Representatives of the Oakland A’s and the city of Oakland met yesterday as planned to discuss the city’s latest proposal for a $97 million lease extension to keep the team in the Oakland Coliseum for 3-5 years while a new stadium in Las Vegas is (maybe) built, and how did that go? Not well at all!
“We appreciate Oakland’s engagement and also we are far apart on the terms needed to agree on an extension,” the club said in a statement.
ESPN previously reported that A’s owner John Fisher would accept a two-year deal with a total of $17 million in rent, which certainly qualifies as far apart. No word on whether he would be okay with the city’s demand that he sell his 50% stake in the Coliseum site to a private developer (presumably these guys), though ESPN said that wasn’t expected to be a sticking point in talks.
If Fisher doesn’t want to pay up to Oakland, though, his other options are limited. ABC7’s Casey Pratt says he’s hearing (from undisclosed sources, this was just a tweet) that A’s execs are set to meet with Sacramento officials today, then will hold an internal meeting tomorrow. Sacramento’s stadium only has about 10,000 seats, with another 4,000 fans able to sit on its outfield lawn and in standing room, so would seem like a terrible option for an alleged major league team — though their current average attendance would fit comfortably in a ballpark that size. Also, a temporary move to Sacramento might allow Fisher to hold on to his lucrative TV deal, even if he would have to negotiate it down from the current $67 million a year if he moved out of the Bay Area proper, which might be alluring to an owner who has pretty much given up on the whole “put a viable team on the field and try to sell tickets to watch them” thing as a business model.
All of this, of course, presupposes that the A’s will have a stadium in Vegas to move to by 2028 or thereabouts, and there remains no word of how that’s supposed to work, either financially or in terms of fitting it into the available space. Fisher increasingly appears to just be making this up as he goes along, but only Oakland so far has even partly called his bluff — it remains to be seen whether Sacramento or MLB or the mysterious investors who Fisher claims will pay for $1 billion worth of his Vegas stadium will tell him to go pound sand as well, which is probably what it would take for our reader predictions to come true. Until then, we may be left wondering what Sacramento River Cats fans will think when they find out their Triple-A team may be replaced by a lower level of baseball.
The lack of public support for paying for MLB ballparks is out in the open now.
Fisher’s Farce is Example 1. In Vegas he has neither a credible ballpark plan nor a credible timeline for opening a new ballpark. He wouldn’t put up enough of his own money for an Oakland ballpark, and probably won’t put up much for Vegas either. Sacramento voters won’t pay for a MLB park there even if he “temporarily” moves the A’s there.
Example 2 is the Royals. They tried to get a new and free-to-them ballpark in KC by hiding behind the far more popular NFL Chiefs. Didn’t work. And the Royals have no credible threat to move elsewhere.
Example 3 is the Angels. Arte Moreno went from suburb to suburb in the LA area trying to find money for a new ballpark. The deal he finally made to stay at the existing place was investigated for corruption by the FBI, and that forced the resignation of Anaheim’s mayor. He put the team up for sale and then took it off the market because no one wants to overpay for a MLB franchise that can’t get public money to replace its 60-year-old ballpark.
It’s odd that the A’s are thinking about moving to Sacramento to play in a AAA stadium when they could just play in Las Vegas in a AAA stadium. If you’re gonna move the team to Vegas you should just… move the team to Vegas. Is this all a hardball negotiation to get Oakland to pay what Manfred wants and keep the A’s in Oakland?
As noted in the post above, it’s probably a gambit by Fisher to hold on to his current cable deal, even if he has to cut the NBC Sports Bay Area a break on annual payments. If he moved to a minor-league stadium in Las Vegas he would have nobody buying tickets *or* watching on TV, and billionaire man cannot live on MLB revenue-sharing payment alone.
Who said Fisher could build an x-billion dollar stadium next to the Hooters Hotel, or whatever it’s called now, the world’s largest Motel 6 and a runway protection zone. As I’ve repeated 100 times, Las Vegas is going to be a lousy baseball market, especially if the so-called major league team keeps racking up 100 losses.
Vegas don’t want a John Fischer team.
Vegas doesn’t want the John Fisher team, but John Fisher wants his team in Vegas. And Major League Baseball approved it.
That’s the quandary.
There’s also the matter that the current A’s roster is hot garbage, and that’s probably an insult to overwarmed refuse everywhere. Fielding a team with a sub-.300 win percentage in a minor league park for multiple years would tank any local support before they opened their new digs. At least in this arrangement, they’d have a few years to be at least passably mediocre before opening in Vegas. Given how much of their Vegas attendance plan is banking on casinos comping tickets to their guests, they can’t afford to be so terrible that a ticket to their game would worthless and no resort would want to buy the tickets in bulk.
The other fly in the Summerlin ballpark ointment is the ownership of the stadium. The stadium (and development) is owned by Hughes corp.
It’s true that the AAA team presently holding a lease there is the primary affiliate of the A’s (emphasis on single-A), but that team is, so far as I know, still owned by Hughes corp as well.
So you’ve got a poor man billionaire who is begging for money from everybody to make him look like a big shot moving in to Vegas who’s AAA affiliate and prospective temp Vegas home is owned by a corporation that is several orders of magnitude richer than the so called big shot.
Will Hughes corp evict it’s own AAA team to help the floundering failson who strategically left himself with nowhere to play?
I’m not sure what the Aviators attendance has been like the past few years, but I’m willing to be they have outdrawn the A’s on a number (if not majority) of occasions. IF I’m Hughes corp, I tell him to take an F’ing walk and never darken my doorway again.
The other key date to look out for is April 9th. That’s when Schools Over Stadiums will be in court in Carson City to determine if their ballot measure to repeal the $380 million funding from the Nevada legislature can go ahead and collect signatures to get on the ballot, will need to be refiled, or thrown out altogether. If that ballot measure is allowed to go through, with the state teachers’ union providing organizational muscle and financial backing, whoo boy that does not portend well for the A’s.
Ultimately, I think the A’s will end up in Sacramento. The city will offer some kind of sweetheart deal, in the hopes that strong local support in the intervening years before the A’s leave(?) for Vegas can make them an attractive expansion candidate. I still think Fisher is playing with fire by giving Comcast any excuse to renegotiate their broadcasting deal. They’re going to do everything they can to reduce that deal down to the bare minimum and bone over Fisher, because they’ve almost assuredly been taking a loss on that contract for years with how bad the A’s have been.
It’s too bad they closed the Tropicana, it was the best of old Vegas, a beautiful property. Back in the 90s my go-to buffet was the Island Buffet, the Tropicana will be greatly missed. Whatever replaces the Tropicana will be alot better without a baseball stadium shoehorned into the Northeast corner. Salt Lake City, Nashville and Charlotte are all better markets than Vegas, as is staying at the Coliseum site, even if all that can be done is implode Mt. Davis and renovate the Coliseum.
They are pretty much gone now, the old Vegas casinos. The new ones are unquestionably better (and much bigger) in every way, but still… it feels like something is missing.
“The town will never be the same. After the Tangiers, the big corporations took it all over. Today it looks like Disneyland. And while the kids play cardboard pirates, Mommy and Daddy drop the house payments and Junior’s college money on the poker slots. In the old days, dealers knew your name, what you drank, what you played. Today, it’s like checkin’ into an airport. And if you order room service, you’re lucky if you get it by Thursday. Today, it’s all gone. You get a whale show up with four million in a suitcase, and some twenty-five-year-old hotel school kid is gonna want his Social Security Number. After the Teamsters got knocked out of the box, the corporations tore down practically every one of the old casinos. And where did the money come from to rebuild the pyramids? Junk bonds. But in the end, I wound up right back where I started. I could still pick winners, and I could still make money for all kinds of people back home. And why mess up a good thing? And that’s that.”
Pretty sure that is copyright text.
Neil;
What is your understanding of the NBC Bay Area RSN rights ‘region’ (or footprint)?
I ask as I had originally been told that Sacramento was clearly and completely outside the zone the network was ‘paying’ for.
Keown’s article on espn a few days ago made it sound like there might be some kind of “shadow/penumbra” region where the existing contract might still partially apply (presumably because Sacramento is still in the broadcast area or NBCSN/BA is available there etc).
If Sacramento is outside the prescribed area it could be an easy walk for NBCSN.
They are paying far too much for the rights to the franchise Fisher has personally destroyed. They could negotiate down to retain the rights, but why? Tearing up the existing contract and negotiating hard on a new one (which would last a maximum of three years and has literally no long term value or renewal prospects) would seem the prudent option. And if you lose the rights to an entertainment property that is close to unwatchable and that can only get worse when Gelof and Langeliers petition the courts for emancipation,
“Oh well”.
They could be spending that $67m on a property that has some future and might actually interest more people than the A’s do. So that leaves the Earthquakes out, but still… there are other things the network could spend it’s money on. And I think it is really hard to look at what they have to broadcast and say they are getting their money’s worth.
Your understanding is my understanding. I don’t know why NBC Sports California (the corporate sibling of NBC Sports Bay Area that owns the A’s rights) would want to pay a significant amount of money for Sacramento A’s games, but that’s what the sportswriters keep saying.
Thanks.
One more question:
Doesn’t the A’s access to MLB’s billionaire welfare program expire after this season?
I understood their window to keep collecting checks while in a major market ended at the close of this season. Did that get extended as part of the Vegas move approval? If so, I don’t recall it. That expiry was thought to be the major driver behind his ‘hurry’ to do a deal now rather than continue waiting another 20 years…
After this year, Fisher will NEED the full payment from his current RSN more than ever.
That got extended as part of the Vegas move approval:
https://www.fieldofschemes.com/2024/01/08/20800/mlb-frees-as-from-deadline-to-finalize-vegas-stadium-by-changing-definition-of-finalize/
If the A’s are Sacramento bound, I really wish that I still watched sports.
If decently sized markets like Phoenix and the Twin Cities can’t get tv deals- why would any broadcast entity pay for the rights to an embarrassment of a franchise in Sacramento or Las Vegas?
Reportedly, cable and satellite operators have the contractual right to drop the NBC Sports California channel if the channel is no longer televising A’s games. By making a deal with Fisher, NBCSCA preserves the per-subscriber fees it gets from those cable and satellite operators.
If it wasn’t for that… I agree that no channel would pay anything more than a nominal amount to televise Fisher’s Farce.
So could Fisher use that same leverage to keep his broadcast deal if he moved to Las Vegas? Or to Salt Lake City, or Greensboro? How do the cable carrier contracts define what an “A’s game” is?
Yeah- if I’m the cable operators, I’m trying to figure out how to drop NBC sports California. The Sacramento A’s aren’t the same as the Oakland A’s. Whatever value there is in having NBC Sports California on your cable/satellite service comes from the baseball team with 50+ years of history in the East Bay, not a similarly awful team playing in West Sacramento.
NBC Sports California also happens to be the TV home of the San Jose Sharks and Sacramento Kings. Xfinity is the legacy TV provider in most of the Bay Area and Central Valley. You really want to get rid of that RSN just because a baseball team is leaving California? Knee-jerk fan thinking to the extreme.
Given how poor the A’s relationship is with the city of Oakland, why would moving from Oakland to Sacramento hurt TV ratings? It’s not like people in San Francisco stopped watching the 49ers when the moved to Santa Clara, or fans in Oakland stopped watching when the Warriors moved to SF. I don’t think the people watching the games on TV will care than the team moved a few counties over.
If NBC Sports California carries Kings games, their market is northern California broadly, which includes Sacramento as much as East Bay
Chucky- I think Bay Area cable providers should look to getting rid of the RSN, or at least paying less for it. No one in the Bay Area cares about the Kings, or Sacramento A’s. Paying top dollar for an RSN that has only one team in your media market is ridiculous (and while I like hockey, the NHL is pretty niche and the sharks are terrible).
The Sharks’ TV territory includes the Bay Area, the Central Valley, and all of Northern California. The Kings’ TV territory doesn’t include the Bay Area because that belongs to the Golden State Warriors. And “Bay Area cable providers” means Xfinity for the most part.
It bears repeating: Fans think like fans. Broadcasters think like businesspeople.
That’s my point. The sharks are the only reason for anyone in the Bay Area to care about NBC Sports California. Having the local rights to Sacramento sports teams is just a business any broadcaster in 2024 wants to be in.
Interesting, M, thank you.
A double-ended must carry is an interesting contractual clause for the carriers to hold. I would say it bears considering from long range though.
While an in-situ MLB team does bring cachet to the RSN and cable/sat/streaming carriers and makes carriage a more attractive proposition, having an incompetently run business fiasco that will in all likelihood fail to top 500,000 in attendance this season (maybe even fail to top 300,000… come on Fishco, you can do this… err, not do this… err, whatever) may not.
If fans are dropping the carrier (I’m assuming the RSN is in a popular bundle, but it may not be possible to know how popular the channel itself is compared to others in the bundle) or package because the A’s are an utter disgrace, then the carriers have already seen the drop they are ‘fearing’ through the loss of the A’s games.
In fact, I would argue that NBCSCA has already ‘lost’ the A’s games in the sense it is a major league property. It is no longer an MLB property in anything but name.
Will some people hang on and continue subscribing (maybe even watching) for legacy reasons? I’m sure some will. I’m watching the early part of the season when possible purely for the schadenfreude.
Will it be a majority of fans that do this? I doubt it.
The announced crowd of 6618 (iirc) the other night looked credible. And I could not count all the fans during the brief seating shots. But a guesstimate would be that there were no more than 4000-4500 people in the stands that night.
The viewing numbers have to be in similar free fall as well. Get ready Vegas, you’ve never seen anything like this before… (*except when the CFL expanded there in the early 1990s).
Does the MLBPA have any say in what sort of facilities it’s membership works and plays in?
What are the odds the As just stay in Sacramento? The AAA stadium seems nice enough and the local fans will be initially excited to watch major league baseball (i.e. the visiting teams). Vivek pitches the city on helping bankroll an expansion to the stadium (add 5~15K seats) and Fisher signs a 20~30 year lease. Vivek has all sorts of good karma with Sacramento with the Kings playing well, so he might be a better pitchman than Fisher
I would say the chances they stay there is pretty low. While Sacramento is demographically an ok market for a team. Economically- there aren’t any major corporate sponsors or organizations capable of buying premium seating.