Move the Miami Marlins. Actually, wait. Don’t. That’s not the point. The point is this; people keep dumping all over Oakland and Oakland A’s fans for not supporting their team. It is simply a bad and incorrect argument amplified in the sports hot take echo chamber.
Look no further than the Miami Marlins as proof of that. The team from South Florida moved into their publicly financed new digs in 2012. Let’s just say loanDepot Park has not been the game-changing project fans were told it would be.
In fact, the old, decrepit Oakland Coliseum has brought in a million more fans between 2012 and today. That’s right, what is widely, and incorrectly, regarded as the worst stadium in American professional sports has performed better than a shiny new facility Rob Manfred and his MLB cronies demanded be built. By the way, this includes the opening year honeymoon. The numbers skew even further in favor of the A’s if you take that first season out.
Imagine what a new A’s stadium in Oakland or Fremont or San Jose would draw especially considering the attendance seen at the reverse boycott. Hell, put the goddamn thing in Livermore for all I care. The Oakland Roots managed to get a thousand people to Los Positas College for a random USL game I attended in 2021.
Despite being the least supported team in baseball, people aren’t saying, “Move the Miami Marlins.” Manfred isn’t patronizing their fanbase with nonsense statements. The echo chamber that insists Oakland doesn’t support its franchise is eerily quiet about the ballclub in South Florida which no one seems to care about, new stadium and all.
If your justification for an A’s relocation is that Oakland doesn’t support the team, then that logic also dictates the Marlins should be the first franchise to leave town. Speaking of logic, if you are any city or county government in America, loanDepot Park is a case study on why you don’t give billionaires money.
Miami financed roughly 80 percent of the Marlins’ new ballpark. What have they got in return? They tore down the beloved Orange Bowl, replaced it with a building no one in the city seems to care about and the team has fluctuated between mediocre and terrible over the past decade. Renown scumbag Jeffery Loria is the only person to have benefited from any of this.
Bad ownership is something both Miami and Oakland suffer from. It is why MLB shouldn’t move the Miami Marlins or the Oakland A’s. Blaming the public for greedy billionaires grubbing for money and dragging their team over the coals is piss poor. Utterly ridiculous.
Sports fans and cities as a whole shouldn’t be forced to put up with this kind of behavior. And if you are a sports fan supporting these relocations, you’re an idiot. But by all means, have fun in your echo chamber of awful takes regurgitating exploitative billionaire propaganda.
Of course, we live in an era where context doesn’t matter or is simply made up to support whatever outcome one wants. It’s better to look through a keyhole instead of opening the unlocked door if that supports your argument.
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