is born, Coliseum is fucked for baseball.
2. Wolff takes over team. Tries to look at sites for a new stadium in Oakland, maybe doesn’t try hard enough
2a. Oakland doesn’t seem too interested anyway for various politician-driven reasons
3. Fremont and the ensuing BS happens
4. San Jose starts pushing hard and everybody kinda assumes it’s where Lew wants to go anyway
5. Oakland comes back and decides to do something after all.
Something like that?
Thanks, and go As.
I think that’s pretty much right, but with 2a mostly preceding 2, with some overlap.
Well, 2 would have to be in some part the economy collapsing thus making his pet idea unworkable.
There’s a big gap between 1 and 2/2a, which includes the pre-Wolff blow-off of Oakland by the Schott-Hoffman owned A’s, and the blow-off of the A’s by the Brown administration in favor of housing development. There’s also the ~ two years when Wolff vas an A’s employee but not owner, in which he ostensibly tried to get an Oakland park plan going (he proposed the Coliseum parking lot, Oakland expressed interest, then he backed off that site as MLB generally determined it strongly preferred urban-center ballpark development). Then came Wolffish ownership and the phony 66th Ave plan. It’s fair to say that Oakland’s interest level over those years was sporadic and often disorganized, but no so much that it was never interested.
… and Reed stops the vote.
I still say the delay is a crass move to suppress voter turnout, making sure the partisan booster voting becomes a larger block in the referendum. Took a page right out of the Don Perata handbook. Or maybe the City of Bell handbook.
Is there still time for a the anti-ballpark faction to get an initiative against on the November ballot?
No. City initiatives can make the ballot in two ways: by majority vote of the City Council (which is what SJ would have done for the pro-park measure), or by submission of the requisite number of voter signatures. Either has to be done by August 6 to make the November ballot. So unless some anti-park faction has already drafted a ballot measure and has something like 25,000 signatures already, it ain’t happening this time.