So even as I write this, soccer great Lionel Messi and his Inter Miami Molly Ringwalds team is playing the NYCFC Pigeons on the not-so-sacred turf of Yankee Stadium, "The House That We the Taxpayers Built."
American soccer, in its usual, heads-up way, managed to minimize the audience for this game as much as possible, by putting it on a streaming service. But that's par for the course. Big-league soccer here in the US is essentially back where it was in 1975, when the great Pelé came to bring The Beautiful Game to our country, with his debut for the Cosmos at Randall's Island.
That was the old NASL, which at least a few novelties of its own. Today's MLS is more or less a parody of soccer where it's played elsewhere in the world, its novelty uniforms besmirched with merch, its team names even borrowed from foreign teams.
In America, soccer is the sport of the future, and it always will be.
No, I don't think there's much chance of soccer ascending past baseball as our favorite sport of the summer. But I do think there's a better-than-even chance of baseball descending to soccer's level—and below.
Your Oakland Athletics, once a storied, original franchise in the American League, are a case in point. Today and tomorrow, the Yanks finish up their last trip to Oakland-Alameda Country Stadium. Their very first game there was a 2-1 win over the A's on April 22nd, 1968. Fritz Peterson got the win over Lew Krausse; Tom Tresh drove in the winning run with a sacrifice fly, before all of 11,714.
The attendance never would get much better—brining up the whole question of why the Athletics moved there in the first place. Like original 49ers arriving in about '56 or '57, their arrival marked the end of a jaw-droopingly stupid hegira by the franchise across the whole of the United States, to the always golden land of California.
Woefully underfinanced, the A's had, 13 years before, idiotically conceded the battle of Philadelphia to the Phillies, the team that still holds the all-time record for most losses by any team, anywhere, in anything. In 1955, they left Philly—then the third largest city in the US—for Kansas City, the 20th largest.
By 1968, KC ranked 27th. But that was all right. The A's moved to the 34th largest city, Oakland—a crime- and drug-ridden city in rapid economic decline...that also shared a market with the Giants. Brilliant!
There, thanks mostly to the baseball smarts of Charlie Finley and Billy Beane, the Athletics somehow managed to win 6 pennants, 4 World Series, and 17 division titles. But Oakland fell to 45th in size among American cities, and neither the Giants nor MLB, in their infinite wisdom, would let the team move to San Jose.
Instead, the A's start the long trek back across the country next year, first with three years in Sacramento, then on to the Fun Capital of the World, Las Vegas!
The good news is that both the California capital and Vegas are more populous and wealthier than Oakland. The bad news is that the A's are going to Soccer-Size! their baseball.
The Athletics plan to play in a minor-league stadium in Sacramento, one that seats only 14,000. Even the new park planned for Slot and Craps City is going to only seat 33,000.
This is part of the new trend in baseball, whereby ballparks are getting smaller and smaller—mostly so they can be filled almost exclusively with the rich. Our current Yankee Stadium seats only 46,000. Considering that the Stadium, at its zenith, seated (or stood) 82,000, that means pretty much an entire Fenway Park has been eliminated. Tampa Bay's planned new park will hold, I think, 27,000.
Then there's the weather. According to the YES broadcast last night, it is already so hot in Sacramento in the summer that the A's may not be able to play any day games there. As for Las Vegas, in the desert, well, give us another 30 years or so at our current rate of environmental destruction, and the whole place will be a gigantic sand mound.
By that time, the Athletics will no doubt have continued on their way back east, stopping in city after city, stadium after stadium, until they are all the way back to...Philadelphia? Perhaps there they will play before all of 400 carefully selected billionaires, seated in a ballpark that also serves as an oxygen tent, iron lung, and five-star restaurant.
Who knows? It's just more of MLB operating in its usual, haphazard, money-grubbing fashion. Running over any fans foolish enough to actually give their hearts to their local team, flipping franchise like free supermarket samples to operators who have neither the money nor the smarts to actually run a team (but all of the right friendships), and making constant demands on every taxpayer they can grab ahold of.
Meanwhile, the game we all love deteriorates before our eyes, the players seem more interested in perfecting their hand gestures and dugout rituals than learning their craft, and the sport's vaunted "parity" has succeeded in giving us maybe the worst major-league team since the 1890s.
Fourteen-thousand seat stadiums? Soon, they'll have trouble filling even those.
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