There is a possum living in the wall of the visiting television broadcast booth at the Oakland Coliseum. The Athletics have been unable to corral it. And the smell of its crap was so potent that SNY had to abandon ship last weekend and do the Mets’ three-game series against the A’s out of a janitor’s closet or something.
Last night, Gary and Ron shared the story of how they got moved out of the visiting television booth thanks to a possum ? pic.twitter.com/t3aK3siEzT
— SNY (@SNYtv) April 15, 2023
This feels like something that got left on the cutting room floor in “Major League.” Rachel Phelps totally put a dead squirrel in the ceiling before the Yankees came to town, right? Anything to get out of Cleveland. Or Oakland? When does “The Athletics Express” show up? How hard is it to catch the possum?
Just let the A’s go to Las Vegas already. The lease on the stadium is up in 2024. Owner John Fisher is not going to extort a new building out of the city. The team has been nomadic for its entire existence. Why pretend any longer?
That all said, we remain very skeptical about Vegas as a big league city. Yes, the Golden Knights and Raiders have been successes. And it is only a matter of time before the NBA sets up shop in Sin City. But those teams have much more in common with your traditional Vegas acts — entertainment products with limited dates — than the Athletics would. Eighty-one regular season games is a grind, even with the pitch clock. Would the local demand be there? Or would the A’s become dependent on visiting fans doing a Vegas trip around their team’s trip to town?
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James Kratch can be reached at james.kratch@xlmedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @jameskratch.
