New in PJ Media:
California, which has blazed so many trails for the rest of the country, is now trailblazing again, fielding baseball’s first homeless team.
On Thursday, the Seattle Mariners will kick off their 2025 season with a game at home against “the Athletics.” Not the Oakland Athletics, although the team’s ignominious abandonment of its home since 1968 is still so recent that its season schedule page at MLB.com still carries an ad that tries to entice you to visit lovely Oakland. And not “the Sacramento Athletics” or “West Sacramento Athletics,” although the team will play this year and, the story goes, the next two seasons in the latter city. No, the team is now just “the Athletics,” without a city.
This is because the team plans to abscond again, this time in Las Vegas, in 2028, and so it doesn’t want fans in Sacramento too comfortable with the idea of the A’s being around. This is, after all, the most peripatetic franchise in major league baseball, having started out in Philadelphia, then moving to Kansas City in 1955, and then to Oakland. That matches the Boston/Milwaukee/Atlanta Braves, but now the A’s have taken the lead with the move to Sacramento, and the Vegas shift will give them a two-city lead in the race to be the most restless ballclub.
The cityless moniker is also particularly fitting since the team is (for now) still playing in Gavin Newsom’s California, where far-left officials have allowed homelessness to proliferate to an alarming degree, and homeless people, including many who are drug-addicted and mentally ill, to terrorize the populace. One cannot visit a major city in California without encountering one or more ranting, potentially dangerous person on the street. And so now it’s fitting: California has given baseball, and the nation, its first homeless team.
The Athletics chose to be homeless. SportsLogos.net reported back in Nov. 2024 that the nearest analogy to their cityless name “was when the Anaheim Angels became the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim and spent the next decade referring to themselves only as the Angels in just about everything aside from their preferred abbreviation, ‘LAA.’”
The A’s even reserved trademarks that include the name Sacramento: “There’s really no obvious reason for the Athletics to go this route. The team already owns the trademarks for both Sacramento Athletics and Sacramento A’s. They could’ve proceeded just as the Angels did previously and reserved the use of Sacramento for standings and scoreboards while sticking to ‘Athletics’ on their uniforms and all official releases.”
There is more. Read the rest here.
Captain Quirk says
A homeless team, does that mean no more home runs?
cornelius says
On some level, it’s incredibly comforting that our fearless leader’s love of baseball has survived all his years of fighting the good fight, being constantly pilloried, smeared, and defamed by the media and academia, being poisoned in Iceland, and coming so close to being murdered by terrorists in Garland, Texas.
It’s as if to say that in spite of all the metaphorical battle scars Robert carries around with him every day as he slogs through the waning days of middle age, there are still traces of the wide-eyed little boy who has never succumbed to the despairing cynicism that beckons every one of us who are engaged in the anti-Jihad.
I love the game of baseball myself….every bit as much as I love football and boxing…(and – for that matter – music, film, literature, nature, stand-up comedy, etc). Some things are timeless. Baseball seems to be one of those things. Robert reminds us of that today….even as his article is an expression of the righteous anger and bitterness towards the libs who have effectively destroyed the once-great state of California.
Islam sucks…..as does the left. But nonetheless, ain’t it good to be alive?