Hospice Baseball

Not a well attended hospice for reasons

 

So, some words about the Oakland A's, how badly MLB has screwed the pooch, and why anyone who is making light of this is a terrible human being who I hope gets the kind of cancer that makes other people point at them and laugh while they die. Because that's kind of what's happening here.

Sports in this country has always been a terrible bargain foisted on people before they were old enough to know better, and if you'd like to draw a corollary between that and religion, I won't stop you. Nearly every new stadium project has been a case of clear theft, and every team that decided to throw games through "load management" or tanking for draft position -- including several that I root for! -- have engaged in grift. T'was ever thus, and if you don't want to pay grifters from time to time, you can't watch sports, now or likely ever. Perhaps in a future where there is promotion and relegation, massive reforms, retributive taxation on the generational wealth that was created by past theft, and so on, you might get there. But you won't.

Or, shorter, we'e all marks, have always been marks, will always be marks. But there are limits.

And that's how we get to the Oakland A's, a baseball team that exists only because MLB requires each franchise to play games, rather than just forfeit them. They are on course to have one of the worst records in modern history, are owned by an owner that has more or less defined moral hazard in our time, and employ only the cheapest players they can find. If any of these players are seen as useful to any other team, they are sent to them straightaway, especially if they might be in the major leagues long enough to earn more than a union-mandated minimum salary. Their stadium is in disrepair because LOL that might cost money, and they will remain this way until they move to some other location.

Some people, somehow, seem to think it's all well and good to blame the city of Oakland for this. They should have engaged in the grift more, you see. They didn't play ball with the current grifter who owns the team. Their fan base is too small, despite the fact that they went to the stadium in disrepair in large numbers when the team was seeming to make an effort to win games.

This is, of course, exactly what happened to Miami not too long ago, and Montreal not very long before that, because (drum roll) it works. If you own a major league team in any sport and aren't going to make an ungodly amount of money when you sell the team to the next mafiaso, you are a freaking unicorn of stupid, but that's besides the point.

So, to the media and fans of other teams who are looking forward to the A's being in a desert city with not enough water in a time of devastating climate change? Third finger, raised, while leaving. Oakland's fans aren't going to become San Francisco Giants fans, despite a lovely stadium existing just 15 traffic-choked miles away, because they no longer see MLB as a manageable grift, but a fatal one. And if you don't think that your local oliogarch would do you like this... well, maybe, though honestly there aren't more than a half dozen owners in all of sports that I would trust to do that, especially when there's money to be made. 

But how about their idiot children, or the next mafiaso?

Oakland's hospice could be your own. Choose your actions accordingly.