Welcome to the Roadwire Prospect podcast. I'm your host, James Anderson, and joined this week by

Melissa Lockard, who covers the Oakland A's for the athletic. And Melissa is as plugged in and as

knowledgeable as any beat writer, beat reporter that I know. And I just thought it would be really fun to

kind of talk about the A's even though

they don't have a ton of big names on the big league roster but we have so many players on this

roster who are kind of getting a chance to show what they have at the big league level and they've

got a replenish farm system so I thought it would be a great time to have Melissa on Melissa

thanks for joining me how are you doing I'm doing great thanks for having me on. Melissa, thanks for joining me. How are you doing?

I'm doing great. Thanks for having me on.

So before we get into any players, I just really wanted to quickly let you sort of give kind of a report on where things kind of stand with fans and ownership there because I know

that's been kind of a messy situation for a while now,

and it's kind of coming to a head, it seems, this year.

What's your sort of read on this whole situation from someone who is pretty plugged in there?

Yeah, I mean, it's definitely a strange time.

You know, the stadium saga has been one that has gone on, you know, really for almost 25 years. You know, it's been a long time. And it's at a point where, you know, from a votes perspective, from some of the regulatory work perspective that there have, that there's kind of a tipping point that's coming soon about

whether they're going to be able to build that stadium and Howard Terminal in Oakland that they

would like to build. And it's coming at the same time that, you know, ownership has decided

basically not to invest anything in anything but, you know, this stadium project, which, you know, I mean,

from a business perspective, perhaps you can see some reasoning behind it, but they've done it

with very little communication whatsoever with their fan base. They've also raised ticket prices

at the current location, which seemed awfully tone deaf when you consider the moves that they

were making on the field.

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