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With no new stadium in sight, A's fans could be watching the last days of their baseball team, which is on endangered list.

TAMPA - The rumblings already have started. With three years to go in the basic agreement, baseball's owners are once again sounding the flashpoint "c" word - as in salary cap. But this past week, events in Oakland and Miami - where a new stadium plan for the A's was pronounced dead and one for the Marlins once again put on life support - may leave the owners no choice but to revisit another ominous "c" word: contraction.

In both cases, though, it's always been with an eye on their teams getting new ballparks and the accompanying significant increase in revenue streams. But the seemingly never-ending battle between the Marlins and the south Florida bureaucrats hit yet another impasse when the Miami city commissioners failed to approve the financing for the proposed $609 million retractable-roof stadium to be built on the site of the old Orange Bowl targeted for 2012.

Instead, they are now seeking three significant amendments to the deal: In the event the Marlins are sold, the city wants to get back all its stadium costs before owner Jeffrey Loria could reap any profit from the sale. The city is also asking for a share of any naming-rights deal and wants the Marlins to pay any cost overruns on the proposed $94 million parking garage. All of them are non-starters for the Marlins and more and more it appears former Florida owner John Henry was right when he said there is nothing more impossible than south Florida politics.

At the same time, the A's owner, real-estate developer Lew Wolff, announced last week he was abandoning his three-year quest to move the team 30 miles south on Interstate 880 to Fremont. Wolff spent $80 million, of which $24 million was non-refundable, exploring construction of a shopping center in Fremont with a 37,000-seat stadium for the A's as the central drawing point.

But Wolff, too, ran into considerable opposition from both the Fremont city bureaucrats and the local merchants and finally concluded his grand vision was doomed. In the opinion of San Francisco Chronicle columnist Ray Ratto, it was a doomed folly from the very beginning. "It was nothing more than a real-estate deal with a baseball team as a hook," wrote Ratto, "and it made less sense than moving the A's back to Philadelphia and exhuming Connie Mack."

"For the past couple of years, we wanted to upgrade our farm system, which had become depleted, to one of the best in the game while freeing up payroll for this year," Beane said by phone Friday. "The key to our success this year will be how our young starting pitchers perform, but we've sought to help them by getting a much-needed offensive upgrade behind them."

After Justin Duchscherer, who led the A's with 10 victories last year, lefty Dana Eveland, who was 9-9 as a rookie in '08, and Sean Gallagher, who came over from the Chicago Cubs in the trading deadline deal for previous team ace Rich Harden, the A's will have a grab bag of young, inexperienced starters from among lefties Gio Gonzalez, Brett Anderson, and Dallas Braden and righty Trevor Cahill - all of whom are rated among the top 25 pitching prospects by various scouting publications.

"I agree that for us to legitimately compete with the Angels, we need at least two of them to come into their own sooner rather than later," said Beane.

As for Holliday, Beane admits, win or lose, the 2007 NL MVP runner-up, is a one-year rental.

"I believe everyone has the responsibility to put your best team on the field," Beane said. "(Holliday) is one of the best players in the game but I know retaining him is not a possibility in this environment. So if we lose him, we either get two first-round picks or have the option of trading him."

Challenging as it has been for Beane to keep the A's viable despite an annual payroll of $50 million or less and attendance of barely 20,000 per game, it has to be discouraging knowing that he is going to have to operate under the same financial constraints for the foreseeable future. Having rebuilt the farm system, the hope was when all these good young players developed, the A's would have their new ballpark and Beane would have the means to retain them.

"It would be nice to have these kids play their entire careers with us," Beane said. "I admit the toughest part for me has been turning over very good players every year. It's not good for fan loyalty seeing all these new jerseys every year. I love what I do. I love developing players. I just wish I could keep them. From that standpoint, it does wear on you a little. Larry Beinfest faces it every year too. Then again, I guess this has been going on throughout the A's history. Before me, Charlie Finley was selling off all his players and before him Connie Mack broke up all those great A's teams in Philadelphia."

But at least Mack and Finley found buyers for the team and, in Mack's case, buyers who could move it. Baseball has run out of places to move struggling franchises and, especially in this economy, who in their right mind would buy either the A's or Marlins with their bleak stadium situations? And just as Wolff, his partner John Fisher and the Marlins' Loria are going to be looking for a way out from under their mounting losses, baseball can't afford to keep dumping revenue-sharing money into hopeless franchises. Like just about every other industry in this country right now, baseball is going to have to take stock of its situation and downsize. There are too many teams in baseball anyway and it makes no sense to continue operating them in places that can't or won't support them.

Mattingly23

Mar 1 2009, 02:19 AM

Yeah, Simmons is my boy. If the Kings move out of Sacramento, which is a shame since that city supported them even in the terrible Mitch Richmond years and earlier, they should be the ones to go to Vegas since it would make sense for the Maloof brothers. KC is either going to land an NHL team, an NBA team, or both. They have a new arena built and ready to go. I just hope it's not the Islanders, even though I am a Rangers fan. I want that team to remain on Long Island.

Can they move the Grizzlies to a city that makes sense this time? That franchise is going to end up moving once every ten years for eternity! It's the same thing with the Hornets. Even pre-Katrina, New Orleans didn't make sense, and they didn't stay in Oklahoma City full-time because it would have been terrible to bail on New Orleans at that point. It seems like they'd be flooding the Oklahoma market if they add a second team in Tulsa. One of these teams should be sent back to Seattle and become the Sonics again.

I'd love for a bunch of NHL franchises to contract and/or move back to Canada. It's amazing how dumb they were with their over-expansion. Hey, Atlanta is a terrible pro sports city, lets give them a hockey team! How about Nashville? Yeah, that's a real hockey hot bed. The Great One was traded to the LA Kings and suddenly every southern or hot weather city thought they could be as successful with hockey. Thing is, they were missing #99.