Did the A's Admit Oakland is a Viable Market for MLB?
Why would a Major League Baseball team be concerned at all with what a Pioneer League team does? The average attendance for a PL game was 2,248 last season, with the highest average attendance coming from the Ogden Raptors at 3,429. Most baseball teams sell more than 30,000 tickets per game.
The A's are not most baseball teams.
Last year, the A's average attendance sat at 10,276, and that included an Opening Day attendance of 26,805 and two "reverse boycott" games that drew 27.759 and 37,553. If you take out those three games, that's an average of 9,370 fans per game, and that number figures to drop even further in 2024 with the A's potential relocation looming.
The A's lowest-attended game in 2023 was on May 15 against the Arizona Diamondbacks, which drew 2,064 fans.
As you may have heard, the Pioneer League has a new team in Oakland to continue the city's baseball tradition, the Oakland Ballers. The team had planned (and paid a deposit) to play one game at the Oakland Coliseum when the A's will be on the road in Arizona on June 29th. The A's stepped in and nixed that deal.
The Oakland Ballers are a team, much like the Oakland Roots and Soul soccer clubs, that are promoting themselves as a part of the community. They were planning on giving away tickets to the Coliseum event to a number of youth groups and had hoped to get as many baseball fans out to the game as possible. There was also a good chance that they'd put more butts in seats than the A's, which is why the team had to make sure that game doesn't happen.
But in enacting the clause in their contract with the JPA to get rid of the June 29th game, did the A's just admit that they have not in fact "done everything they can" to stay in Oakland as owner John Fisher wants everyone to believe? It seems as though trying community outreach and giving away tickets (or not selling them for double the price) was a strategy that hadn't been considered, and the optics of a full ballpark had the A's scared.
The fact is, Fisher could have had a full stadium year in and year out if he acted like he gave a darn about the community or if fans had heard him speak sometime before he talked about the team's relocation in November.
By not permitting the Ballers to host their event, Fisher may have admitted that he thought that they would draw a huge crowd, which means that he also knew how get more people to his team's games--he just chose not to.
Oakland is a viable market for Major League Baseball, and he was afraid that the Ballers, and Independent League team, would prove that point.