The Oakland Coliseum definitely isn’t the No. 1 stadium in baseball…although as we found out this weekend, it is certainly No. 2, or at least when it comes to the visiting broadcast booth.
The Mets were in Oakland over the weekend and the SNY crew had some, uh, fecal matters to attend to in their regular booth, as they had to call the Mets’ sweep of the A’s from alternate broadcast locations because a possum was living (and pooping) in their main booth.
Jerry and Boomer just can’t fathom how MLB allows Oakland to remain an MLB city as is, let alone now with this.
“This is what I don’t understand: it’s bad enough there were some days last summer they were drawing 3,000 fans…how does baseball allow this?” Jerry asked. “When I first saw the story, I thought the stench was going to be weed, and I thought of you broadcasting like that in New England.”
“Nobody wants to go there because it’s over in Oakland,” Boomer replied. “The Warriors used to be over there, and they built a new arena in downtown San Francisco. I know the A’s want to go to Vegas.”
The Warriors left Oakland and so did the Raiders, the Niners and Sharks play in Santa Clara and San Jose (which in terms of mileage/time would be like the Giants or Jets and Devils moving to Trenton) and pretty soon, it seems the east side of the Bay is going to be barren all the way to Sacramento.
MLB wants to expand to 32 teams, but in Boomer’s eyes, we have two markets ripe for the pickings and two starving for baseball, so let’s start there.
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“I think what’s going to happen is they’re doing to have to do something with Tampa – they should go to Nashville, which wants a baseball team in the worst way, and so does Utah,” Boomer said. “If they want to get to 32 teams, they need to figure out what to do with Tampa and Oakland. Move them to Nashville and Vegas and then expand to Salt Lake City, where they have ownership and money and the political will to have a baseball team.”
Jerry’s idea, then, for the 32nd team, is in the Carolinas, where they have hockey in Raleigh and football and basketball in Charlotte, but no MLB baseball between Atlanta and DC.
“You have a lot of displaced New Yorkers down there,” Jerry said. “I don’t know if they have ownership there, but it makes sense because of all the northerners there and the fact they’ve supported Minor League Baseball there.
No matter where teams 31 and 32 go, though, one thing for sure: Oakland has to go, because “that stadium stinks and is antiquated” (and not just in Boomer’s mind/mouth), and is just too big in many ways – and while Vegas is hotter than the sun, a new Stadium could be just like the one already constructed in the desert Southwest.
“You’d like to see then in some sort of dome setup like Arizona,” Boomer said.
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