Liveblogging that ginormous ESPN article about how the A’s picked Sacramento

Oh hell yeah, it’s an ESPN tick-tock (not TikTok) of the Oakland A’s to Sacramento agreement! If there’s one thing ESPN is still good for, it’s fly-on-the-wall insider accounts of major front office decisions, and I for one am going to read this right now, and you get to read it with me:

THIS WAS John Fisher’s moment. It was a cold and rainy morning at Sutter Health Park in West Sacramento, with the microphone glitching whenever Kings owner Vivek Ranadive tried to heap praise upon the Oakland Athletics owner, but this was the place — the single, solitary place in the entire known universe — where people gathered to willingly extol the virtues of Fisher.

Give ESPN’s Tim Keown his props: He knows how to write a great lede. This one has it all: a great sense of place and of dramatic tension, attention to detail (leaving out only a link to the microphone glitch video), and a framing that subtly spells out how A’s owner John Fisher wants nothing more than to be loved, and is receiving nothing but hate. A+ so far, no notes.

They cheered because they are employed by him, or might be soon, or by an entity that might profit from what this man owns.

For a guy who wants to be loved, and who can pay people to cheer for him, Fisher sure is choosing a funny way of dealing with his current employees.

Keown follows with the usual about John Fisher not being able to name any A’s players (the one player he cited Sacramento fans as being able to see next year was New York Yankees outfielder Aaron Judge), and only speaking briefly and then getting the hell out of there, and then the intro is over. CUT TO:

THE VIEWS FROM the A’s waterfront offices in Oakland’s Jack London Square are magnificent: ferries coming in and out, light shimmering off the Bay, San Francisco’s skyline nearly close enough to reach out and touch (the site of the team’s abandoned Howard Terminal project is just a slight lean to the north).

Again, nice scene setting, but when is this, and why are we here?

Representatives from the team and the city of Oakland met at 8:30 a.m. on April 2, precisely 49½ hours before the festivities in West Sacramento

Ah, okay. Might have wanted to do a “49½ hours earlier” screen card first to tip off that we’re in flashback now, just a suggestion.

By early February, with no movement from the A’s, the city’s representatives assumed the team had found somewhere else to play.

And now we’re in a flashback within a flashback — is Chris Nolan directing this article? Anyway, the notion that Oakland city officials assumed Fisher had a plan for a temporary home is slightly dubious given that he’s never seemed to have a plan for anything before, but maybe.

Kaval said $97 million, payable whether the team stayed for five years or opted out at three, was a non-starter and wondered how the city had come up with that number. He was told that Mayor Sheng Thao’s team had done its research, and the number factored in the cost the team would incur by relocating twice in the next three to five years, the $67 million annually the team receives from NBC Sports for its television rights for being in the Bay Area — a figure, the city says, that includes just $10 million in ad revenue, meaning NBC Sports subsidizes to the tune of $57 million per year — and the sweetheart $1.5 million rent the team currently pays at the Coliseum.

“This is above market rate,” Kaval said, and [Oakland chief of staff Leigh] Hanson agreed. “It is,” she said, “and your deal now is criminally below market.”

That’s some impressively hardball negotiating, and it’s good to hear that Thao’s staff didn’t just come up with that $97 million rent number out of thin air. But it’s also the kind of bluntness that failsons who just want to be adored absolutely hate — I speak from personal experience here — and you have to wonder if this didn’t play a role in Fisher and Kaval announcing a Sacramento move less than 24 hours later. Let’s keep reading and find out!

“Well,” Kaval said. “This isn’t going to work for us.”

Hanson said she shrugged. “It’s your responsibility to decide where you’re going to play baseball,” she said. “We pick up trash and we do cops and we care about economic development, but it’s not our responsibility to house you.”

No unearned adoration here at all, guys. What good is being a billionaire’s lackey if elected officials can just talk to you like you’re an equal?

Sources say the A’s, however, never laid out an offer sheet, never presented so much as a single piece of paper with demands or suggestions. At one point during the second meeting, in March, Kaval suggested the A’s might be willing to accept “the Raiders’ deal” — two years and $17 million, the arrangement Raiders owner Mark Davis struck for the two lame-duck years in Oakland before he moved his team to Las Vegas…

The “Raiders’ deal” was the only negotiation tactic Kaval employed, according to sources familiar with the negotiations.

So either Kaval genuinely didn’t want to cut a deal with Oakland, or he was hoping to be presented with an offer he couldn’t refuse. Either tracks, honestly.

Kaval took exception to the city’s offer of a five-year lease, since the team believes its future Vegas ballpark — start date unclear, financing undetermined — on the 9-acre site of the yet-to-be demolished Tropicana Casino and Resort will be ready for the 2028 season, maybe even a year earlier.

Hanson said the city had worked its own numbers there, too, and those numbers indicated the A’s will need five years, minimum, before the Vegas stadium is completed. Left unspoken, sources say, is that significant doubt remains whether the deal in Vegas will happen at all, and the five-year gambit was a hedge against ever having to negotiate with the A’s again.

Ha! Also, yup.

Kaval had made it known the team was in daily conversations with Ranadive and Sacramento, weekly discussions with Salt Lake City. There were those on the Oakland side of the table who believed Sacramento was a done deal before this meeting began — and they weren’t the only ones. Broome, the GSEC CEO, was in the room during the negotiations with Ranadive, and he told ESPN he knew Sacramento was getting the A’s 10 days before the official announcement.

So we’re back to “Kaval didn’t want a deal with Oakland,” which is fine, but then why meet with them at all? Were he and Fisher worried about some kind of St. Louis Rams-style lawsuit charging that he’d skipped over the part of league bylaws that tries to see if a team can be kept in its current home first, and figured that sitting across from Hanson and saying “Yeah, nope” would check that box?

Either Keown didn’t ask Kaval or didn’t get an answer, because he’s on to:

By early evening Hanson got Thao’s approval to present a revised offer: a three-year lease with a $60 million extension fee.

That’s kind of negotiating against yourself, but $60 million over three years is roughly the same per year as $97 million over five, so sure.

Within 24 hours, rumblings that Sacramento was the choice filtered out through the Twitter feed of “Carmichael Dave,” a Sacramento radio personality well-connected to Ranadive and the Kings.

This future we live in is truly a remarkable place.

By 10 a.m., at about the same time the A’s were on a flight heading for Detroit, Ranadive was standing at the podium, wind whipping his hair, thanking his good friend.

And that’s about all we get on the “why” of the A’s move to Sacramento. But Keown isn’t done dropping news bombs:

MLB, at the behest of Manfred, waived the team’s relocation fee because — according to a league source — it would be too burdensome for Fisher to pay. “So if we say there’s a relocation fee of $2 billion,” the source said. “Realistically, how are we going to get that?”

Seriously? I know the leading theory is that Fisher got his way by being so annoying that MLB owners would rather let him make his dumb move to Las Vegas than have to keep listening to him whine about Oakland, but if he really got out of paying a relocation fee by turning his pockets inside out and frowning sadly … that’s either a sign of him being a genius negotiator or the most annoying man in the world or both.

Also, if Fisher can’t afford an expansion fee, how’s he going to afford to spend $1 billion of his own money on a stadium in Vegas? Or does he plan on finding someone else’s money and pretending it’s his? There’s only one guy who gets away with doing that.

“After 15 years of this, owners are on Rob [Manfred],” the league source said. “They want to know, ‘What’s happening in Oakland? Let’s go, it’s time to s— or get off the pot.'”

If those are the options you give someone, those are the results you get. Fisher, clearly, went with Door #1.

IN WEST SACRAMENTO, there are logistical questions that remain outstanding. The physics of the Triple-A River Cats, a Giants affiliate, and the big league A’s sharing a ballpark have yet to be determined. Significant improvements to Sutter Health Park are necessary to comply with the collective bargaining agreement and receive the approval of the Major League Players Association. Lights will need to be upgraded, bullpens revamped and a second batting cage constructed. The home clubhouse is currently beyond the left-field wall, an arrangement that seems less than optimal.

Here we have a partial answer to the question of whether the players’ union can block the Sacramento move, which has been reported elsewhere but is worth repeating: Not so long as somebody upgrades the stadium so that player working conditions are major-league quality. (Whether baseball fan conditions will be is another story.) How much that will cost, and who will pay for it, remains unknown, apparently even to Keown.

And finally, the pièce de résistance:

[Greater Sacramento Economic Council president Barry] Broome said, “The only thing I asked of the Fishers is when they win the World Series in the next three years, they put that parade right in the middle of our town.”…

He is speaking about the A’s, a husk of a team. … Broome is undeterred. “All we need is a 19-year-old kid named Vida Blue, a 20-year-old guy named Reggie Jackson,” he said. “We just need three, four, five guys. We need to look in the Dominican Republic for a shortstop, for Omar Vizquel.” (Vizquel is Venezuelan.)

Boom. Keown has a few paragraphs to go, but that’s putting a hat on a hat, your punchline is right there. Good night, folks, tip your bartenders, and come back soon for more Fun With Fisher and Friends!