In a statement issued last month, the Larry H. Miller Company stated that they would be happy to accommodate the Oakland Athletics until the team’s new Las Vegas stadium finishes construction, a process that could last many years.
So, the stadium that state officials had planned for the Salt Lake Bees in Daybreak, South Jordan, may now potentially host a Major League Baseball team following the 2024 regular season. Imagine Big League Utah, a coalition with the goal of bringing MLB to Utah, is the Titanic. Then picture the Oakland Athletics serving as the iceberg that sinks it.
The Oakland Athletics have a long history of being one of the poorest teams in baseball. Brad Pitt said it best in the 2011 film “Moneyball” when he pointed out that, in 2002, the team employed numbers-driven analysis to win over 100 baseball games.
“There are rich teams, and then there are poor teams. Then there’s 50 feet of crap, and then there’s us,” says Pitt, who portrayed longtime Athletics general manager Billy Beane. Now, 20 years after the events in the film, it is beginning to seem that “Moneyball” will serve as the last and only reminder that the Athletics once played in Oakland, California.
Fans of the team deserve better than this.
Athletics owner John Fisher has made a clear choice not to invest in the team, its fan base or even their stadium, the Oakland Coliseum, known for its utter demise. All of this is in addition to the team’s relocation to Las Vegas. This past season, fans organized a “reverse boycott,” in which they wore shirts encouraging Fisher to sell the team. (He has been on record saying that he would do no such thing.)
Baseball has a long memory when it comes to historical moments like this, especially when it involves money. In the most infamous curse of them all, the Boston Red Sox sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees in 1919 for over $110,000.
This money helped start a superstitious “curse” that lasted 86 years. Ruth would become one of the most feared batters in the game (“Home-Run King,” “Sultan of Swat”) with 714 home runs on the all-time list, and the Yankees would go on to win 26 championships. The curse broke in 2004 when the Red Sox overcame a 3-0 series deficit to the Yankees in postseason play and later defeated the St. Louis Cardinals in four games to win the World Series.
There are also curses that don’t involve money but have everything to do with the treatment of humans and animals.
In the 1945 World Series between the Detroit Tigers and Chicago Cubs, fans of the latter team asked the owner of the Billy Goat Tavern, William Stanis, and his pet goat, “Murphy,” to leave because some people did not like Murphy’s presence at the games. After Stanis and Murphy left, the Cubs lost and did not make another trip to the World Series for 71 years. The “curse of the Billy Goat” finally broke when the Cubs defeated the Cleveland Indians (now the Guardians) in 2016 after seven games.
These are two infamous curses that are completely different in their own ways. If you add both scenarios together, with money and the mistreatment of humans involved, you have a radioactive curse ready and able to latch on to the nearest franchise it can touch. This is why the Beehive State should steer clear of this situation altogether, however they can.
Utah does not need the Oakland Athletics; it’s the other way around, and this is not a state where you should be able to rent at the expense of other fans. Having previously owned the Utah Jazz, The Larry H. Miller Company does not need assistance in showing that they can operate a major sports franchise.
The potential stadium in Daybreak only plans to have a capacity of 7,500 seats. That’s well below other stadiums when looking at the league at large. An average MLB stadium has a maximum capacity of 42,675, while, ironically, the Oakland Coliseum has the largest space with a capacity of 56,782.
Furthering the story with attendance metrics, things become even clearer. The average attendance of the MLB last year was 29,295, up 9.1% from the year prior, whereas the Oakland Athletics attendance during the 2023 season was 10,275 – the lowest in the league.
These numbers don’t show how Utah can support an MLB franchise in an area that is over 20 miles from the proposed location for a future MLB team. South Jordan carries the real possibility of becoming overpopulated and infrastructurally overwhelmed. Daybreak would not only be home to 81 games a year for the next few or more years, but it would also have to deal with traveling fan bases, production teams, media and more.
It’s interesting that the focus for a temporary relocation of the Oakland Athletics is a stadium that is not only 13% the capacity of the Oakland Coliseum but also the smallest of the stadiums in Utah.
The already-built Smiths Ballpark in Salt Lake City, home to the Triple-A affiliate of the Los Angeles Angels, the Salt Lake Bees, has a capacity of 15,500. The Bees are in their last year of their lease and are scheduled to start the 2025 season in Daybreak. Nothing is set in stone, but it appears as if the wheel has been formed.
Baseball history shows that it doesn’t take much for a franchise to experience decades of cumbersome self-fulfilling prophecies and superstition. And at the end of the day, these are only numbers, but baseball loves numbers.
When this does happen to baseball in Utah, and when the marketing starts as an Oakland Athletics limited-time only experience, that’s when you buy front-row tickets to baseball’s next great curse.
