We made it through the weekend, and it looks like the Oakland A’s are still moving temporarily to Sacramento, though with A’s owner John Fisher you never can tell. Let’s check out the latest developments:
- A’s stadium goon Dave Kaval clarified, according to the San Jose Mercury News, that “there is no lease agreement” with Sacramento and “the A’s won’t pay a dime in rent.” Rather, the A’s will pay for some upgrades at the River Cats‘ 10,000-seat ballpark (price: Kaval didn’t say) and will be allowed to play there for three years with an option for a fourth based on just, I dunno, a handshake? Handshakes come with option years now? Followup questions much, Merc News?
- ESPN’s Buster Olney tweeted on Friday that other MLB teams have “a lot of disgust with how the A’s have handled the ballpark situation,” especially since Fisher is expected to keep lowballing payroll while farming revenue-sharing checks from the league. “This makes us all look bad,” Olney quotes “one person” as saying (presumably a person who works for an MLB team, Olney didn’t say). Olney didn’t explain, even after being asked about it by pretty much everyone on Twitter, why then every team owner in baseball voted for Fisher’s Vegas move. It’s the expansion fees, right? It’s gotta be the expansion fees.
- A “communications and branding expert” in Las Vegas writes in the Nevada Independent that the Sacramento residency “leaves one wondering why the club wouldn’t simply move to Summerlin’s minor league ballpark instead,” then answers his own question by saying “one of the main reasons Nevada was probably rejected as an option is the annual $67 million deal the team has with NBC Sports California” which will have to be renegotiated in Sacramento but still might be worth more than whatever Fisher might get in Nevada. Plus, he notes, the Nevada Supreme Court is set to hear arguments starting tomorrow in the Nevada state teachers union’s push to put a stadium funding repeal referendum on the state ballot, which could kill the entire Vegas move if a vote goes like it did last week in Kansas City. All of which adds up, writes Michael Schaus, to “an improvised and haphazard scramble,” yup, don’t think anyone had missed that.
If there’s been one common theme to Fisher’s entire A’s relocation saga, it’s been pushing on ahead regardless of whether he seems to know how he plans to proceed or why he’s doing it — whether that was choosing Las Vegas in the first place when he had a seemingly more lucrative stadium deal on the table in a bigger market in Oakland or choosing Sacramento as a temporary home because maybe he can keep part of his TV deal and anyway he’s friends with the local minor-league owner there. Not that any of the theories above are necessarily wrong, but there’s a fine line between decision and whim, and John Fisher above all other major sports owners keeps finding a way to walk it.
What I don’t get is that the bottom has dropped out of the local broadcast blueprint. Add that to the question of who is going to watch the A’s on TV for the next three years (if ever). Why would the RSN want to “renegotiate” at all for anything more than subsistence-level money? They should be sitting around celebrating that the A’s have broken their contract calling for them to play in the Bay Area and letting them out of that horrible deal.
And the A’s have been broadcast in Sac for decades, so the numbers are right there, it’s not even like the RSN needs to speculate.
Exactly, Brian.
This makes no sense no matter how you look at it. Even the MLB welfare check mecca (Vegas) he has been going after won’t help him. To fund the stadium he wants to build there (or at least his $1.2Bn share of it… if it comes in on budget which it won’t) he will have to sell greater than 100% of the equity he has in the team. He stands to make significantly less on RSN rights in Vegas than he made in Oakland (if he ever gets there).
The RSN that has the A’s and Sharks is kinda stuck in the middle here. If A’s leave NorCal completely, then don’t have to pay. But they also have little reason to even exist. No carriage fees from Comcast, DirecTV etc. It used to be that the Giants, A’s, Sharks and Warriors shared one RSN and had multiple overflow channels for conflicts. Likely the three teams left wind up in a similar arrangement eventually.
Can we just skip to “John Fisher is a greedy nitwit”?
How about “John Fisher is the Dan Snyder of MLB”?
I can’t wait for the MLBPA to reject this, which might actually leave the Wandering Athletics to play as a traveling team…
It appears that the MLBPA can only reject it based on working conditions, so if Fisher/Ranadive/MLB do enough upgrades to things like clubhouses, that would eliminate that roadblock. Though like so many other things with this whole move deal, there remains a whole lot of [citation needed].
Pretty sure the way this plays out is that the MLBPA complains and the A’s wave their hands around and say it will all be fine by opening day, don’t worry. Then they do 40% less than the minimum and on opening day MLBPA can either cancel opening day or go along. Remember the players are totally onboard with the idea of extracting money out of taxpayers, after all they get a cut. Fisher is pretty bad at this but the last thing anybody in the business wants is to set a precedent that owners should build their own stadiums or that their threats to move should be ignored. They players will go along. Much as I might want them to put a stop to this nonsense.
Honestly I’m rapidly losing interest now. I’m a lifelong baseball fan but I think I might be done. I’m so sick of the constant whining and gaslighting, not to mention the $20 beers. The government should be finding ways to take money away from worthless failsons like Fisher who haven’t actually done anything to earn their money. Instead we look for ways to reward their incompetence. I don’t want to be a part of it anymore.
I’m with you on your last paragraph, especially with the constant changes to the game: intentional walks, pitcher doesn’t throw four pitches, he just indicates a walk and voila! Larger bases, pitch clocks (that have been tinkered with again), guy starts on second for extra innings, etc.
Hey! You are messing with my only legacy in the game of baseball!
What do you mean, the players “get a cut?” There is no salary floor in baseball. The owners don’t have to pass on the value they get from a free stadium.
A new stadium did not improve the Marlins’ payroll very much, for example.
And I assume they don’t have to share expansion fees with the players. I know they don’t in the NHL, but I’m not sure of MLB.
The owners do tend to spend more when they have more, though. (Not that they rationally should, but they do, at least somewhat.) So the players do get some trickle-down money from stadium subsidies, though not nearly as much as the owners do.
If I’m a replacement level player, I’m very much interested in Teams 31 and 32. Mike Trout may not care as much.
The old House of David ballpark in Benton Harbor, Mich., might have available dates.
In related news:
What’s next for Chase Field? Politicians work toward deal to keep DBacks, taxpayers happy
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/phoenix/2024/04/08/politicians-aim-for-chase-field-deal-to-keep-dbacks-taxpayers-happy/72898676007/
I wonder how they’re really working to keep taxpayers happy.
Pay for your own stadium, $nakes
Much as a creep and weirdo he is, Robert Kraft proved that if you pay for the whole thing, you are entitled to the profits. Unfortunately most billionaires want all the profits and none of the expenses, so they grovel to politicians and it usually works.
The justification for all this is expansion- however, what sane potential owner is going to pay $2+ billion for a team in a small market as the local tv deal system collapses?
The Baltimore sale seemed incredibly low considering they just got $700 million from the state and the right to develop a sizable parking lot.
How many streaming subscribers will there be for a new team in Portland or Nashville or SLC? Why would anyone pay to watch bad baseball?
What happens if the stadium can’t be built in Las Vegas? Are the A’s going to stay in Sacramento past the 3-4 year deal?
Seems far more likely they end up staying in SacTown than ever making anything happen in Vegas. If nothing else inertia will keep them there. Building something in Vegas is going to be a heavy lift and that’s not the A’s MO. Slumming in a AAA park while doing nothing except cashing welfare checks makes perfect sense.
My guess would be “oh hell yeah”, Jeremy.
It’s still early days and they could back out of the Sacramento deal/non deal when they see the price (“you mean we have to pay? Isn’t this whole thing about someone else paying??”) or try to spark interest (bwahahahahaha) in some other location currently looking on enviously at Sacramento/LV (!)
If they don’t back out of the binding non-deal Kaval claims they have not signed in Sacramento, I would expect them to be there for a very, very long time – unless Fisher starts legitimately losing money (which he claimed to do in Oakland but very rarely actually did) and does a panic sale.
Even then, anyone think he’ll get $1.5Bn for a fire sale of a team he has stripped of assets (including it’s tv territory) and parked in a AAA stadium in Sacramento?
I don’t.
Agreed. I registered my skepticism of Ranadive in the previous thread, but at the very least, he seems to be rather adroitly setting himself up as the buyer of first resort, at a bargain-basement price. Long-term prospects remain hazy, but that’s no surprise.
I still believe that the public funding for the Vegas stadium is going to get pulled, either by ballot measure or in the next legislative session. That’s why Fisher has struggled to find a development partner to cover the difference of the Armadillo Dome’s cost, and still can’t find a bank willing to provide the loans and liquidity to make the private side of this deal work. None of this was an issue for building Allegiant Field with the Raiders, even though Marc Davis is significantly less wealthy than John Fisher.
I think if the Vegas deal falls through, Fisher will be forced to sell the team in the same manner that MLB did with McCourt and the Dodgers: not by an edict from the league, but where they foreclosed on any opportunity for the owner to get themselves out of the hole. They’ll cut off his welfare checks and refuse to give him any bailout money, so he’ll walk before sinking his personal fortune into the team.
Where will that leave the A’s? I think if Ranadive can pull a rabbit out of a hat and get a new ballpark built somewhere in Sac, that team will be his. Otherwise, I suspect they’d try to keep the team in NorCal with someone willing to build a ballpark and be done with it. I have strong doubts they’d burn a potential expansion market (and the fat fees that go with it) by allowing the A’s to be bought and moved at a much lower price. A huge part of why MLB was cool with the A’s moving to Vegas was because there were no local ownership groups willing to pay the expansion fees. I don’t know of another market where there’s a willingness to publicly finance a new ballpark but no local deep-pocketed wannabe owners.
I think the taxpayer funding is questionable too. Even if it isn’t compromised by SOS (or others), it isn’t nearly enough to make the stadium happen.
Assuming dumb & dumber stick to more or less the current (7th?) renderings, they are looking at north of $1.5bn. They have $400m, more or less.
Fisher owns about 90% of the club (per Forbes 2016 – he bought Lou Wolff’s 10% then) and the club is valued by Forbes at around $1.2Bn today. I wouldn’t invest in a project that required greater than 100% of the franchise’s equity to complete. Apparently, neither will anyone else.
Since most of Fisher’s wealth is tied up in family businesses, he may not be able to liquidate at will to fund this boondoggle (at very least, he will likely have to sell within the family and thus perhaps not at full market value). If he liquidated all his non-baseball assets and put them into the project, I’m still not convinced it could be completed. It’s that bad.
Do you think Ranadive would only be interested in staying in Sacramento? I know he owns the Kings, but would he consider moving to a better market ‘west of Sacramento’ that has significant MLB history and is now ‘open’?
I think Ranadive is probably only interested in Sacramento. I also think that despite his Kings ownership; he might have less cash on hand then Fisher and Sacramento has the same California problems as Oakland- that it’s really really hard to build a stadium with public money.
In a perfect scenario, the Sacramento A’s get sold to a super rich tech bro, he plays it cool to the other owners but backs up the Mayflower trucks and brings the team to San Jose. Tell the Giants to suck it, threaten the antitrust exemption. It’s the most appealing area of the country without a team, and Santa Clara county has shown some willingness to throw money at stadium projects.
Somebody already tried the San Jose thing. Didn’t work out so well.
Up to and including talking the city of San Jose into challenging MLB’s antitrust exemption in court, if I remember correctly.
Yup:
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/san-jose-loses-mlb-antitrust-appeal-to-acquire-oakland-as/
MLB set up a “blue ribbon commission” that spent 2 years “studying” the San Jose issue over a decade ago. Everyone, including some pretty plugged-in reporters like Bob Nightengale, said that the commission was going to green-light the move and was merely figuring out the details of the Giants’ compensation. The “public” owner back then was Lew Wolff, a well-connected San Jose developer and former fraternity brother with then-Commissioner Bud Selig. Selig even convinced the owners to block the A’s purchase from a group led by Andy Dolich so that Wolff and Fisher could buy the team instead back in the aughts. Totally a done deal, right?
Then that blue ribbon commission came back and said lol, the A’s cannot move to San Jose and will never be allowed to. San Jose threatened to sue and it didn’t matter. Wolff sold his stake to Fisher and now here we are. I still will never understand what the hell happened, but that episode permanently slammed the door on the San Jose A’s. If the Commissioner infamous for nut-cutting and forcing Peter Angelos to accept a new National League club on his doorstep in DC was willing to waste everyone’s time for 2 years and burn an old friend to keep the A’s out of San Jose, there ain’t no reason to believe that Milquetoast Manfred and his slapstick cohort would allow a new owner to come in and change that. I’ve no idea what the hell happened there, but if San Jose was even remotely possible the A’s would have been there for years already by now.
I’m not saying they explore legal options. I’m saying they just move, Al Davis style. Tell the league all A’s games will be played in Palo Alto at the Sunken Diamond, while the team negotiates with Santa Clara county. Tell Manfred to take them to court. Force all the other owners to get on the same page and revoke ownership. Do all of this while they’re knee deep in expansion proposals and/or the Giants heirs are playing succession (Charles Johnson is old af).
It would be funniest/smartest business move. Either you get a team in San Jose, or you force the other owners to buy you out.
I think Ranadive would stay in Sac. He has a ton of local goodwill for saving the hometown team which he could potentially leverage for reduced red tape or city commitments for infrastructure improvements. Also, low-key Sac could be a valuable market. The Sac-Modesto DMA is top 20, and that’s not including Fresno or the millions of other folks in the Central Valley. They’d need a retractable roof or enclosed ballpark to deal with the heat out there. but it’s doable.
If not Ranadive, I would think that some deep-pocketed developer would jump at the opportunity to build out at either the Coliseum site or Howard Terminal. John Fisher is too risk-averse to see it, but the potentially billions of dollars worth of reclaimed waterfront land in West Oakland would be a bonanza and attract the kind of uber-rich California real estate investors who could sink a couple billion in a project with a 20-year payoff.
My main point though, is that I think MLB will do their damndest to ensure that the prospective owners who’ve indicated a willingness to pay for the expansion fees end up paying them. There aren’t a whole lot of would-be owners beating down the door to pay those fees, so if Big League Utah or Music City Baseball got to buy the A’s and move them to their market, that would leave a ton of money on the table. That would mean keeping the A’s in some part of Northern California. Although who the hell knows, maybe that means in 2027 the A’s will be playing at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds.
Davis didn’t just up and move, he filed suit and won.
Mystery Tech Bro can move the A’s to San Jose all he wants, he’s not going to sell many tickets when MLB doesn’t put their games on the schedule.
NFL has its own mechanisms to fund stadiums and a dome in Las Vegas was always going to do well because there really isn’t any competition for a stadium of that size in Vegas.
I guess that kinda feeds into my point, though. The money was there and guaranteed by both the politicians and the league. The stadium fit a clear venue need in the biggest live events city in the world. Marc Davis is an idiot and brokeboi by owner standards, but it didn’t matter in getting partners on board.
The ballpark has none of that, so even though Fisher is pledging a billion of his own money, no one else wants to step up.
“This makes us all look bad”.
Um, guys, um… Frank McCourt, Marge Schott, Jeffrey Loria, Charlie Finley, Charles Comiskey etc etc.
It’s not like you don’t have a history of welcoming despicable excuses for humanity into your little club.
And you are blaming the guy who needed Lou Wolff as a front man to get into the club for your OWN decision to let him into the club.
Big picture, boys. And it is all boys of course…
Say, this comment won’t hurt my chances of an expansion franchise down the road if I write the big check will it? No? Good to know.
Do not forget Jeffery Loria. Fisher makes Loria look competent by comparison.
Loria got the stadium built and has a World Series ring! A’s fans should be so lucky.
Maybe the Giants are giving the As a deal in Sacramento to get them out of the bay area
I’m still kinda shocked that none of the other California based teams didn’t pitch a fit over this very issue. There are 3 clubs splitting up Southern California, whereas the Giants are about to have NorCal entirely to themselves. Even accounting for the population differences, it’s still wildly lopsided. That’s not even considering that the Bay Area has one of the most lucrative corporate markets in America. If I were the Dodgers but especially the Padres, I’d be livid over a divisional rival getting access to rivers of more money.
The Giants may well market themselves as “Oakland’s new team” (or whatever) over the next few seasons, but as I understand it MLB has made it clear that Oakland and the East Bay don’t become Giants territory just because the A’s leave.
There is, of course, precedent for this given that the Yankees faced the same restriction when the Giants and Dodgers both left for the left coast (and others).
Despite Fisher’s complaints to the contrary, I don’t think it is lost on anyone in the MLB offices or ownership group that Oakland will be among the best 3 or 4 expansion locations available once dumb & dumber have moved on to Vegas (by way of Sacramento, Chico, Fresno, Boise and/or Colorado Springs).
If it were my money going to expansion fees, I’d much rather have Oakland (which has a long history of 17-25,000 paid attendance despite ownership that was doing everything it could to keep the out) over any of the other available options.
Re: the Yankees, it doesn’t seem like “territorial rights” existed in the ’50s and ’60s. See: LA/Anaheim Angels and Oakland Athletics.
Territorial rights certainly did exist then (the Yankees were told that there would be a new NL franchise in NY in the near future). No new AL team was ever created in their region, obviously.
What was different was that regional TV rights really weren’t much of a thing – true enough, TV was really quite new then.
With respect to the Angels, IIRC Autry bought the rights to the name from Walter O’Malley (who had purchased the PCL team that played in LA) and subsequently agreed to be a paying tenant at Chavez ravine until the Anaheim stadium was ready. I am not sure what if any indemnification the Angels paid over and above those two items (probably none – see below).
I don’t recall any details of Finley’s move of the A’s to Oakland (other than that he had tried to move for several years before the AL allowed him to).
I think it is important to note that, unlike now, the leagues were still very much separate entities at that time, so it only required a vote of the AL’s 10 clubs to approve either move/expansion.
The Giants don’t own the River Cats, do they?
MLB teams just have development deals with minor league teams. They don’t usually have much control of how they do business off the field.
Right, Fisher’s deal is with Ranadive, who owns the River Cats (and the Kings). The Giants just have an affiliate deal with Ranadive, which runs through 2030.
Well said. I’m a native Bostonian living in California for 35 years and Oakland for 26 of them, and I’ve comfortably split my baseball allegiance between the Red Sox, A’s and the Giants for as many years. But I too am sickened and fed up with the greed, two-timing, mendacity and cynicism (please free to add adjectives at will) of major league baseball, and will no longer have any part of it. I’m proud of my adopted home for finally holding firm and saying Enough! Enough of the endless extortion and added demands everytime the people of Oakland – aka: the taxpayers – made a concession. I’m proud to see the city breaking free of the financial burdens placed upon it for decades by dealings with shady characters like teary-eyed, Al “I wanna come home” Davis. It’s about time that every city understands that it has value beyond a transient sports team, and stop letting the owners divide and split them into combative factions, which only the team owners shall slink away from unscathed. P.S. S.F. Giants: you signed that MLB endorsement of the relocation, too. And I can’t think of another team more motivated to see the A’s out of the Bay Area, even if it means they’ll have to play in the home of your own triple-A affiliate. Nobody has forgotten your sputtering paroxisms when you thought they could actually be playing in San Jose. So goodnight to you baseball, many of us have better things to do than eat a twenty-dollar hot dog in the sun, while watching a fossilized sports for three-plus hours.
What a wonderful dream it would be if Oakland city found a way to strip Fisher of his piece of the city land pie thru imminent domain, seeing as how he’s abandoning it. Good luck and I give the good people of Sacramento 3 minutes to discover what a worthless carpetbagger he is…
My heart breaks for the fans in Oakland and KC. Their long suffering will be rewarded in heaven.