Oakland A’s stadium vote: a livetweetblog

45 comments on “Oakland A’s stadium vote: a livetweetblog”

1. I predict the (slim) majority of the Oakland City Council will fold and approve what the A’s want; massive public subsidy for sports be damned! But in the end it won’t mean much. The Howard Terminal fantasy will remain just that, a FANTASY!, and the A’s will continue to pursue much greener pastures outside of Oakland. Lot’s of fireworks today..but nothing changes.

   1. I expect that ultimately they’ll vote yes, but it’ll be on some form of their term sheet. Whether it’ll be a version the A’s can live with or one that will spur them to go full bore for the relocation avenue, we’ll soon see. So far they have one yes vote and one no vote that councilpersons have expressed publicly.

      1. You were right Dan!

2. What’s funny is the lemmings in Clark County is openly allowing themselves to be played by a team in a sport teetering on irrelevance (mainly due to the parties who run the sport). No one have yet to answer the question on how to give the A’s $1 billion for the privilege on moving to Nevada. This is on top of the fact there is not enough revenue being generated to pay the bonds off for the Raiders stadium (the same one they pay no rent for). On top of the unemployment rate still near double-digits, the educational system being dead last in the country and the wages being stagnant for almost a decade. Oh and we also have a housing crisis in which landlords have no cap in raising rents (there are instances of them raising rents in upwards of 25%), Californians and New Yorkers buying up everything sight unseen, inflation spiraling out-of-control, gas shortages, spike in crime, etc. But getting a baseball team to play in the hot summer desert is the answer.

   1. “..a sport teetering on irrelevance..” Amen to that!! Was once a huge baseball fan myself (A’s), but have transitioned to soccer/futbol/rugby union over the past decade. Baseball too boring/slow and the sport of “older” America IMHO. It’s still interesting to follow this A’s ballpark saga however, even if my hometown was screwed out of hosting them back in 2014.

   2. What makes you think baseball is “teetering on irrelevance”

      1. The final World Series will be in 2042!

         https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Baseball

         1. In the year 2525, will Manfred’s Man be alive?

         2. Most likely. However, he maybe, “Blinded by the Light.”

            https://youtu.be/lcWVL4B-4pI

3. Story held from publication until yesterday, which the City Council no doubt appreciates:
   https://www.sfgate.com/athletics/article/Exclusive-Most-Oakland-A-s-single-A-players-in-16323267.php
   Single-A players for the A’s Stockton affiliate getting hosed on housing costs because the host family program is suspended for Covid reasons, and the “preferred” hotel rate the team got them exceeds their take-home pay.

   For today’s hearing, I just hope we get to see renderings with new unlikely ways the shipping cranes can be incorporated into a ballpark.

4. Sacramento could try to lure the A’s like they did in the past with the partially built stadium that already exists.

   https://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2015/11/06/field-of-dashed-dreams-how-sacramento-tried-to-lure-the-raiders-and-athletics-to-town/

   You can still see it today with satellite view.
   https://goo.gl/maps/skXvcxopa53YjznG8

   1. Not happening. You’ll need to be satisfied with the Cats playing in their sandbox.

      1. I was more being sarcastic to show that Sacramento already spent millions trying to lure them away from Oakland and got nothing from it.

         1. ✔️

   2. Are they ever gonna tear down that damn thing? They’re going to tear down the old Arco Arena and build a hospital there, so the least they can do is rip apart that concrete slab.

   3. Nice link Matt. Seems like Sacramento was ahead of the curve here… they have created a wetlands area with potential theatre style seating….

      or a slabitat, if you prefer.

      I assume someone somewhere attempted to talk the minor league River Cats into playing there before SHP was built?

5. Neil,

   Please start a new chapter in your FOS book

   “Do not threaten to move unless you have a fully flushed out plan to do so. You will make things worse for yourself”

   1. That’s pretty much the opposite of what my research has found. I would say “Don’t bother to fully flesh out a plan to move before threatening to do so — it’s all about how much you can scare local officials, not about whether you’re serious or not.”

      1. They weren’t scared that’s the point and they shouldn’t be. If I were them I would say “after much consultation with our stakeholders (the people)” we have reduced our offering to 200 million ” after Vegas officials get frustrated with the A’s unwillingness to commit to the market

         1. I mean, Fisher and Kaval got $495m, plus a vague promise to hit up Sacramento and Washington for more. That’s a pretty good payoff for a few weekend trips to Vegas.

            1. Given the state the sport is and given the fact this is the bay area the better move for extortion is for MLB to threaten contraction at the end of the Rays lease. Baseball while still popular doesn’t have the juice to demand a billion dollar stadium. Las Vegas is the only market willing to drink the Kool Aid. The offer from the city council today says the A’s need Oakland more than Oakland needs the A’s. That offer is a ceiling not a floor

            2. Who’s going to come up with the $2-3B it would take to buy out Fisher and Sternberg? Or are you just suggesting that contraction would make a better bluff?

6. Now that the City Council vote is over can we all agree that this is one ugly design for a ballpark, All the talk about financing but nothing about the renderings.

   1. Fortunately, stadiums almost never turn out to look like the initial renderings.

      Less fortunately, they almost never turn out to look better, either.

   2. Hoorah! Elon Musk will now turn his techbrain to the design of a baseball stadium (looking at you Las Vegas). Where you park your vehicle, preferably a Tesla, and watch the ballgame from the comfort of your car!

      In New York City you call them “parking garages.” WITH GAMER LIGHTS!

      1. There was actually a public commenter this morning who said “somebody should contact Elon Musk” to help build a “green stadium.”

      2. With the Boring Company ™ already in place, why not just dig until you have an underground cavern big enough for a baseball stadium? (No one cares about science anymore, least of all physics). You can always put large HDTVs with images of Las Vegas all around the stadium… or maybe Paris and Cairo since, you know, a good part of Las Vegas architecture seems to be designed to make you think you are somewhere else anyway. And, let’s face it, in LV as in Oakland, it’s mostly going to be someone else paying so who cares how much it costs?

         Bonus feature: Create a 6′ skylight in the center of the outfield and any hitter who knocks a ball through it (a la the Trop) will get 2 runs for every runner who crosses the plate instead of a stupid ground rule double.

         win-win-win I say.

      3. What if bore for the underground ballpark fills will water.

         Nevermind. What am I thinking. The water can be pumped to Bellagio’s 8 acre man-made lake where it will evaporate faster than the bore fills with water. Or better yet, fill up Lake Mead.

         Oh, oh! Can we incorporate a small barn as part of the outfield fence. Like Visalia’s Recreation Ballpark (not using corporate name).

         https://stadiumjourney.com/stadiums/recreation-ballpark-s355

7. Well, I was wrong. The Oakland City Council voted overwhelmingly in favor of THEIR term sheet.. but not the A’s. Wow! LOL!!!

8. Looking forward to the petulant press releases that Kaval and Manfred put out.

9. Kaval: “I would like to thank you all for convening today to meet to vote on our presentation. However, I would encourage you all to vote no on this proposal that we do not want”.

   Ok, I’m paraphrasing, but…

   I was hoping they would either vote it down or the councillors would amend it significantly during the process. Maybe they kind of did with the suggestion that more than 2/3rds of the amount they are agreeing to in principle be paid by ‘somebody else’, but we’ve yet to see the actual agreements (if we ever do).

   It is interesting in that it puts the A’s back on the clock (so to speak). But little else. The A’s have received a promise of nearly half a billion dollars to develop HT. There’s just no way to posit that as a win for the taxpayers of Oakland.

   I am hoping now that Kaval deploys scorched earth option #2 and immediately announces this will not be good enough and that they are rescinding their proposal.

   Then Oakland can sell their half of the coliseum site for the express purpose of affordable housing developments to someone not named or affiliated with John Fisher while issuing non-sporting RFPs for Howard Terminal and things can, well, really get moving.

   1. Anyone stick around to see what happened with the Coliseum sale vote in the afternoon session? I had reached my capacity for representative democracy.

      1. Neil, I think it’s still going on at the time of this post. The live tweet thread I’ve been following covering it seems to indicate that they seem to be leaning towards the AASEG proposal,. It no decisions made.

   2. I’d give anything for anyone to explain to me how the A’s hand was not weakened today. If he goes goes back to Vegas tonight after this and keeps the channel of communication open with Oakland as a Vegas official I am to interpret that as there is no serious interest in Vegas and only interest in dragging out another 5 five years of negotiation in a market they want to be in.

      The reason Oakland didn’t give more is because they know the “word is out on the street on MLB”. I think Carl Pohland wasting the Triads and Charlotte’s time and the Nats one-sided deal with DC has put mayor’s and city councils on notice “Don’t let these people (MLB) waste your time”.

10. To the point of teetering on the brink of irrelevance: “ The average age of MLB fans is 57. That’s up from [52] in 2000. A good way to slowly kill baseball is to make sure young people either can’t watch or don’t care. MLB does both exceptionally.”

    https://www.12up.com/posts/average-age-mlb-fans-terrible-news-for-baseball-01eat6g4nsrt

    1. Baseball has pretty much always (at least since it’s first half century or so) skewed to older fans. Ever watch films of the early 1970s or late 1960s world series?

       Sure, there were some young fans there. But an awful lot of people in their 60s were in the seats as well.

       In the early 1970s media types referred to baseball as a 19th century sport doomed to failure in the modern age. More than a half century later, it’s still doing fine. Revenues have never been higher.

       Not that the owners and MBA’s in charge aren’t doing their best to kill it, as you said. But then, they’ve pretty much always treated fans as an afterthought.

       1. Touché. Good analysis.

    2. The only folks I know who still watch baseball are my mother and older relatives (+60 to 70 years of age). The younger generation (-50 years of age) appears to be all about the NFL, NBA and soccer. And while MLB is still a huge revenue generator, its primarily due to older corporate America and their older/more conservative upper echelon. I see MLB’s revenues slowly declining over the next generation, especially with the explosion of soccer’s popularity in the US. Baseball will never truly die out, but it will be a far cry from it heyday as America’s pastime.

11. And Neil thank you for taking the time to cover this. I enjoyed reading about it well after it was over in your easy-to-follow style.

12. Someone with a modicum of economic sense in Oakland should make a bulk purchase of Neil’s book and “Public Dollars, Private Stadiums: The Battle Over Building Sports Stadiums
    by Kevin J. Delaney and Rick Eckstein,” and send them to The Oakland Council…or perhaps “dumb it down” to some bullet points that clearly explain why it absolutely, positively NEVER makes economic sense to give taxpayer money to billionaire sports owners.

13. Question for Neil or anyone else,
    Can LV, Henderson, or Summerlin demand some sort of exclusivity agreement in which no negotiation will take place unless Oakland is cut off from negotiation? MLB has no right to waste any of these communities time and resources if they are being used. The LV pols should put the kibosh on this immediately as well as Portland , Sacramento

    1. Anybody can *demand* anything they want. Getting someone to agree to it is trickier, especially if you’re not willing to walk away without it.

    2. Matthew: Since professional sports’ basic business model is to play off as many competing locations for their (artificially scarce) franchises on a near continuous basis, I doubt anyone involved would take such a stipulation seriously.

       Manfred has already said (as Selig did before him) that expansion will not take place until the Rays and A’s stadium situations are resolved (let all hope hope hope the Rangers aren’t in need of another new publicly funded stadium before this happens), so he is essentially saying that the expansion shakedown cannot proceed until two cities – which might or might not be Tampa and Oakland – are extorted into ‘fixing’ the already pretty good economics of the Rays and Athletics.

       Franchise non-relocation agreements (like the one the Rays currently do not enjoy but the city kinda does) tend to be part and parcel of any stadium funding deal… but Las Vegas is nowhere near that stage of discussion. In fact, if we are to believe what the LV pols say, they’ve barely spoken to anyone from the A’s except as a ‘meet n greet’ sort of affair.

       Looked at from the team’s perspective (or any business owner), would you agree up front to an exclusive negotiation with one potential landlord or host city in exchange for nothing at all?

       I tend to side with the municipalities and not the franchises (as you’ve probably noticed), but even I wouldn’t sign an exclusivity agreement in exchange for nothing. Suppose they spend 3 years negotiating with LV while not speaking with anyone else and then DON’T get to an agreement there (or in Boise, or Sacramento, or Thunder Bay – damn, Neil, here I was so focused on Boise that I forgot about Thunder Bay…). Then where are they?

       Sports franchises waste municipalities time and money (asking city managers and finance people to run through proposals is not “free”, it takes them away from the work they should be doing on behalf of the people) all the time. As this site has pointed out (and recommended) many times, you can always refuse to take the phone call or meeting.

       Cities fall all over themselves to have dalliances with pro sports. It is unfortunate, but it is so.

14. The most ironic part is due to climate change the stadium is going to be under sea water before the lease is up or the state is going to be devoid of people to support it because they’ve all been burned out of their homes…..

    1. A big piece of the “infrastructure” spending demand is so Oakland can elevate the stadium district and surround it with berms to keep out the bay as sea level rises. Though as I noted previously, “that won’t help much if fans have to wade through waist-deep water to get to the turnstiles”:

       https://defector.com/which-teams-will-be-the-first-lost-to-climate-change/

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