According to ESPN, because San Jose is in Santa Clara County, that territory falls under the San Francisco Giants’ umbrella, which is why Major League Baseball doesn’t want a team in San Jose.
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The U.S. Supreme Court, in a move widely expected by legal experts, on Monday refused to hear San Jose’s last-ditch appeal of its antitrust claims against Major League Baseball for stalling a plan to move the Oakland A’s to Silicon Valley.
That was viewed as the city’s final remaining legal effort to try to bring the A’s to San Jose.
While a few justices in the later cases expressed serious reservations about the correctness of the court’s earlier ruling, a majority of the court declined to overrule past precedent, citing the importance of stability in the law and possible harm to the game.
The A’s were never a participant in the city of San Jose’s lawsuit. The definition means no team can move to San Jose without the consent of three-quarters of the 30 clubs.
“We knew going into this litigation that getting a hearing before the U.S. Supreme Court would be a long shot – the Court hears only a couple dozen out of the more than 2,000 petitions it receives each year”, Liccardo said.
San Jose officials could not immediately be reached for comment.
But now, the A’s are focusing on a new ballpark and not relocation. The team’s current ballpark, the O.co Coliseum, is among the oldest in baseball, plagued in recent years by sewage problems.
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Wolff, who originally pushed for a move to San Jose, has recently shifted his attention back to trying to get a new ballpark built in Oakland, and never supported San Jose’s legal action against the league. A lower court judge rejected the city’s argument, ruling that baseball could withhold its approval for the Athletics to move under the league’s longstanding antitrust exemption. Major League Baseball lawyers told the Supreme Court this summer that San Jose is asking to unravel “a question that has been firmly settled for decades”.
