Idiots Write About Sports

At long last, new A’s owner Lew Wolff has unveiled his plans for a new stadium just north of the Coliseum.

The oddest thing about the Chronicle story, by the exiled Glenn Dickey no less, this this statement:

Baseball owners have set a deadline — the start of next baseball season — for the project to be moving forward, Wolff said. “I don’t say we have to have a shovel in the ground at that point,” he said, “but we need to be able to show that we have a concrete plan. We are the only team in the major leagues to share a stadium with football that is not going forward with plans for a new stadium.”

Now wait a second. How in the world is a deadline involved in this? Dickey says nothing — which is quite unlike him. Maybe the demotion’s gotten to him.

In any event, Phil would tell you why there’s a deadline: because if the A’s can’t get a stadium rolling during the offseason, Wolff is going to have baseball’s blessing to start plans to move to Las Vegas or some other place willing to furnish Major League Budball with another free stadium.

And although stories throughout the Bay Area have tended to report this as a “no public money” stadium, a careful read suggests that all the A’s have said is that there would be no bond money used. As Neil deMause writes at Baseball Prospectus, “The A’s press office has refused to release any details of the plans beyond an exceptionally hand-waving Wolff press release.”

As deMause rightly points out, baseball’s new revenue-sharing break for privately-financed ballparks does mean that the A’s might actually get a new stadium — because they’re a small-revenue team, but not a small-market team. That could be good news for the A’s, which — and I’m a Giants fan here — would be a really, really good thing, because I don’t want to see the A’s move.

But at the same time, Phil has taught me to be pessimistic about all of this. So I can’t help but seeing this silent ultimatum to get the deal done by the end of the offseason as anything but a threat to pull up stakes and take the team to Vegas if the deal won’t get done.

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