The Oakland A’s can add a new item to their list of all-time low accomplishments over the past few years. This time around, though, it doesn’t have one of the worst owners in sports or finish last in team batting average.
It’s perhaps no surprise that the East Bay baseball team is now recognized as having the worst stadium food in Major League Baseball, according to Betting.com.
Aggregating more than 100,000 food review scores from every major stadium in the United States, the “Guide” ranks all stadium food, no matter the sport. Oriole Park, home of the Baltimore Orioles at Camden Yards, has been voted to have the best food compared to any major stadium or arena in the United States. While the food at the RingCentral Coliseum, home of the Oakland A’s, didn’t finish last in the “worst food-rated stadium” category — a distinction that goes to FedEx Field, home to the Washington Commanders — the A’s ranked last in all baseball sports venues.
We admit that data collection for these rankings was a bit sketchy. Apparently, each comment is fed into a computer, which analyzes each word for their “sentiment” using a “natural language toolkit”. When did you hear that computers understand sarcasm? Probably never. It’s likely that some of the comments were jokingly calling something terrible “the best thing ever”.
That being said, an ownership group as aggressive as the A’s in trying to move the franchise from Oakland to Las Vegas unsurprisingly doesn’t want to spend a lot of money on better food. They won’t even spend money on game-winning players, since they were second to last on the payroll last season. Know who’s at the bottom of the payroll? As mentioned above, the Baltimore Orioles were rated as having the best food, proving that spending less on food isn’t necessarily a cost-cutting move.
As far as the food is concerned, one of the nice things the A-team did for them was Hal the Hot Dog Guy, an East Bay native who worked as a hot dog vendor while finishing his PhD at UC Berkeley, and created for him Powerful followers stand and character on Twitter. Unfortunately, he won’t be back at RingCentral Coliseum next season.
