Portland is the next stop.
The John Fisher-Oakland Athletics 2021 Relocation Tour’s next stop will be in Portland, Oregon as Fisher attempts to get interest from cities that desire a Major League Baseball team in the A’s franchise battle to get about $800 million in seed money from the city of Oakland to build a stadium-village on the Oakland waterfront. Fisher and his entourage have gotten interest from Las Vegas. Fisher does not want to build a new ballpark at the Oakland Coliseum property even though there is mass transit and roads leading into the complex. Oakland’s proposed waterfront stadium could have no mass transit or automobile accessibility.
Portland is a small market. There doesn’t seem to be a growing sentiment by local elected officials to build a baseball stadium. Portland does have the largest number of breweries of any city in the world but that doesn’t mean very much in business. You need Fortune 500 companies in a market with CEOs willing to commit to high price luxury boxes, club seats and buying signage. There is Nike in Beaverton and Lithia Motors. The Portland television market would be small. The Portland TV market, though, is bigger than Major League cities, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, San Diego, Baltimore, Kansas City and Cincinnati. Portland does have a bigger TV market than Las Vegas. The San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose television market is the sixth largest in America. There could be other suitors. Nashville had problems with government support in getting a Major League Soccer stadium built. Nashville is a small market with limited TV dollars. MLB is not sold on Montreal as a full-time Major League city although if someone built a stadium there, MLB would return in a second. Charlotte is in the same boat as Nashville. San Jose, the best option, is off limits as it is in San Francisco Giants territory.
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