I'm personally not a baseball fan, but reside in the South Bay and have always been curious about San Jose having another professional team/stadium. After going down a deep rabbit hole on the Santa Clara County territorial rights dispute I found this article from the Tampa Bay Times which included a quote from the commissioner at the time, Fay Vincent.

"'The San Francisco franchise now occupies, within our rules, the territory including both San Francisco and Santa Clara County and one other county (San Mateo),' commissioner Fay Vincent said."

Contrary to the opinion of several sources I read this (and the 1990 minutes obtained by the San Francisco Chronicle) as rights that were immediately granted to the Giants without the move being a condition to amend these rights in the MLB constitution. Just sharing this here because I found it interesting in the entire wrinkle of events leading to today.

1 comment
  1. The article fails to mention that Oakland A’s owner Walter Haas gave up the rights to the South Bay so the Giants didn’t have to move to Tampa. This was to allow the move to Santa Clara, but when the Giants were able to get a downtown stadium built in SF, they kept the Santa Clara rights even though they never moved. Then refused to return the favor when the A’s were in the same boat. FTG! FJF!

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