Earlier this week in his retirement announcement stream on Twitch, Trevor May went off-script to talk about the A's relocation situation, which led to him telling owner John Fisher to "Sell the Team" along with some other juicy quotes.
Some have questioned why he didn't say these things during the regular season if he was struggling so badly not to "eviscerate" Fisher, especially since he knew this season would be his last well before his final pitch, but honestly that would have been in bad taste.
The timing of his comments was actually perfect. You can quibble about whether it would have shown more "guts" to do it as a member of the team instead of on the way out, but who cares? He shared his thoughts, and he didn't hold back.
Right now we're in the middle of the postseason, and there is an unwritten rule that teams should not announce news during the playoffs because it could take away from Baseball's time to shine on the field.
Sure, we'll see managerial firings or some minor leaguers electing free agency, but there is a reason players aren't technically free agents yet, and it's so that the focus is on the postseason. If teams were bidding for Shohei Ohtani right now, do you think fans across the country would be more invested in their team potentially landing Ohtani, or an all-Texas ALCS?
Yes, that speculation still happens, but there aren't any concrete rumors to base anything on. It's all speculation in October.
Yet, Trevor May, who is no longer an MLB player, can say whatever he wants without fear of the timing of the situation, so he took this dead period for news and brought the "SELL" movement back into focus for a few days. This is notably a time when A's fans don't have a voice since the A's finished 39 games out of a playoff spot.
The beauty of all of this is that the A's still had to adhere to the unwritten rule, so we haven't seen the typical counter piece in the Las Vegas Review-Journal to try and take some of the attention away from May, or to try and spin that story another way. "Take Mommy and Daddy's money somewhere else" had time to breathe in the media cycle and was talked about everywhere in baseball media.
The other part of the timing that worked out well here is that the World Series will last until at least October 31 if there's a sweep, and through November 4 if it goes seven games. With the owners potentially voting some time at their meetings from November 14-16, that gives the A's potentially less than two weeks to change the narrative that has been set.
One thing we can expect in that timeframe is to see the new renderings of the proposed ballpark project in Las Vegas. The team is also expected to announce the architect for the project before the vote, so there will be chances for the team to make themselves look a little better before the vote. If this is a real, serious process there should be a decent amount of pressure on those announcements in order to get the 75% of owner's votes they need to move.
Will the narrative matter? It's entirely possible that they already have the votes and this will all be a formality, but if there is a chance that this relocation doesn't pass, then Trevor May's timing couldn't have been better.
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