September 30, 2024 [LINK / comment]

2024 season ends; Oakland & Athletics bid each other farewell

The end of the 2024 regular baseball season was delayed by one day due to horrible weather conditions in Atlanta related to Hurricane Helene. (We here in Virginia have likewise been afflicted by flooding of Biblical proportions for the past week or so.) In today's make-up double-header, the Braves and the Mets split the two games, thereby each claiming a wild card berth, but condemning the Arizona Diamondbacks to "wait until next year." I'll have more to say about the pennant races and postseason prospects later, but for now, I'd like to focus on the worst-case tragic scenario that came to pass on the east side of the San Francisco Bay last Thursday afternoon. The following paragraphs are based on a Facebook post I made four days ago, with minor edits.

Thursday, September 26 was a sad day in baseball history. After 57 years, four of which included World Series titles (1972, 1973, 1974, and 1989), the Athletics have played their last game in Oakland. Until recently I had refused to believe that the team owners (John Fisher, et al.) and the city leaders could not come to terms on a new stadium deal, since the presumed future home city in Las Vegas has not yet committed funds to building a new stadium. Next year Sacramento will be the Athletics' temporary "home" city, an awkward situation that has never happened in all of MLB history. (Their temporary home field will be Sutter Health Park, the home of the Sacramento River Cats. Seating capacity: a mere 10,624.) As a reflection of the persistent doubts about this relocation actually taking place, MLB officials recently reasserted that the move to Sacramento next year is a done deal, and that there is no turning back. But to me this merely illustrates the failure of negotiations with Las Vegas officials up until now. If the Athletics were indeed going to end up in southern Nevada [on a long-term basis], they would have moved into Las Vegas Ballpark, the newish minor league stadium in the western suburb of Summerlin, Nevada. Seating capacity: just over 8,000. From browsing thelvballpark.com, I just learned that the Athletics and the Arizona Diamondbacks will play exhibition games there next March 8 and 9. Las Vegas Ballpark replaced Cashman Field, where the A's played a few "emergency" games in 1996, when renovations to Oakland Coliseum were being finished up. That facility has been renamed and now serves as a soccer stadium. The bottom line is that the Athletics owners have committed to leave Oakland even though there has been no such commitment from their presumptive future home city. Heck, maybe Portland or some other city will enter the equation as a potential relocation destination. Who knows how long this transitional relocation will take: three or four years?! It is all very strange.

Anticipating this tragic outcome, in June last year I traveled to California with Oakland Coliseum as my primary destination. (Technically it is now called Ring Central Coliseum, but almost nobody calls it that.) As viewers of this website know, it was my first time there! The weather was surprisingly cool, but the sun was incredibly bright. Last Thursday it was filled to capacity (except for the upper deck on the east side, which was never used for baseball), with 46,889 fans in attendance. To their immense credit, the Oakland fans were well behaved. This was in sharp contrast to the Washington Senators' last game in RFK Stadium in September 1971, when the angry fans stormed the field in the 9th inning, causing the home team to forfeit the game! There were 31,395 fans at Olympic Stadium to say goodbye to the Montreal Expos at their final game on September 29, 2004.

I remember as a very young baseball fan learning that the Kansas City Athletics were going to move to Oakland, California, a city I had never even heard of! Population-wise, the San Francisco-Oakland metropolitan area ranks much lower than other (Major League) Baseball cities with two MLB teams, and that has not changed over the past six decades. One might argue that the whole idea of moving to Oakland in the first place was simply not economically sound. Building the Coliseum was a classic example of a stadium "on speculation," intended to lure a professional sports franchise from another city. Milwaukee County Stadium, Metropolitan Stadium, and Tropicana Stadium are all examples of that. Sometimes it works out, and sometimes it just doesn't. I should not that the San Francisco Giants blocked the Athletics' attempt to move to San Jose several years ago, which was a shame. That would have actually made sense. Given the demographics of the Bay Area, it seems unlikely that big league baseball will ever return to Oakland, barring a miraculous political change of heart, either in Las Vegas or Oakland. At least Montreal (where the Expos-Nationals franchise was born in 1969) still has hope for getting a new MLB franchise in the future. My deep condolences to all those fans in Oakland who are now left with little but memories of past glory.

This composite photo image (which I sometimes call a "montage") is based on my June 2023 visit to Oakland Coliseum. It is the first such composite photo of many that I have been preparing for all the MLB stadiums that I have visited.

Superstar Ohtani smashes records

Two weeks ago, Japanese-born superstar Shohei Ohtani became the very first major leaguer to hit 50 home runs and steal 50 bases in the same year. He is beyond amazing, and he seems determined to prove that he's worth the several hundred million dollars that the L.A. Dodgers committed to paying him -- eventually. (I hope his deferred salary contract provisions include an escalator clause to account for inflation!) Ohtani finished the regular season with 54 homers, coming in second in the Major Leagues to the Yankees' Aaron Judge, who hit 58. Ohtani just barely missed qualifying for the National League Triple Crown: he was #1 in homers and in RBIs (130), but with regard to batting average, he came in second place to Luis Arraez, who batted .314 this year.

In contrast to last year, when his arm was injured due to overuse, Ohtani has not pitched at all this year. In fact, he hasn't played defensively at all, just serving as the Dodgers' designated hitter. I'm guessing he will stick to his offensive role in the batter's box for the rest of his career.

Braves make the postseason!

The Atlanta Braves succumbed to a string of despite injuries this year, losing three of their best sluggers during the middle of the year. That's about when they fell out of first place, being replaced by the Philadelphia Phillies who dominated the division for the rest of the season. The Braves' starting pitchers have been top notch, but their relievers have often let their team down in late innings. (The same could be said about the Washington Nationals -- and will be, soon!) A couple weeks ago the Braves were in a desperate position, but then they had a five-game winning streak that put them in a virtual tie with the Mets and Diamondbacks for the second and third NL wild card spots. If you ask me, ONE wild card team per league is enough!

But when it comes to slumping [teams], no team could compare to the Chicago White Sox. On Saturday they set an all-time record for losing more games (121) than any other team in modern MLB history, defined as since the turn of the 20th Century. But they managed to win the final game of the season on Sunday, thereby finishing with a slightly better percentage record (.253) than the famously bad 1962 New York Mets, who finished with a 40-120 (.250) record. On August 5 the White Sox tied a contemporary-era record when lost their 21st game in a row in Oakland, thus tying the 1988 Baltimore Orioles' American League-record losing streak. The O's lost their first 21 games that year. The White Sox streak began on July 10 and spanned the All-Star break.

Nationals almost triumph at season's end

The Braves were not the only team that started slumping after mid-season: so did the Nationals! (How many people remember that the Nationals were briefly in one of the wild card spots as of late June? Believe it or not!) They started improving in early September, thus remaining only about 22 games behind the first-place Philadelphia Phillies until the middle of the month. The Nationals then began a five-game losing streak, their fourth of the year. At least they didn't lose six games in a row! Last week the Nats were swept by the Kansas City Royals in a home series. Their prospects seemed dim as the Philadelphia Phillies arrived in Washington on Friday, but the Nats managed to shock the NL East champions with not one but TWO upset victories. After missing over three months due to a badly pulled back muscle, starting pitcher Trevor Williams put in two outstanding performances in September, getting the win in Friday's 9-1 shocker. [In Saturday's game] Mackenzie Gore threw six shutout innings, striking out nine batters and only giving up three hits. In the Nats' 5-1 win over the Cubs on September 21, Gore had thrown six innings of no-hit baseball. He really started improving late in the 2024 season. If the Nats can get a new contract with Trevor Williams next year, they are going to have a truly exceptional rotation of starting pitchers.

In Sunday's final game, the Nats were behind 6-3 in the bottom of the 9th inning, when they loaded the bases with nobody out. Talk about a dramatic situation! Could they pull off a comeback win and thereby sweep the Phillies? Unfortunately, no. Both Luis Garcia and James Wood (rookie slugger) struck out, and then Juan Yepez (one of the miscellaneous guys called up from the minors in August who has performed quite well on occasion) hit a long fly ball to left field on the first pitch. Going, going, ... and then the left fielder Kody Clemens made a leaping catch as he collided with the wall. Arghhh! That ball was just a few feet from carrying over the row of flowers in front of the first row, and would have been a walk-off grand slam home run. So close! [The Nats' only previous grand slam of this year occurred on April 27 (courtesy of Jesse Winker, now with the Mets) and they ended up without any walk-off homers this year. The Nats had hit one or more walk-off homers in every year they have played since 2006, but not in their first year, which was 2005.]* See the full list on the Washington Nationals BIG moments page.

* Corrected sentences.

Road trip to New York

About six weeks ago, my wife and I made a weekend trip to the Big Apple, the first time we had been there together for many years. Unfortunately, we could not arrange it to coincide with a Yankees game, and given our time constraints, the possibility of taking a tour of New Yankee Stadium was given a very low priority. (Translation: It didn't happen.) I did, however, pay a brief visit to where the Polo Grounds once stood, right across the Harlem River from The Bronx. On the way back to Virginia, I passed by a couple sports stadiums of note, and retrospectively I really wish I had stopped to take a closer look at them.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: The Polo Grounds Towers, the high-rise apartment complex that now stands where the New York Giants used to play baseball; Met Life Stadium, in East Rutherford, New Jersey, home of the "New York" Giants and Jets; and Ripken Stadium, in Aberdeen, Maryland.

Odd & ends

Last month Bruce Orser sent me an email about the changes in Comerica Park's outfield dimensions last year, and I just realized that I had never explicitly mentioned this in my blog. Horrors! Nevertheless, I did update the Comerica Park page with a diagram showing the "new" (i.e., year-old) inner fences.

So when am I going to do diagrams of Rickwood Field, Sacramento's Sutter Health Park, London Stadium, or Gocheok Sky Dome? Good question! (Maybe after I pay an in-person visit...)

As is customary, at the stroke of midnight, marking the transition from September to October, the table of postseason scores will begin began to appear at the bottom of my baseball blog page. (It's after midnight, I just noticed.) A link taking you down to that table appears near the top right of the baseball blog page.