A's Owes Giants Big Money If They Want to Move to San Jose

There was a recent column in the San Jose Mercury by Mark Purdy (I would like to link except that they put the article behind a paid wall after a while and I hate links that don't work after a short while) complaining about the Giants blocking the A's proposed move to San Jose by mocking the Giants connection with San Jose. 

One laughable part of the article was that the Giants showed how little they care about San Jose by not bringing any of the San Jose Giants staff to the World Series.  I don't mean to pop any bubbles and illusions, but big corporations don't usually reward every employee they have, it is usually the ones in the main corporation that gets the treats, not the ones in all the various divisions underneath.  And San Jose had nothing to do with this decision, I'm sure that any staff who lived in San Jose got to go too, they weren't left back at home just because they lived in San Jose.

Another laughable statement was that Purdy thought that the Giants owe the San Jose Giants for producing 10 of the Giants players.  FYI, the San Jose Giants did not produce the prospects, the Giants signed them and have been moving them though their Giants minor league affiliates using the Giants hired coaches.  San Jose is just one of the venues at which the Giants had THEIR players play in order to develop.  There is nothing in the San Jose air or water that "produced" our Giants players, except for former Giant Kevin Frandsen, who was born and raised down in the South Bay area, I believe in San Jose.  It would have been more appropriate to invite the parents and coaches of the players because they had more of a hand in producing the players than San Jose the city ever did.

I find that Purdy and the San Jose Mercury staff who have written about baseball in San Jose to be understandably biased towards the A's moving down to San Jose.  Afterall, the Mercury would become THE newspaper for a major league team and just think of the advertising revenues that would rain down on them should the move happen.  And they are particularly civic-minded and thus support initiatives that will bring big business bucks to San Jose.  Still, that is a bias.

But he does hit the nail on the head when he says that the Giants simply want money from the A's, and ultimately for the A's to move away, so why not be open about that.

Giants Thoughts

I agree that the move is about money, but that would be the decision of the owners of the Oakland A's to move because they could always pay the money to the Giants in order to move to San Jose.  Heck from what I gather, and I realize that I only know part of the whole situation, Wolff could have moved the A's to San Jose long ago if he were willing to pay off the Giants to move down to the South Bay.  And that is the Giants right to ask for such a relocation fee, just like in any other business.

A's Can't Give What Wasn't Theirs In First Place

Now there are some who opine that the Giants should not get any money because the A's "gave" them the South Bay territory when the Giants were looking to relocate to Santa Clara, that the Giants don't really own the rights.  Plus they note that Oakland is even closer to SF than San Jose, so any claims by the Giants on that territory is bogus.  But I don't understand that stance, once you look at the whole history of territory ownership in the San Francisco Bay Area.

From what I understand, the Giants owned the whole territory for the San Francisco Bay Area once they moved to San Francisco - much like how Baltimore owned their whole area - which includes the South Bay.  I don't believe that there was any relocation fee paid by the A's when they moved into Oakland and entered the Giants territory, probably because that wasn't important back then.  So bad on the Giants for not asking for a relocation fee back then.  I would bet Charlie O., cheap guy that he was, would have chose one of his various other choices, like Louisville, had he had to pay the Giants any money to relocate to Oakland.

However, later, the A's agreed to the Giants re-taking the South Bay territory.  So bad on the A's for not asking for money then too.

Money, Money, Money:  MONEY!

But as far as I'm concerned, the Giants have a long-term right to the South Bay territory, they owned it when they moved to San Francisco and that right was re-asserted when the A's conceded it to them later.  It was their territory the moment they became the San Francisco Giants.  They only ceded it when the A's entered the territory, but then got it back when the A's ceded it back.  If the A's don't want to pay that, they could instead move to another unclaimed territory and avoid the fee, that is how the MLB relocation game is played today.  

For example, the Nationals gave the Orioles around $50-60M in concessions in order to play in Baltimore's territory.  The Giants can't do anything about Oakland, since they got that territory now, but if the A's want to move down to San Jose, they should pony up similar amounts of money (plus inflation, baseball-style, at roughly 10% per year) for the right to move within the Giants territory once again.  It has been 6 years since that deal was struck, so we are talking about something in the $100M range.

Not Even Close

Purdy ends with the suggestion that it would be better for Giants fans in the South Bay to be able to attend Giants-A's games in San Jose than to visit the World Series Trophy.  Is he crazy?  I would rather visit multiple Trophies than to ever attend a single Giants-A's game in San Jose.  The key, for me, is that if the A's pay the Giants the money they want, then the Giants will be able to afford to win multiple World Series Championship trophies. 

Those young pitchers don't pay for themselves (well, sort of, in that they probably draw bigger crowds on the road and full houses at home, but you know what I mean).  But if the A's give the Giants something in the $100M range, they will be able to afford to keep Lincecum, Cain, Posey, Bumgarner, Sandoval to the latter part of the 2010 decade, which would enable the Giants to possibly win multiple World Series Championship Trophies to add to their 2010 World Series Championship Trophies (never gets old...). 

If the Giants can keep that core together, they will have a chance to add multiple, but that will take money, whether Neukom sells more shares in the Giants to raise money, sell the team to a tech billionaire who can spend a lot of money, or enforce his team's rights to the South Bay area and get a relocation fee from the A's.

Put Up or Shut Up Time

I can understand Purdy's and other San Jose baseball supporters' frustrations with the relocation process.  Wolff, now in his mid-70's truly might not make it to see the move happen.  But it all boils down to money, and the A's, at the moment, are not willing to pay the Giants enough to make them move off their position right now.

Many, like Purdy and others, seem to feel the South Bay should not rightfully be in the Giants possession, but a proper evaluation of the ownership of territory over the history of the Bay Area shows that the Giants should have had ownership of the territory for the entirety of their existence in San Francisco.  For that right, the A's should pay the going rate for such a move, which any other team would have to pay had they decided to do the same; the Nationals give the most recent example of what the going price is.

MLB baseball should be playing the mediator in this case, and work out the money details, like they did in the Orioles-Nationals case, but has been dragging its feet.  Perhaps Selig is still mad at his former college roommate for some slight?  (Wolff and he were college roommates, or something like that)  I had originally thought that relationship would favor Wolff, but if anything, Selig is taking a hands off approach, perhaps to show that he is not playing favorites.  Or maybe Wolff has been opposed to paying any money.

And payback is a bitch, sometimes.  Maybe the Giants don't want to play nicely.  Perhaps the A's should have been nicer to the Giants all those years when they were daunting their rivals with billboards pointing out the San Francisco Giants' lack of World Series championships.  Perhaps they should not have targeted the Giants negatively in their TV commercials ads.  They certainly could have ruffled the feathers of some of the Giants front office with their in-your-face advertising, and if so, the Giants front office would then not mind seeing the A's twist in the wind right now.

In any case, as all things in business, it comes down to Dough-2Give-2Me, and the A's hasn't been singing the right tune yet to the Giants ears.  I bet part of the slowness of the A's to realize this is because they are hoping beyond hope that since the A's "gave" the Giants the South Bay rights, they might be able to just take San Jose without paying anything.  Baseball dragging their feet suggests that this position is folly, and that the Giants rightfully own the territory, and the sooner they come to their senses and start negotiating with the Giants for the rights, the sooner they will call San Jose home.