The Oakland Athletics, who have been known for the most part for building good baseball teams so that they can be torn down again, are also known for talking the talk that never leads to a walk. They are a think tank just for the hell of it, on the cutting edge of an industry that just doesn't like itself.
On the other hand, if it keeps the kids busy...
The latest idea as explained by face of the franchise Dave Kaval is that the team will accept Bitcoin as payment for a full-season suite rental at the Coliseum. The team values it as a flat $64,000 per coin, while the Dallas Mavericks and Sacramento Kings have been accepting such currencies as payment for tickets and merchandise, though theirs is pegged to the value in U.S. dollars, which floats. The A's are taking Bitcoin as a standard valuation of 15 percent above Bitcoin's Monday value of $55,000.
"It's been a great way to see if the hype can turn into reality and hopefully make Bitcoin and cryptocurrency transactions more mainstream," Kaval told The Wall Street Journal's Jared Diamond. "If you see it in baseball, you could potentially see it anywhere."
Yes, I suppose you could, Dave. It just has all the feel of the A's usual ploy of "I know, let's try THIS to see if someone notices."
In an industry that is going through a series of rules-changing twitches to learn the secret of why it seems to be shrinking in the estimation of the money-throwing public, getting in on the Bitcoin craze seems perfectly A's. It doesn't affect their relative anonymity except for a few folks reading the WSJ Insider.
And there's the trick. The A's once owned the market while the Giants struggled, and they could make it a fairer fight again with more traditional methods, like a deeper run in the postseason or an actual shovel at the site of The Ghost Stadium. The Bay Area doesn't need two major league baseball franchises but it is a nice luxury to know you can see every player in the sport every year.
The problem with the Bitcoin scheme is not that it is inherently wrong — I mean, the A's can accept turnips or livestock or pawned musical instruments as payment if they like with no greater effect on the market than the minimal one they already have. What they need is a simpler approach to their biggest problem — being satisfied in the Giants' shadow.
What they need is to be more involved in more widely popular schemes, like engaging in the deep end of the free-agent market, always a popular gimmick. What they need is to win games in October, which they tentatively began this past season by beating the Chicago White Sox. What they need is to start the stadium they've been rambling on about for three years and probably won't begin for another three. What they need to do is take on the Giants as a true rival and act like the noisy neighbors sticking their feet in the punch bowl at every opportunity.
All these things take money and attitude, of course, and we know the franchise's stance on that. They will happily take your money in whatever pretend valuation you've got while hesitating when it's theirs, and they think the stadium treehouse is all the attitude they need. They are mirroring MLB's new view of the sport they sell by distributing different rules to different minor league classifications just to see if any of them will become an attention magnet… which, of course, they won't because they all miss the singular point of the modern successful attention-getting device.
They don't burn money, and they don't create sparks. Fernando Tatis does that. So does Mookie Betts. So does an active annual free agent market. So does connecting in a more visceral way with the market from which you are trying to derive all that coin, bit or otherwise. Those are dynamic things, things that make people notice and become intrigued. Bitcoin is just moving the expensive furniture around, plus other folks did it first.
The A's used to be all about that 'tude, and they need to be again. Then again, we've been saying that for years to no measurable effect, and so it shall be with the Bitcoin scheme. Kaval said 60 people have inquired about it, as though 60 people move any needle at all. Bitcoin is an idea that in this case is too little that affects too few people. It's just one more scheme to make you think the A's think, which isn't idea creation but narcissism unchained. Their way to re-obtaining their share of the market requires more sweat and more spending, and until those are the main thrust of their brainstorming, they'll have the same fundamental problem they've always had.
Making people care about them en masse.