In the dead spot in the baseball schedule between the end of the World Series and the winter meetings, the news has usually, over the last few years, revolved around contentious labor talks or steroids. In the absence of scandal, it seems like nothing is happening at all.

Your relatively minor news of the week, though, masks what is, if not an ongoing scandal, certainly an embarrassment for the game. The news is that the Oakland Athletics are quite near to finally abandoning Oakland for Fremont; the scandal is that they’ve had to do so.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with the Athletics pulling up stakes yet again. As one of the consistently elite teams in the American League this decade, they have yet to draw many more than 2 million fans in a season. Oakland is not rich, and the A’s shabby ballpark is badly located; it’s a major league market, but not one that can reward as consistently excellent a team as the Athletics are in the way they deserve to be rewarded. The story, as it’s supposed to go for a small market team, is that if you put a good team on the field, enough fans — especially those rich enough to sit in luxury boxes — will come out to the yard to allow you to continually raise payroll and, after enough time, allow you to become a large market team. That’s what happened at various points to the Rangers, Indians, Braves, and White Sox; since it hasn’t happened in Oakland, you can hardly blame ownership for casting their eyes slightly south.

Of course the Athletics haven’t been able to make the natural move to San Jose, one of the 10 largest cities in America and by some standards the richest, for two idiotic reasons. The first is that the city falls within the Giants’ territory, and the Giants, with their magnificent ballpark and presence in San Francisco, enjoy the cash of the plutocrats of Silicon Valley and have no particular desire to let the Athletics in on it. The second is that San Jose doesn’t want to pay for a ballpark, and it’s baseball policy to never pay for a ballpark if it can at all be avoided. So the Athletics will not be moving to San Jose but to Fremont, a centerless bit of sprawl 30 miles closer to San Jose but within their own territory.

The Fremont Athletics? The very idea of such a name shows up the vacuous stupidity of the whole situation. The Athletics will be closer to San Jose, but probably not quite close enough to overcome the loyalty that city holds for the Giants and stand on an equal footing with the other wealthy California teams; their new proximity to the city will probably do a bit to hurt the Giants, though, who find themselves looking at an uncertain future with an aged roster, depleted farm system, and the departure, sooner or later, of Barry Bonds.

This “spread the pain” philosophy makes a bit of sense for Major League Baseball — the Athletics get a better though still not ideal situation, while the Giants don’t see another team swallow up a large part of their territory — but not as much as the obvious solution, which is to just finance the Athletics’ move into the capital of Silicon Valley, where they would quickly become a fairly rich team while leaving both San Francisco and Oakland to the Giants.

On a smaller scale, it’s the Washington Nationals dynamic being played out all over again. Baseball went for decades without a team in the nation’s capital, not because that was what was best for the game as a whole, but because it was convenient in terms of the game’s structural dynamics. At first, it was a good place for owners to have handy, as they could threaten to move their teams there if they didn’t get a ballpark, and after it became clear that the Expos, through baseball’s doing, wouldn’t be a viable concern in Montreal, an embarrassing situation stretched on for years as that team was shuttled into out and out of Montreal, Puerto Rico, and Washington because of issues over the Orioles’ supposed territorial rights and public financing of a new yard. At least that worked out the right way in the end.

The Athletics’ story also has a good bit of relevance for New York. Tiring as it may be to hear people complain about it, the Yankees and Mets really do have an unfair advantage in that the city is probably naturally a threeor four-team market. It’s been clear for many years that the easiest way to correct that advantage would simply be to move a team into Brooklyn or New Jersey; the economic base and passion for the game are certainly there, and it would do more than a bit to restrain some of the more absurd spending practices of the local teams. Why will it not happen for decades, if ever? Territorial rights and ballpark financing issues. It’s a status quo that’s good for individual owners, and no one else.

tmarchman@nysun.com