America’s (But Not Utah’s) Pastime
On September 26th, 2024, the Oakland–Alameda County Coliseum saw its last Major League Baseball game ever. A hundred different think pieces have been written on the game by sportswriters a lot more literate than me and who were actually there, so I won’t spin out the details, but suffice it to say that it was simultaneously a somber and antagonistic affair. The people of Oakland didn’t deserve to have their baseball team taken away from them, just like their basketball team (in 2019 by San Francisco) and their football team (in 2020 by Las Vegas) were, and they knew it. The whole world of baseball knew it; I know at least the visiting team, the Texas Rangers, sent a staff delegation partly to honor the stadium and partly to mourn. A piece of history, a venue that hosted the Moneyball team and the Bash Brothers and the Swingin’ A’s, a venue that held 56 years of history, wouldn’t host a professional baseball team again.
Despite the signs at nearly every game calling to sell the team (sometimes with more expletives than that), greed prevailed. John Fisher, owner of the A’s (and also son of The Gap founders Donald and Doris Fisher) started shopping the A’s location around in May of 2021, after the city of Oakland refused to pay for a new stadium, mostly a vanity project, a monument to the fact that John Fisher had at one time owned the A’s. By the end of the year, he’d bid on a spot in Vegas to build a new stadium, which will be done in 2028. Until then, the A’s will play in a stadium in Sacramento, one with a capacity of 1,500 less than Smith’s Ballpark here in Salt Lake, home of Salt Lake’s AAA minor league team, the Bees.
Smith’s Ballpark matters in all this because, in an alternate universe, the A’s are playing here in Utah. Not in Smith’s Ballpark, but in the new stadium being built for the Salt Lake Bees in Daybreak, an insidious suburb of South Jordan (can suburbs be insidious? Daybreak is insidious). In a sort of mirror of the Oakland situation, Salt Lake’s baseball team is being taken from them in hopes of expanding profits down in South Jordan. Obviously, moving a team from Salt Lake to South Jordan is very different than moving one from Oakland to Las Vegas, but the idea still applies: history and culture are being taken away from a city to chase profit.
The Bees aren’t the only parallel to Oakland in Salt Lake. Utah’s newest and worst-designed sports team, the Utah Hockey Club, was known as the Arizona Coyotes up until last year. I, like many others, was very attached to the Coyotes’ design, which felt like a 90s Taco Bell, in all the right ways. Instead, we got Pantone mountain blue and something called rock black. And this isn’t the worst of it. Arizona Coyotes owner Alex Meruelo also wanted a new stadium, didn’t get his vanity project approved, and made his fan experience so miserable that the NHL had no choice but to let Ryan Smith, founder of Qualtrics (unnecessary sidebar but how does the founder of a survey company make enough money to buy multiple Major League sports teams?) buy the team and move them to Salt Lake. Put simply, Salt Lake has a pattern of obtaining or at least trying to obtain sports teams at the expense of existing fanbases. Not the most evil of things, but still at the very best skeezy.
Why should any of this matter in the here and now, though? We can’t keep the Bees from moving to Daybreak, the Utah Hockey Club is already here, and life will go on as normal in the Utah sports realm. Except that the Bees aren’t leaving Salt Lake just because there’s more money in the vapid wasteland of Daybreak. It’s because of an initiative called Big League Utah, where some of the biggest names in Utah sports, politics, business, plus Ty Burrell, want to bring a Major League Baseball team here permanently, meaning there’ll be no space for a minor league team. Their website espouses how ready Utah is to be a sports state, how downtown Salt Lake will be revitalized, and how the new stadium in the Salt Lake power district will be perfect for baseball. It describes Utah as a five-tool player, ready for the big leagues—those tools being growth, economy, location, state of sport, and quality of life. The population of Utah is secularizing in ways it hasn't before, meaning that there isn’t an automatic loss of revenue one day a week. In other words, you don’t have to worry about having games on Sunday if there are heathens who will watch. Also, Salt Lake City is one of the fastest-growing cities in the country, fueled by a tech boom that Ryan Smith is a part of. Utah has hosted the Winter Olympics in years past and will do so again, and its location would bridge the gap between disparate teams playing in the western division of MLB, like Seattle and Houston. Big League even argues that Utah’s reputation as a ski and outdoors tourism destination means that quality of life is sufficiently high in Utah to place a baseball stadium here.
And yet, there are still problems with Salt Lake as a sports city. In a proposed plan to revitalize Salt Lake and make room for an entertainment district around Delta Center—home of the Utah Hockey Club and Utah Jazz—hotels, new residential towers, and renovations to the Delta Center were included. Conspicuously not on that list: The Utah Museum of Contemporary Art and Abravanel Hall, home of The Utah Symphony. While Mayor Wilson of Salt Lake has confirmed that Abravanel Hall will be spared in the construction, the damage has been done in terms of reputation. One would be forgiven for believing that, to the Salt Lake City government, growth, entertainment, and sports are more important than cultural institutions. Additionally, multiple NBA All-Stars, from Dwayne Wade to the family of Ja Morant, all espouse that Salt Lake is one of the most racist environments they have played in. Donovan Mitchell, one of the best defensive players in the league and former Utah Jazz player, has talked in depth about his problems with the culture in Utah: “[Living in Utah as a black man] was draining… I got pulled over once. I got an attitude from a cop until I gave him my ID. And that forever made me wonder what happens to the young Black kid in Utah that doesn’t have that power to just be like, ‘This is who I am.’” Is it worth it to bring a baseball team into that environment?
I do feel the need to suffix all this with the idea that I’m a hypocrite. I’ve already planned tickets for when my beloved Washington Capitals play the Utah Hockey Club, and I can totally imagine myself there on opening day for the Salt Lake Gulls, or whatever they end up naming that Major League Utah team down the line. Even my favorite baseball team was taken from their city in Montreal and given to Washington after years of lackluster attendance. I have zero moral legs to stand on. That being said, we should be wary of any efforts to bring a baseball team, or any major league sports teams, really, here. Not because of any failure on Utah’s part to hold a sports team (though there may be a few), but more because, if we do bring an expansion team here, we may be playing into a cycle of greed over love of the game.