SI:AM | The A’s Are Reaching New Lows

Plus, the obvious favorite to win this season’s Super Bowl.

Good morning, I’m Dan Gartland. Did we ever get an update on the opossum living in the A’s stadium?

In today’s SI:AM:

🦅 Why the Eagles are basically a lock

⛹️‍♂️ Takeaways from the NBA combine

🔴 Georgia’s recruiting coup

🇺🇸 A new USMNT star

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You can’t blame A’s fans

Bay Area residents looking for a little peace and quiet on a weekday evening, I have just the place for you to go: the Oakland Coliseum.

Last night’s A’s game attracted a mere 2,064 fans, the team’s fewest since Sept. 19, 1979, when only 1,037 fans bought tickets.

Attendance has been dismal for the A’s all season long—and with good reason. Franchise owner John Fisher has refused to invest in building anything close to a competitive roster. The A’s have the lowest payroll in baseball, and not surprisingly, Oakland has the worst record in the majors. Last night’s 5–2 loss to the Diamondbacks dropped them to 9–34. That’s a .209 winning percentage. If they keep up that pace, they’ll finish at 34–128. On top of that, the team is angling for a move to Las Vegas. Why show up to support a team that doesn’t give a damn about you?

The league average attendance this season is 26,460 per game. The A’s are averaging 9,129. They drew a larger-than-average crowd at home just once this season, on Opening Day with Shohei Ohtani and the Angels in town (26,805). Of the 14 games in the majors this season to draw fewer than 8,000 fans, 13 are A’s games. (The other was Rays at Reds on April 17.)

There’s no reason to believe things will get better. As the A’s slip further and further down the standings, fans will be even less incentivized to come out to the ballpark. Watching emerging slugger Brent Rooker, the MLB leader in OPS, isn’t enough of a reason to attend a game. The A’s have had some success drawing fans to the ballpark with promotional events—like a Tony Kemp poster giveaway and an opportunity for kids to run the bases April 30 against the Mets that drew the largest non–Opening Day crowd of the season—but you can’t do a giveaway every night.

The biggest factor keeping A’s fans away is the threat of relocation. Bally’s Corp. announced yesterday it had reached a revised agreement with the team to build a stadium on the site of the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas. The team first announced in April it had reached a “binding purchase agreement” to acquire 49 acres of land in Las Vegas. Last week it announced plans for a 35,000-seat stadium on the site. Yesterday’s announcement was for a 30,000-seat stadium on an adjacent plot of land. As part of the new agreement, the team is expected to petition the Nevada state legislature for $400 million in public funding for the $1.5 billion project, as opposed to the $500 million it was previously expected to ask for.

That’s the big hangup. As The Nevada Independent points out, the state’s 120-day legislative session ends in three weeks, and no legislation related to the stadium has been introduced. If the A’s can’t get funding approved before the session ends June 5, Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo would have to approve a special legislative session. That’s a problem because MLB has set a January 2024 deadline for the A’s to get a stadium deal done in Las Vegas.

Between the team’s terrible record, miserable attendance and stadium mess, the A’s are in for one of the worst seasons imaginable.

The best of Sports Illustrated

David E. Klutho/Sports Illustrated

• For today’s Daily Cover story, Greg Bishop makes the case that the Eagles’ strong offseason makes them the overwhelming favorites to win Super Bowl LVIII.
• Albert Breer explains how the Commanders sale will impact future sales of NFL teams.
• Ross Dellenger has an update on the future of college conference realignment and expansion as the Pac-12, Big 12 and ACC try to keep pace with the Big Ten and SEC.
• Kevin Sweeney is in Chicago for the NBA combine, where he came away impressed with these prospects early on.
• Michael Rosenberg argues that this year’s conference finals matchups are proof that the 2020 NBA bubble was no fluke.
• Georgia has landed a commitment from the top quarterback in the 2024 recruiting class.
• Cowboys special teams coach John Fassel didn’t mince words when discussing the team’s kicking competition, saying the job is open to “anybody else on Earth who is not on the team right now.”
• The U.S. men’s national soccer team has reportedly added a star striker who has filed a one-time international switch from England.

The top five...

… things I saw last night:

5. A’s first baseman Ryan Noda’s no-look flip for the out after he booted a grounder.

4. Wyatt Johnston’s hustle on what proved to be the game-winning goal for the Stars in Game 7 against the Kraken.

3. Steve-O’s flaming first pitch.

2. Aaron Judge’s 462-foot home run to dead center in Toronto.

1. Shohei Ohtani’s effortless 456-foot home run as he finished a double shy of the cycle. (Even though he missed out on the cycle, Ohtani is the first pitcher in AL/NL history to have a home run, triple, single and walk in one game.)

SIQ

On this day in 2000, four years before the Malice at the Palace, players from which team jumped into the stands and brawled with fans at Wrigley Field?

• Cubs
• Dodgers
• Cardinals
• Pirates

Yesterday’s SIQ: The first soccer-specific stadium built for an MLS franchise opened on May 16, 1999, in which city?

• Columbus
• San Jose
• Denver
• Dallas

Answer: Columbus. After the Crew played their first three seasons at the cavernous Ohio Stadium (home of the Ohio State football team), owner Lamar Hunt paid $28.5 million to build a more intimate stadium that the team could call its own.

A Sports Illustrated article by Ian Thomsen published shortly after the stadium hosted its first game proclaimed that Columbus’s new park could be a model for the future of soccer in the United States, writing it “may be unpretentious by NFL standards, but then its mission is to help the sport create an American identity.”

Indeed, now, the vast majority of MLS’s 29 teams play in soccer-specific stadiums. One of the few holdouts, NYCFC, released the first renderings last week of its new 25,000-seat stadium in Queens that is expected to open in 2027.

While the Crew’s stadium started a trend, it also nearly led to the city losing its team. Thomsen’s article describes the stadium as a bare-bones facility where “the so-called luxury boxes are open-air with cinder-block walls.” In 2017, three years after he bought the team from Hunt, new Crew owner Anthony Precourt threatened to relocate the team to Austin, if Columbus would not build a new stadium. The original park was not old, but it was spartan compared to the facilities other MLS teams had built in the years since Hunt’s gamble.

The franchise’s relocation was a serious threat that lingered for a year before MLS reached a deal to have Jimmy and Dee Haslam, owners of the Cleveland Browns, buy the team and award Precourt an expansion franchise in Austin.

Columbus got its new stadium, too. The new Lower.com Field opened in July 2021. Adjusted for inflation, the $314 million price tag was about six times as much as the original stadium’s.