It is clear what we most need to happen in the sure-to-be-bastardized 2025 baseball season, and that is for the Tampa Bay Rays and West Sacramento Athletics to not only reach the postseason but to fight their way to a match-up in the American League Championship Series. If we're doing Major League Baseball at Major League Prices in minor league settings, let's not half-ass this. Let's really go for it.
The Rays announced yesterday that their 2025 home will be Steinbrenner Field in Tampa, the spring training home of baseball's reigning anti-Rays, the New York Yankees; in keeping with America's exciting new approach to the redistribution of wealth, the Rays will be paying the Yankees $15 million in rent for the privilege. For big league teams, that amount of money is a rounding error, but as a metaphor—with the poverty-unravaged Yankees getting more financial oomph in their pursuit of Juan Soto while the Rays scramble to re-up Jose Siri—it is exquisite. One team lives the newly-in-vogue shameless patrician's life while the other barely gets by on a diet of Montgomery Biscuits and Charleston River Dogs, with the former extracting rent from the latter. It's one American pastime embedded in another.
And it's all part of Baseball 2025, where not one but two teams are downsizing to Double-A levels for profoundly different reasons. The Rays lost their stadium roof and other hunks and chunks of Tropicana Field to Hurricane Milton, which is not necessarily the fault of the industry; it’s what insurance people call an act of god (patent pending). The WestSacs, for their part, lost their soul, dignity, and reason for existing because one fatuous dope simply cannot get his business right, and wouldn't bother if he could; the Athletics are couch-surfing for the next few years due to an act of godlessness, a.k.a. Gone John Fisher. That one is very definitely MLB's fault, a crime that can only find atonement through an indeterminate sentence in WestSac, with no time off for good behavior.
And so the business has seen fit to give us power downsizing, with not one but two teams playing in ballparks that seat a total of 25,041 fans between them, plus an indeterminate number of extra behinds on two grass berms (all in West Sac) and 13 luxury suites (all in Tampa). And even though the 2025 schedules have already been released, they should be adjusted immediately to allow the teams to play back-to-back series, one in soul-crushing Florida heat and humidity, then another in brain-searing California heat and smoke from any one of a number of nearby fires. That, followed by Hell's ALCS, with the winner going to the World Series and the loser playing a best-of-seven series against the Savannah Bananas. We deserve nothing less.
This is the state of play as baseball embarks upon the second quarter of the 21st century. The league is rich and popular and impossibly small-time and slipshod, all at the same time. It’s a risibly dystopian vision of worst-case scenarios, but also a generous gift for those of us that rely on half-witted metaphors about the parlous state of the sport. Not every team can have an Ohtani, but they can all have a J.J. Bleday.
The Rays come off as less ignoble here, in that 1) they did not summon the hurricane as a way to pressure the local legislature, although 1a) they weren't trying to extort money from the county and state because they'd already won that payday. Most important, though, is 2) they chose to stay in the neighborhood rather than relocate to a smaller suburb of a smaller metropolitan area three counties over. At least the same folks who watched the Rays in the Albanian bunker that was the Trop can now communally enjoy the daily afternoon monsoon while huddled under a plastic overhang that sounds like Gregory Hines dancing atop Oscar Peterson's piano. That's gotta count for something, right?
The A's, on the other hand . . . well, it will be drier but hotter when they try to pass off a night game in 97-degree heat as ideal baseball weather, as compared to those balmy 111-degree afternoons. There are not nearly enough meteorologically bad things that can happen to that franchise for our satisfaction, and if they can all happen without harming the baseball side of the company or any outlying civilians, we're all in, hands, feet, and foreheads.
This, though, is only a longterm wish. The more immediate goal is to see the A's'n'Rays face each other in October and prove woefully overmatched by the occasion. The A's have already announced plans to screw their new local fan base by playing their postseason games in Las Vegas, which if anything is hotter than all the Sacramentos combined, although there’s also no reason for anyone to be losing sleep over the logistics of the 2025 West Sacramento A’s playoff run. This is our thought exercise, and it requires two minor league parks to reach the appropriate level of shabbiness. Any attempts by MLB and the networks to make that outcome some kind of Field Of Dreams homage will last only as long as it takes Ken Rosenthal to begin his first dugout standup with "Of course, none of this would have been possible without . . ." And then he will be seized, gagged. and stuffed into a bat trunk.
And what a pairing it would be. A monumental accident meeting a persistent and deliberate failure, in a minor league ballpark, is the kind of show we are all in the mood for these days. As the tales of Florida’s catastrophic weather and California’s catastrophic inertia are told and retold, well, there won't be a wet eye in the house. Given the expected ratings for a cataclysmic matchup between these two $55 million payroll teams, there may not be many eyes of any moisture level in the house. And we've already established the chimerical state of the house itself.
Robbed of the vodka-infused heroin of a Yankees/Dodgers/Mets postseason, Fox and TBS will break into the middle of Game 2 of the Hell ALCS with a Golden Bachelorette simulcast and dare MLB to do something about it. It would be Rob Manfred's 72nd-story suite in purgatory, and baseball's most exciting marketing idea since the 1919 World Series. All it would cost is two teams remaining on the distant outskirts of relevancy for a few more years, or forevermore. Whichever makes for the more lyrically infernal metaphor.
