The planned move by the Oakland A’s to Las Vegas won’t just end more than five decades of baseball in the East Bay. The A’s say it will end the cost-conscious roster strategy the team is famous for: Moneyball.
The A’s are still in the early, slow-moving bureaucratic process of nailing down the details of their move for Vegas, and a new ballpark they hope to open on the Las Vegas Strip in 2028. Major League Baseball owners have yet to even approve the move and it isn’t clear when they would move or where they would play over the next few seasons.
But if and when it does happen, A’s president Dave Kaval said in an interview, the team believes the increased revenue from a new stadium will allow the team to abandon the Moneyball approach. Devised by general manager Billy Beane (who is now a senior adviser to the club) and made legend by a Michael Lewis book, the Moneyball strategy involves using data to identify high-value players who are undervalued by the market.
“The reality is, the entire Moneyball system that Billy Beane devised was based on the fact that we had limited resources,” Kaval said. “Now, with moving to Las Vegas and having higher revenues that we can invest on the player side, we can still use some of those techniques of valuing undervalued assets, but we’ll have money to play in the free agent marketplace. It’s just going to be a completely new day in terms of the on-field product.”
(Beane declined to comment on the “Moneyball” era and referred questions back to Kaval.)
The A’s on-field aesthetic has long been defined by the bright green and gold of their uniforms. But it is the green and gold of operating a profitable ball club that has evaded the organization. The facilities in Oakland have deteriorated, and now, so has the baseball product: The A’s are 33-87 entering Wednesday’s play, and on track for one of the worst seasons in MLB history.
The A’s have been working toward a ballpark solution to meet a deadline in the most recent MLB-MLBPA collective bargaining agreement that says the A’s won’t receive revenue sharing money from the league if they haven’t “entered into a binding agreement […] to construct a new Major League Baseball facility” by January 15, 2024. The league’s definition of “a binding agreement” is unclear, but a league source said the A’s have met the threshold and are eligible to continue receiving revenue sharing after 2023.
The binding agreement and public-financing legislation to build a ballpark on the Las Vegas Strip is just the start of the complicated task of relocating and rebuilding the A’s. The club has to file a relocation application through MLB, which hasn’t been completed yet.
“We’re working hand-in-hand with the commissioner’s office,” Kaval said about the relocation application. “We’re providing them the necessary information and we’re just working through that process and its ongoing.”
Comments
Post a Comment