This story is a couple of days old — I missed it among the dozens of articles about the actual World Series — but the San Jose Mercury News wrote about how the Giants winning the World Series might be good for the A’s designs on San Jose:
At least one expert Monday said the claim that an A’s move to San Jose would hurt the Giants’ bottom line might be difficult to prove after the San Francisco team’s handsome postseason profits — as well as the prospect of an even larger boost from ticket sales and sponsorships next year.
“To the extent that the commissioner’s office would be concerned about the Giants’ financial well-being if the A’s were allowed to move to San Jose,” said Andrew Zimbalist, a Smith College economist and baseball expert, “that concern would by allayed given the success the Giants have had.”
Setting aside the fact that Zimbalist has been disqualified as an expert in ballpark development cases because, to put it delicately, he’s often full of crap, on what planet does this make any sense?
The Giants just won a World Series and made a bunch of money with no other team in their territory. Wouldn’t it be more logical to say that a team cutting into their territory and thus their profits would hamper the kind of success they just experienced while their territory rights remained inviolate? Or even if that wasn’t the case, why wouldn’t the response be that, no matter how successful the team is, they’d always be more successful if they had San Jose to themselves?
The Giants winning the World Series was great for Bay Area baseball fans. It was even nice to see some kind words exchanged between Lew Wolff and the Giants as a result. But this is ultimately a business dispute. The kind that no amount of baseball success is going to resolve on its own.
