A’s Owner Lew Wolff’s bid to relocate his team to San Jose was examined by Tyler Kepner of the N.Y. TIMES. Wolff’s dream ballpark “exists only in fantasy,” and it “is a technological marvel” in downtown San Jose. The privately-financed venue will have 36,000 seats and the revenue potential to put the A’s “above baseball’s poverty line.” Wolff said, “All of our concession signs will be digital, so when you’re supposed to stop serving beer, you just press a button and it disappears. And then if you have extra hot dogs, you can reduce the price.” But Kepner noted the ballpark plans are “snarled in a territorial dispute” with the Giants, and without a resolution, MLB “faces the potential embarrassment of hosting its first A.L. wild-card game” at the Oakland Coliseum. That venue is a "multipurpose bowl with visible football lines and giant tarps across the unsold upper deck that might not be removed even for the playoffs.” Wolff: “Look, we need a decision, and we need it sooner rather than later. It can’t lap over another year. I don’t think it will. I don’t have any date, but not having any decision is worse than having a ‘no’ because you can’t move on to Plan B. And you’re going to ask me what is Plan B, and I’m going to tell you I don’t have one.” He added that if team execs knew their destination, “they could begin to secure their core players and prepare for a payroll that could eventually almost double” to $100M. He added it would be “very aggressive” to think that the A’s could have a new park for the ‘16 season (N.Y. TIMES, 9/23).
