Question of the Day - 05 June 2023

At least in theory, the A’s and Aviators could co-exist.

As Twin Cities Business Magazine Executive Editor Adam Platt, a baseball aficionado, tells us, “There isn’t such a rule [forbidding co-location]. The New York Yankees and Mets recently had affiliates in Staten Island and Brooklyn." Platt says the proximity of the MLB Minnesota Twins (in Minneapolis) to their Triple-A affiliate, the St. Paul Saints, is as close a major/minor pairing as he knows. “Brooklyn and the Mets are probably geographically farther, but technically in the same city.”

(For those whose New York geography is minimal, the Yankees play in the Bronx and the Mets in Queens, while Brooklyn and Staten Island constitute the third and fourth boroughs of the five-borough city. Manhattan is the fifth.) 

Other issues are also interesting to us. For example, will the A's and Aviators not only play in the same city, but also the same stadium? The Aviators play in the 8,196-seat Las Vegas Ballpark that the A’s covet for the near term, until a venue of more than three times that capacity can be built on or near the Las Vegas Strip. On the other hand, the Aviators made headlines last season for outdrawing their struggling major-league affiliate in Oakland. It would be ... awkward ... if the minor-league team had higher attendance figures than the major-league. 

Unless the Aviators were ejected entirely from their own stadium (highly unlikely), they’d have to sandwich their Triple-A schedule between the better part of 81 Athletics' home games for at least a couple of years.

Two other questions are pertinent. Can Las Vegas support two professional baseball clubs? Remember, we're quite low when it comes to national media-market rankings. Secondly, would A’s management want to compete with a popular Triple-A team in the same town? We suspect those are the kind of questions team flacks aren’t eager to answer.