Last week Vegas, this week Portland:
NEW | Oakland @Athletics staff reportedly headed to Portland, OR next month as they explore possible moves. The team is meeting with Las Vegas this week, a representative confirms to me. @KTVU https://t.co/bOR7RKpXtz
— James Torrez (@JamesTorrezNews) May 24, 2021
“Faking a Move” is, of course, Step 2 in the stadium-grubbers’ handbook, aka Chapter 4 of Field of Schemes, aka “The Art of the Steal.” University of San Francisco sports economics researcher Nola Agha tells KTVU-TV that “they are putting pressure on the city of Oakland to pass any legislation that’s necessary to continue to build at Howard Terminal,” but also “at the same time, it’s tradition for professional teams in the United States to move where the owners get the best deal.”
Which, yes, I know what Agha means, team owners definitely do sometimes move in search of a better stadium deal. But they far more often don’t move after seeking a better stadium deal, and it’s not always because they’re offered a better deal by their current hometown: As just one example, see the New England Patriots not moving to Hartford in 1999 despite a sweeter stadium pot there. (Pats owner Robert Kraft did get the NFL to create its G-3 stadium funding program by making the threat, but the cash on offer from Connecticut was still more.) As I said last week, this is almost certainly A’s owner John Fisher both doing due diligence on his other options, while simultaneously gaining ammunition to convince Oakland officials to hold their noses and approve something close to his $855 million infrastructure demand — he doesn’t have to decide how serious he is about moving until after everyone has laid their cards on the table.
Anyway, if you’re an A’s fan, gird yourself for more headlines like this over the coming weeks and months, as Fisher jets off on fact-finding trips to Nashville, Vancouver, Monterrey, and Perth, because how far is too far to go to escape a stadium whose lights literally won’t stay on? (Yes, A’s president Dave Kaval said that “we can barely keep the lights on some nights” at the Oakland Coliseum, apparently a reference to a game where a bank of lights went out and they delayed the game briefly until they realized they could see okay by the other lights.) There’s a vote in the Oakland city council on the A’s plan tentatively scheduled for July 20; if carbon emissions shoot up in early July thanks to all the air traffic flying in and out of Oakland, that’s surely a small price to pay for ensuring that democracy works to achieve the right outcome for the local billionaire.
Delicious sweet irony. If flying out of Oakland, you’ll need to drive (or in John J’s case, chauffeured) by way of Hegenberger. What’s on the opposite side of I880 as you exit west. You guessed it, the Coliseum. Since Johnny me boy lives in San Francisco, hope for his sake he’s flying using San Francisco Int’l.
Here’s the thing about Oakland: plainly put, the A’s have been stuck there! They’ve been trying to leave and/or get a new ballpark (in the Bay Area) since the first retro ballparks were built in the mid-late 90’s. To date, NOTHING. They would’ve been in a new ballpark in $an Jo$e (just 30 miles down the road) if it not for MLB and those $#@! Giants territorial rights (another topic for another day). So here they are, still stuck in 2021. The Raiders and Warriors left to much greener pastures: the A’s are simply trying to do the same.
After all these years the A’s may indeed finally build in Oakland if the city council decides to sell their soul on this massive $855 million public subsidy (in which a lot of opposition is growing towards in the East Bay). If not, they’ll gladly (and with a huge smile) follow the money.
As f huge follower of European Football/soccer, one thing I learned over the “European Super League” debacle is that the American sports owner doesn’t give a dam about the fans and tradition. It’s all about following the money, and John Fisher/A’s ownership will prove to be no different.
That’s true, Antonio. However, there is nothing stopping them from putting forward a proposal to build a new ballpark on the current site. That would have been more difficult with the Raiders on site, but that problem is long gone.
Fisher even owns half of the site (somehow), so he could probably fob off the ballpark on the city’s land (to avoid paying property taxes) while he develops the remainder into parking facilities and commercial/residential.
Yet since he notionally gained control of the county’s portion of the site… crickets.
I don’t know about you, but if I were as desperate for a new facility as the A’s claim to be, I wouldn’t have waited one day after gaining control of the site to file a proposal for a new stadium.
Simply put: I don’t believe the A’s, and by extension MLB, want to be in crime-ridden East Oakland for the long term. Sounds harsh, but that’s probably the reality of the situation.
South Chicago, the Bronx, St. Louis, Detroit, Cleveland, Baltimore, and arguably a few other areas with ballparks aren’t exactly what your average person would consider the picture of a sheltered, safe, white suburb. League doesn’t seem to have any issues there. The neighborhood isn’t the issue.
The teams/owners of the aformentioned cities obviously had no problem setting down permanent roots in their current locations. I dont’ see the A’s owners being of the same flock; they’re more akin to the owners of the Warriors and Raiders, who had no territorial constraints and were free to leave East Oakland for greener pastures. Just my opinion.
And the Coliseum site is already entitled for new stadium development. That’s a pretty huge piece of the process already out of the way.
Thumbs up emoji here.
Billionaires don’t become billionaires by spending their own money. They become billionaires by spending someone, anyone, else’s money, then reaping the benefits off it (here it comes! They made their billions by being intelligent or innovative and by hard work. And so can you if you’re intelligent and work hard enough).
Fisher inherited his money, he didn’t earn any of it, i suppose you can give him credit for not blowing all of it. I get your point though.
I have a feeling Dave Kaval and the A’s know what and what not these markets can do. Right now its theater but if the A’s don’t get their vote relocation talks are likely…unless the state of California helps provide infrastructure funds.
As a California state taxpayer who hails from $an Jo$e, I’ll be damned if my taxes (which was a nice “chunk” this year) go towards Oakland’s HT fantasy!!
This condradicts itself. “They know the markets” but they’ll leave to an objectively less valuable market (i.e. literally any of them) if they don’t get exactly what they want out of the city of Oakland? That makes no sense.
The A’s piece of the bay area market is probably not great in terms of sponsorship/tv rating etc. Vegas I presume would be not much worse. But he gets a free stadium. Does that make it clear
Both “Vegas would be not much worse” and “he gets a free stadium” seem like extremely wild speculation to me, given what we know about media market sizes and Nevada politics.
The A’s have been at this for 25 years. It seem like will speculation that Oakland is so good and LV and PDX is so bad that if HT fails they are going to go “tatar sauce” and play for another 25 at the Coliseum site
The East Bay being such a big market relative to the alternatives is precisely why the A’s have been at this for 25 years. (Really more like 21, but close enough.) If there were lots of other cities that were such great options, Schott or Wolff or Fisher would have skipped town long ago.
Whoa, what!
So a ballpark is infrastructure?
California’s legislative branch in Sacramento is not Tennessee’s in Nashville or the state you live.
That’s not going to happen as in doa.
(Oakland is the state’s 8th largest city with a population of 435,000, out of California’s total population of approximately 40 million. The constituents of Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose, San Francisco, Fresno, Sacramento, Long Beach and cities 9 – 482, not to mention California’s rural residents, will kill their legislators who give their tax money to Oakland for a ballpark).
Okay, maybe kill is a little harsh. How about “won’t allow.”
Re: Your infrastructure response.
HT won’t need infrastructure without a shiny new A’s ballpark.
But alrighty then, Mr. California legislator, I’ll let you try to explain that one away (or spin it) to your constituents in Alamo, Atherton, Berkeley, Blackhawk, Davis, Hillsborough, Kentfield, Lafayette, Los Altos / Los Altos Hills, Montecito, Menlo Park, Mill Valley, Orinda, Piedmont, Portola Valley, Redding, Ross, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, Saratoga, Tiburon and Woodside. Despite being in the top 100 wealthiest cities / suburbs / zips in the nation, they’re all heavily Democratic, with the exception of Redding in Shasta County. And speaking of county’s, California has 58, 22 of which are Republican and despise the rest of California especially its Democratic control of both houses of the legislature.
Well, good luck with that!
Typo – 23.
So, a general question… how close does anyone think that the taxpayers of Oakland have to get to $855m to “win” Fisher’s heart (ok, emphatically not heart…)?
Other than the obvious (as close as he can get, including $1.1Bn if that’s the number he ultimately ends up with), what is it going to take to get the A’s to HT (assuming that the city still wants them there, which it seems they do)?
$450m? $600m?
And – less general question – what becomes of Fisher’s apparent interest in the coliseum lands? Does he intend to hang on to that? Demand the other “half” for free and then do an alternate development? Donate it back to the city out of sheer altruism???
Really can’t say on what number either side might accept in the HT scenario.
For the Coliseum site though, the stated “plan” is for the A’s to gain full control of it and develop it into a mixed use neighborhood to help offset the cost (and obvioualy ultimately profit) of building the stadium privately.
The gaslighting that is occurring here though is that they are now emphatically stating that the Coliseum site is not viable, while simultaneously having a conceptual plan on the table (that they put out!) Explicitly arguing that development there is in fact viable.
Yeah, gaslighting is pretty much a standard tactic. I recall emailling the then president of DC United when they were playing at RFK. He’d been saying they needed ‘their own’ stadium.
I pointed out that the Nats had left and the NFL was just a distant memory there and that they now had “their own” stadium and just needed to spend some money to make it more amenable.
He wasn’t pleased. He did respond but simply said that there was no way that RFK could work for them.
I think he meant “when there is free money available to build something else somewhere else”.
And then, of course, they managed to build a new stadium which appears to be not much better than RFK was… The world is a funny place.