MLB owners vote to approve John Fisher’s relocation to Las Vegas. Vote was unanimous.
— John Shea (@JohnSheaHey) November 16, 2023
All of this was expected, including the unanimous vote: So long as there was a three-quarters majority of the 30 team owners in favor, it was likely that any dissidents would come around and officially vote “yes” for a show of unity. And it’s been pretty clear for a while that, despite the gift baskets and sky ads, no groundswell of opposition among the owners was emerging, not once one unnamed baseball official said that Vegas was an “iffy” market but nobody had any better ideas.
Now, as the saying goes, it’s up to A’s owner John Fisher to decide what to do with the car now that he’s caught it. He has a “Move to Las Vegas Free” card in his pocket, he has an option to buy a just-barely-workable-maybe nine acres of land in Vegas that vests now that MLB has approved the move, and he has a $1 billion–plus budget hole that he needs to fill somehow. Oh, plus a possible referendum next fall to block the funding of stadium bonds, and a pending lawsuit claiming the stadium funding bill was unconstitutional in five different ways. It’s a lot, and while team owners have certainly navigated through tougher waters en route to new stadium deals, those have also fallen apart abruptly over far less, so all bets remain off.
MLB commissioner Rob Manfred is reportedly set to address the public about this soon; I’ll update this post if any of the words that fall out of his mouth seem noteworthy.
UPDATE, 11:14 am ET: And in further unsurprising news:
Nothing was decided today as to where A's play in 2025-27, sources said. Possibilities include staying at the Oakland Coliseum, going to Triple-A Sacramento's stadium, among others. (Oakland mayor Sheng Thao has made clear there would be conditions to staying at the Coliseum)
— Evan Drellich (@EvanDrellich) November 16, 2023
UPDATE 11/16, 3:50 pm ET: And here’s the transcript of Manfred’s presser. Highlights:
“This is a terrible day for fans in Oakland. I understand that. That’s why we always had a policy of doing everything humanly possible to avoid a relocation, and I truly believe that in this case.”
“Vegas is a unique market in many ways. … We think over the long haul Las Vegas will be a huge asset to Major League Baseball.”
“We’re exploring a variety of alternatives, including staying at the Coliseum for the remaining years in the interim.”
“In terms of the public support that was available, the waving of a relocation fee made that support stronger. And we wanted to go into the market in a way that the people in the market felt like we were making an investment in them and were going to grow the game. That’s the best I can do for you on that one.”
Rob Manfred, saying the quiet parts loud since 2015.
Traveshamockery.
Well said. But would we expect anything else from these clowns?
I saw someone say the owners’ vote was as much about sending a message to their respective home markets as it was the actual approval of the A’s (pending) move, and it makes 100% sense. They wanted the fans and the politicians back home to know that they could one day threaten to uproot their teams *and* follow through on that threat.
That these things almost always take years and decades to actually unfold, and that none of the cities that have ever lost a team (or teams) has been burned to the ashes — let alone experienced any sort of calamitous metro-wide downturns — in the ensuing years is beside the point. The emotional appeal is what matters to the league and the owners, and there’s no greater instigator out there than fear.
The irony is that many teams can’t leave their hometowns because no other market provides as much economic upside as staying put. The Angels, Astros, Blue Jays, Cubs, Dodgers, Giants, Mets, Phillies, Red Sox, White Sox, and Yankees should have banded together to block the move unless Fisher paid hundreds of millions of dollars in relocation fees. If he couldn’t do that, the A’s probably could have been sold, driving up the market prices for all teams. The big market teams are leaving money on the table.
It’s an excellent point Jeremy. I assume that the owners club is saying they think they can make more money out of other host cities by approving this ridiculous move than they will lose keeping Fisher’s Vegas franchise on life support indefinitely (or at least for 30 years, if we assume that will be the duration of the non relocation agreement).
We have certainly seen leagues leave out perfectly viable host cities for years (or decades) because having that threat worked so very well for them, but this is the reverse… going to a place none of them want to be just to send a message.
The danger you always have when sending a message is that the message that is received may not be the one you intended to send.
I guess for them it’s just the principle. They don’t need to threaten their cities, but they still want to affirm the absolute sovereignty of the ownership class even if it costs them millions.
I can’t think of any other explanation for why they’d approve such a stupid move.
This relocation will not happen for a variety of reasons.
First off, the initial A’s stadium renderings do not include a domed roof, which would add hundreds of millions of dollars to the price tag. There is no way in hell anyone is going to bear the Vegas heat in the summer. What the A’s are trying to do is slide that in and hope cost overruns are absorbed by the public. It won’t work.
Second, baseball is a summer sport. Tourism in Las Vegas is at it’s low point during the summer months. People are vacationing in cooler areas. Major conventions (outside of the Magic Fashion Show) are staged in cooler areas. Who is going to want to watch a baseball game in the dead of summer?
Third, the A’s won’t even own the land; Gaming and Leisure Properties (a REIT spun off by Penn Gaming) will. Plus the acreage is too small for a functional ballpark. I won’t even bring up parking.
I agree with the previous commenter. The owners passed this to send a message to the other markets this can happen to you. I can’t see them turning down over a billion dollars in expansion fees Las Vegas can bring when the league expands to 32. That’s why the NBA put the kibosh on Memphis and New Orleans wanting to relocate to Vegas or Seattle. The expansion fees are too big. MLB will ultimately force Fisher to negotiate with Oakland on their plan.
If this relocation goes through, the MLB owners are the dumbest of all the major 4 professional sports leagues. The site is all kinds of wrong (the original site off of Tropicana and the I-15 is a much better site), there is no consensus revenue plan and the stadium design isn’t finalized.
If MLB approved the relocation in an effort to increase leverage with Oakland, it could backfire. The smart move now is for the Oakland mayor to outline all the issues with Las Vegas as a bad market, highlight how much real estate in the Bay Area is worth, and say Oakland is better off if the A’s leave. Refuse to negotiate and start releasing plans about how the land occupied by the Coliseum can be repurposed. Oakland will be fine without the A’s.
Which audience are you playing to there, though? The MLB owners have voted, so no point in continuing to lobby them. The only people here who have decision-making power now are John Fisher and the bond lawyers, and neither of them seem to care about how good a deal the A’s could get in Oakland, only whether there’s a viable deal to be had in Vegas — which remains TBD.
Playing to voters. Is Oakland better off paying $700 million to build a new baseball stadium, or giving away the land around the Coliseum and near the BART/Amtrak station for market rate housing/office/retail? How much property tax revenue would be brought in every year if that land is developed? The case should be easy to make.
If the A’s leave, Oakland will be fine. If MLB really doesn’t want the A’s in Las Vegas, they will have forgone billions of dollars. Is schadenfreude worth losing a baseball team? Maybe Oakland can get a stadium deal and the A’s to stay for only $300 million, maybe less.
Voters in Oakland? I doubt they’re going to vote out Thao just because the A’s left — she’s the one who’s been fighting against Public Enemy No. 1.
Playing this as “We’re fine without baseball, if MLB wants to build a stadium in a major market, they know where to find us” is a good play, I agree. But it seems to be what the mayor has been doing so far.
I don’t think the mayor should talk about Vegas much at all. Because, as it turns out, Oakland was never really in competition with Vegas to offer a better deal. They offered a much better deal and it didn’t matter.
All she can do now is to try to try to sell a new plan – or a version of one of the old plans – to MLB for an expansion team and/or some other relocating team.
Oakland will be better off without the A’s. The BART station, AMTRAK, 880 and the airport give the Coliseum site incredible redevelopment potential. And if the Clark County teachers win, Fisher will be lucky to be playing in a minor league stadium.
The mayor has already outlined all of those things and it fell on deaf ears.
But Oakland should not extend the A’s lease at the Coliseum for a single second unless:
A) They either somehow reverse course on all of this and sign a contract to stay in Oakland permanently.*
B) MLB gives Oakland an expansion team that will be called the A’s.
I can’t see what would be in it for Oakland to have the A’s stick around as a lame-duck team. Their attendance will be negligible.
There’s really nothing in it for the A’s to stay in Oakland either other than that they have a full-sized baseball diamond and some locker rooms that could be made to resemble major league locker rooms and the weather in the summer is tolerable for baseball.
* The only way this franchise will stay in Oakland is if the Vegas deal collapses AND Fisher sells. There are a few ways the Vegas deal could collapse, but I cannot imagine him coming crawling back to Oakland to revive the HT plan or a new plan. He’d just have to sell at that point. Which would be a win-win-win for everyone. He’d make a profit. MLB would be rid of him. The A’s would stay in California.
There was a domed roof in the initial Vegas renderings. (Not that it matters, since Fisher immediately after the subsidy vote said not to take those renderings seriously.)
Is this where MLB wants to locate a team and spend over a billion dollars on a stadium? Next to the biggest dump of a hotel in the world AND the world’s largest motel 6? The OYO Hotel next door opened over 50 years ago as a Howard Johnsons and filed bankruptcy a year later. After several quick ownership and name changes in the 1970s, the buyers of the hotel/casino in 1982, having been rejected by the Nevada Gaming Commission, the then Treasury Hotel was shuttered for 3 years. An attempt to open as the gay themed Pacifica Hotel failed in 1985. With the development around Tropicana and the strip in the early 90s, the San Remo name lasted almost 20 years, until Hooters took over in 2006. Bankruptcy followed during the great recession and the hotel was recently bought by OYO Hotels, which is dominated by scathing reviews on TripAdvisor. Maybe the A’s will have more than 9 acres to build on given the slum properties to the east of the Tropicana.
I dunno…. it sounds to me like the perfect location for a coupla guys like Fisher and Kaval to place their discount bin baseball team…
There is, of course, a temptation to say ‘thatzit-it’sover’ now that the vote has taken place (or whatever the MLB owners club called the herding of ownercats into the box marked ‘yes’). And the Youtube videos about “A’s GONE!!!” or “Why the A’s are moving to Vegas” started just minutes after the initial proposal was made by A’s ownership to MLB…. so that part won’t change.
Pretty clearly, though, it is not all over. Fisher has much to negotiate, and as his discussions with the city of Oakland and the Peralta community college district (who broke off negotiations with them more or less when they started) clearly shows, he’s not very good at it.
Oakland has made mistakes in this process, but they are at the table now (or were until this morning anyway). Their mistakes pale in comparison to Fisher’s. I will be very surprised if he is able to make a viable deal with his partners (land owners, banks, even meet the conditions of the existing funding agreement) in Vegas. It is much more likely that he will find the site and budget not sufficient and then try to expand his deal there (as he has done elsewhere).
So now, whether his team moves there or not, he is Vegas’ problem.
Good riddance.
I believe the existing lease extension at the coliseum expires in November of next year. There should be no further extension offered or granted under any circumstances.
The circumstances under which the lease should be extended are if and only if MLB gives Oakland something like the deal the NFL gave Cleveland when the original Browns became the Ravens.
1) The colors, logos, name, and all the historical records, etc, stay in Oakland. The team in Vegas will be treated, essentially, as an expansion team.
2) The league assures them they can get an expansion team if they can figure out how to build a new stadium.
3) A bit of a discount on the expansion fee for the new owners.
They’d have to find a new owner who will take what the city is offering at HT or at the Coliseum site, but that shouldn’t be too hard.
Item 2 strikes me as very dangerous, since you’d be effectively promising a blank check for a stadium.
No, I would imagine they’d offer what they’ve already offered to the Old A’s as a stadium deal for the New A’s.
So long as the lease agreement is worded that way, so MLB can’t come back with “Sorry, our expansion team absolutely requires 24-karat gold plumbing fixtures.”
So, after being f*d around by MLB and Fisher for nearly two decades, Oakland should walk in to MLB’s offices and offer essentially any amount of money (but at a minimum, $1bn for a stadium and to find an owner with $1.5-2Bn for expansion) to get a team back that can wear green and gold?
No. Under no circumstances should there be an extension offered. Get that con artist PoS out of the coliseum as soon as possible – if necessary by accidentally running into part of it with a bulldozer (*not really. He is still a lease holder so could sue for damages if he can’t use the stadium during his lease term).
Of course, if the A’s are still behind on their maintenance fund payments, it would be perfectly reasonable to lock them out of the stadium on opening day 2024…
Ok, but only now it’s really final that we finally have our site. I think.
https://www.fieldofschemes.com/2017/09/14/12896/as-pick-peralta-as-stadium-site-vow-all-private-money-except-for-tons-of-infrastructure-cash/
This Vegas scheme is far from final for about 20 reasons.
Again, with nearly 4 million within an hour of Sacramento, and the Bay area just over an hour away, what is all this Vegas nonsense?
There’s no glory in being the member of your filthy-rich family who conquered Sacramento.
“We lose a little on every move, but we make it up with volume”
Sacramento
Portland
Nashville
Charlotte
San Antonio
Salt Lake City
Montreal
Mexico City
Monterrey, Nuevo Leon
Guadalajara
The list of better locations than Vegas is long.
Somewhere I read the A’s could potentially play in Mexico City for the three years they would be homeless. Not sure how that would work out. But it would make Coor Field look like a pitchers park. If the A’s had a decent HR hitter he might break Bonds season record.
Maybe they can do like that Atlantic League team did and be the Road Warriors for a couple of years, always playing away games…
The Las Vegas Ruppert Mundys!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_American_Novel_(Roth_novel)
They could become like the 1899 Cleveland Spiders where teams refused to play in Cleveland because noone was attending the games. The spiders played 112 games on the road and 42 at home. Perhaps the 112 games on the road would not be an unbreakable mark? :)
I guess anything is possible, Ken, but playing three seasons in Mexico to me seems like it would produce considerably lower revenue than three seasons in a temporary stadium somewhere.
I mean maybe people would go, and maybe some Mexican TV network would be willing to pay more than the Bay Area SN they are on right now… for a lame duck team that isn’t “theirs” and is only going to be there for three years with AA/A players… but I have my doubts.
I would bet they will work quite hard to get some kind of a deal in Sacramento or Summerlin. Neither is ideal for varying reasons (not least they wouldn’t control available dates or start times in either stadium).
Would they consider trying to use Cashman field (which means it’s other tenant can’t use it…) in the short term? That would be a really backward move but I guess it’s only for three seasons (barring the inevitable construction issues and overruns and financing and…)
No-one will mind home games with 11pm local starts, right?
Instead of complaining about all this, just get behind it. Like the Locals have!
https://theathletic.com/4611968/2023/06/15/bryce-harper-as-mlb-las-vegas/
I think of bigger question is how is the media market going to be divided? I’m pretty sure the Padres, Angels, Dodgers and probably Diamondbacks all claimed Las Vegas as part of their “territory”. I can’t see the Padres, Angels, or Dodgers giving the A’s any access to the Southern CA media market nor the Diamondbacks giving the A’s access to anything in AZ. So that leaves Neveda and perhaps New Mexico and Mexico…..
Manfred said in the press conference I just posted the link to above that the Las Vegas territory is spelled out in the relocation agreement, but he didn’t say what it was. He did say the Giants’ territory remains unchanged, and the East Bay becomes “open territory.”
So does that still mean giants aren’t allowed to broadcast games in East Bay? East Bay fans are still banned from attending giants games in SF? giants prohibited from selling merchandise in East Bay?
Sarcastic hypotheticals illustrate just how ridiculous the territorial situation is here in the Bay Area compared to NYC/LA/Chi. Forever $#@! the giants and Viva Las Vegas!
Rob Manfred, saying the quiet parts loud since 2015®