But the one fact is the Oakland A's owners are - as is common for that group - flying blind without the use of an appropriate tool to help them as they determine what the best steps for the organization are.
I have one tool that they, and you, can use: my Oakland Baseball Simworld.
I created the 2,936-variable, 956-equation simulation in 2002 and based on a system dynamics simulation I created to help John Keriotis, then a limited partner with the Sacramento Kings, see how the Athletics or a professional baseball team in Oakland would perform fiscally in the future.
At the time - 1997 - I was Economic Adviser to Elihu Harris when he was Oakland's Mayor. Mayor Harris assigned me to Coliseum issues and one of those was the possible sale of the Athletics. I helped assemble three "teams" of possible groups, and got one to merge consisting of Frank Robinson and Magic Johnson. Eventually, the sale did not take place but out of it, for me, came a simple 56-variable model of the Oakland Athletics.
After I left the City of Oakland in 2001, I learned a system dynamics simulation programming language called Forio Macro Language (FML), the creation of Forio Business Simulations in San Francisco. FML allows for the development of online sims.
With FML, and Forio's advice, I worked to create two sims: the XFL Simworld, which is still operational, and the Oakland Baseball Simworld, which was delayed for almost a year because I could not figure out an elegant equation model for player contracts.
I finally did that in 2002. I finished the simulation on October 22, 2002 at 6:30 AM (the Tuesday of the week the San Francisco Giants were in The World Series). It received some media notice, both in the Oakland Tribune and in the Sportsbusiness Daily, as well as on the TV show Inside Silicon Valley Business.
Later, I met University of San Francisco sports economics professor Dr. Dan Rascher and together with our Simulation Advisory Board updated the new Oakland Sim.
The idea of the simulation is to have the user understand "baseball business dynamics" and how such actions as building a stadium impact the team's fiscal behavior. It consists of every possible financial combination one may employ to build a stadium. And all of the numbers are "real" and based on information I had to work with at the City of Oakland, then updated annually as the years progressed.
Both sims, and a new beta sim I created called "Buffi The Gym Girl" are the basis of Sports Business Simulations and are used in college classrooms around the country from Memphis to Old Dominion, as I write this. Once students are finished using the Oakland Sim, I'm going to redesign it to specifically include a "San Jose Scenario."
Really, it's already there but encapsulated in a "Move the Team" option called "In Bay Area." But unlike the other options (you can even build a downtown stadium in Oakland) that one doesn't have the stadium costs or public politics entirely built in it. (I'm not going to remove the downtown Oakland option, either.)
There's now enough good information for me to quickly install a set of equations and codes within part of a day and have the sim up and running. I will also update the Oakland Coliseum stadium alternative and other scenarios.
The sim target date: November 30, 2009 at 5 PM.
The sim will have a three-day free trial setting so you can try it yourself.
Do I expect the A's owners to pay attention?
No. Frankly, I'd be surprised if they did; this is for the common people who want to know what is or isn't possible in this whole discussion. In 2006, I personally offered Wolff the opportunity to use a specially designed version of my Oakland sim for free and he never followed up on it, but he did say "Free? I like free."
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