The Oakland A's have solid (waste) proof UPDATE: It happened again

If they move out of Oakland, it's most likely to San Jose. If they were to leave the Bay Area, my first guess would be Sacramento. The city already is in the territorial rights of the A's and the River Cats (the A's AAA team) are pretty popular there. Other than that, I'm not sure. Going south would be problematic as Fresno would pose the same problem as San Jose in terms of Giants territory claims. Going to the Inland Empire would get too far away from the established fan base into a baseball market pretty well saturated by the Angels and Dodgers. You might be looking at going out of state if the Bay and Sacramento don't pan out.

 

Back to Philly.

 

Bring 'em back to Philadelphia!

 

Oh, fuck you!

I thought I was being original.

 

You were. I was just original first. ;D

 

Philly, Brooklyn, and Northern New Jersey would all probably do a better job supporting a team than cities like Portland, or Sacramento.

I think Boston/New England could support two teams, but it would be hard to peel away Red Sox fans at this point, and the team would need to be in the National League.

Interleague play (and free agency/player movement) also lessens the need/desire/logic for a big city to have a team in each league. Fans just don't associate as American or National League fans like they used to.

 

Philly is squeezed by Baltimore to the south, the New York teams to the north and the Pirates to the west. (Pirates fan base used to extend relatively close to Philly, although the horrible years have lessened that.) It'd be hard for another team to carve out a niche there.

There was talk during the Expos mess of having them play home games in Boston for a year or two while the situation sorted itself out.