Search Results for: kaval parallel

There is news, of a sort, about the Oakland A’s owners’ perpetual claim that even as they seek a billion dollars in city money to build new roads and other infrastructure for a Howard Terminal stadium development, they’re working on a “parallel path” to move to Las Vegas if they don’t get what they want. Per the Las Vegas Review-Journal:

Casino magnate Phil Ruffin is heading to the Bay Area on Tuesday to meet with Oakland Athletics brass about a potential site for a new ballpark, a source told the Review-Journal.

Ruffin has ownership of multiple properties in Las Vegas, including Circus Circus and the Las Vegas Festival Grounds adjacent to that.

I mean, sure, maybe? Kicking the tires on various Las Vegas properties doesn’t cost A’s owner John Fisher anything, and, like sending his execs to tweet from Las Vegas hockey games, it rattles sabers about the possibility of the team relocating. Not sure whether Ruffin’s property is supposed to be one of the five in Vegas that team president Dave Kaval said in March he was focusing on, though given that he said then that he hoped to pick a winner by April, either 1) words that come out of Kaval’s mouth are not to be trusted, 2) something went wrong with the other five sites and now Kaval is trying to drum up new options, or 3) both.

The more important question than which particular slice of desert Fisher and Kaval will target, of course, is who on earth would foot the price tag for a Vegas stadium, and nobody at all is talking publicly about that. Moving to a teensy media market for a sport that requires selling tickets to 81 games a year seems like a risk, to say the least, especially a market that could be uninhabitable soon thanks to climate change and the West’s water crisis; spending $1 billion or so in order to do so seems riskier still.

Over in Oakland, meanwhile, Fisher’s stadium dreams, currently waiting on Mayor Libby Schaaf’s continuing attempts to dig under the office sofas for spare change to spend on them, is facing a new lawsuit from a bunch of port unions that charge the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission’s June vote to allow the project to move forward was made “arbitrarily and capriciously” — that would seem to describe how a whole lot of government decisions are made every day, but in the U.S. anyone can file a lawsuit for any reason and usually does, so more power to ’em. The timing does raise the question as to whether the Review-Journal’s “source” leaked the news of a Ruffin meeting over Vegas land as if to say, “Yeah, go ahead and sue us, we’ll take our ball and go to Vegas, see if we don’t”; it certainly would be in character for sports team owners, let’s just leave it at that.

It’s tricky writing about a breaking news situation where the “news” is mostly posturing by various sides: If you report on something someone says, is that relaying information, or acting as a mouthpiece for their gamesmanship? It’s a tough call, which is probably why so many journalists these days seem inclined to punt the entire question and just print everything any major political or business players say without context or analysis. (Ha ha, of course I kid, it’s because only the rare journalists these days consider context or analysis to be part of their job.)

Anyway, with one day to go before tomorrow’s Oakland A’s stadium vote, there’s so much verbiage being thrown about that only bullet points can convey the urgency:

• On Friday, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf’s office put out a counterproposal to A’s owner John Fisher’s initial $855 million subsidy demand, and it included a bunch of changes. Only one Infrastructure Financing District would be created to siphon off future property tax revenues, directly around the A’s proposed development at Howard Terminal (previously estimated as generating $495 million between city and county funds), with no tax money redirected from the surrounding neighborhood (previously estimated at $360 million). Fifteen percent of new housing units from the A’s development would need to be “affordable,” with an equal amount of offsite affordable housing either built or preserved, up from the 0% Fisher was offering. And the A’s would agree to a 25-year non-relocation pact, up from the 20 years Fisher was offering but down from the 45 years Oakland officials had wanted.
• A couple of hours later, A’s president Dave Kaval declared that the city’s offer was unacceptable, saying that “what was released today does not work for the A’s” and that for the council to vote yes on the revised term sheet “would really be a no on that project.” If there’s no change in the city’s offer before tomorrow, Kaval warned, “that would really foreclose our last opportunity in Oakland. We’re down to our last at-bat, our last location, and it would really put or build additional momentum in places like Southern Nevada, where we have this parallel path going, to see if we have an opportunity there that works for the club.”
• A’s GM and minority owner Billy Beane rattled even more move-threat sabers, saying that at the Las Vegas Aviators’ Triple-A stadium, “the facilities here are better than we have in Oakland,” and that “our guys get sent down to AAA, they are actually going up in terms of the playing of the stadium and so it’s really an amazing, amazing place.” (The Las Vegas Ballpark, naming rights sponsor TK [oh duh, no it’s not, see comments], holds 10,000 fans, though maybe it has a really nice weight room or something.)
• Over in Nevada, elected officials told the Nevada Independent that talks there with the A’s are preliminary at best. Clark County Commission chair Marilyn Kirkpatrick said she had only had a “meet and greet” with team execs, and cautioned that “I don’t think we can fund what they might be asking for”; a spokesperson for Henderson City Manager Richard Derrick said he had had two meetings with A’s officials, but these were “largely exploratory.”
• At least some A’s fans found by the San Jose Mercury News started to freak out that the A’s will now move, or at least to be sadly resigned to that fate: “It’s frustrating, I’m upset, I’m angry, I’m sad,” one fan told the paper, while others said they blamed the A’s owners, or the city, or both the A’s owners and the city, for not getting a deal done.

I actually happened to be at Saturday’s A’s game, and was surprised not to see more signs protesting the threatened move, though it’s possible Oakland fans have just been through this so many times that most can’t be bothered to get enraged. (I also noticed that a remarkably large share of A’s jerseys worn by fans had their own names on the back, which is a reasonable adaptation to seeing all the team’s best players traded every couple of years.) The crowd was smallish but boisterous as on my past visits, with everyone twirling their giveaway “Ride The Wave” shirts as the A’s mounted a 9th-inning comeback that fell short; at least the team management had the good taste not to use their other slogan, “Rooted in Oakland,” on the shirts, though there was still lots of signage and souvenir mugs for sale reading that, move-threat sabers nothwithstanding.

So, context and analysis, in brief: Fisher and Kaval asked for $855 million and to be exempted from state affordable housing requirements, Oakland came back with $495 million and no affordable housing exemption, and Kaval said, Well in that case, Las Vegas is lovely this time of year. [Ed. Note: Fact-check this.]

This is what’s called a showdown, and no matter how the council votes on Tuesday,  this game of chicken is likely to stretch well beyond that, because both sides have way too much at stake for a quick resolution. If Oakland officials don’t back down enough in the next 24 hours for Fisher and Kaval to give their blessing, A’s execs can be expected to start talking seriously about how to fund a stadium in Las Vegas — or, as things have typically gone in the past, talking about talking seriously about it, in hopes that it will scare Oakland into upping their ante.

If history is any guide, it is extremely likely that this will end with some sort of compromise where Oakland offers that $495 million plus some free land or additional tax breaks or cheesy bread, and Fisher and Kaval grudgingly accept it as the bare minimum they will put up with. (This outcome is doubly likely given that it’s hard to conceive of Las Vegas, or Henderson or Portland or Thunder Bay or wherever, coming up with more than $495 million plus cheesy bread, even without getting into how those places are all much smaller TV markets.) Getting to that point will likely take a while, though — you don’t squeeze every last dollar out of your negotiating adversary without pulling every arrow out of your quiver — so the smart money would be on this dragging out quite a bit longer, and getting quite a bit uglier. If there end up being 2022 Las Vegas A’s cards, please save me a set.

The San Jose Mercury News has a long interview with former San Francisco Giants exec (and before that press secretary to the mayor of San Francisco; funny how that revolving door works) Corey Busch about whether the Oakland A’s will actually move out of the Bay Area, and frankly that part is less newsworthy, because how would Busch know, really? But it does venture into some history from Busch’s time with the Giants, and there’s where it starts to get interesting:

In 1992, Lurie and the rest of ownership came to an agreement to sell the team for $115 million to a group from the Tampa area. The Giants would move to Florida for the 1993 season, and Bay Area fans were slapped with a reality check.

“What we were trying to do was let people in the Bay Area know that people need to step up and buy the team,” Busch said. “And that’s exactly what happened.”

Safeway magnate Peter Magowan swooped in and bought the team, which eventually led to a waterfront ballpark “with Lurie’s fingerprints all over it.”

Even if the Tampa agreement sped up the offer from Magowan, Busch regrets the message it sent.

“It was a mistake to threaten to leave,” Busch says now. “That was something we learned. We didn’t see it at the time as making a threat. We thought we were just letting the market know, ‘Look, we can’t stay at Candlestick forever.’ And if something doesn’t happen, the team is going to leave.”

Was Lurie actually going to send the Giants to Tampa?

“No,” Busch said. “No one was willing to come forward to buy the Giants until it looked like they might leave. I never thought the Giants were going to leave the Bay Area.”

That’s not exactly saying that Lurie’s move threat was a hoax, along the lines of other leverage plays in the past; Busch could just be saying that he never thought the Giants would leave because he figured a local buyer would step up, and knew Lurie preferred that. Still, this is pretty remarkable: Though the Giants-to-Florida gambit was portrayed at the time as Lurie being blocked from moving to Tampa Bay by the other owners and instead settling for selling to a local owner who would build a stadium mostly with his own money, it turns out to have been more of a leverage move, where Lurie knew that MLB would prefer to keep the team in San Francisco, and knew that if he played footsie with Florida the league would help find him a local buyer to make it happen.

Of course, Busch could always be trying to make Lurie (and himself) look good in retrospect, just as Mario Lemieux could have been fibbing about his trips to Kansas City really being just to have lunch and shake loose arena money in Pittsburgh. I guess being an extortionist looks better than being a carpetbagger? I’ll have to check the Big Book of Capitalist Morals.

A’s stadium czar Dave Kaval, meanwhile, is still out on the hustings, doubling down on his now-infamous Vegas tweet by telling a radio show host on Friday that “we’re on parallel paths here,” seeking a waterfront ballpark in Oakland while “we’ve also been directed by the league to explore other markets, specifically Southern Nevada and Las Vegas.” Perhaps the league also bought Kaval those Vegas Golden Knights playoff tickets? Being able to claim to be doing the bidding of extortioners is definitely a preferred look; for both Lurie and Kaval, it sure has come in handy to have a Bigger Bad around to pull the strings, or pretend to, when you as owner can’t or don’t want to.

Back to Busch, he also thinks that the A’s should reconsider the Oakland Coliseum site, calling the idea that it won’t work “silly” and “nonsense” and saying it’s “inevitable” that the team will end up in a new stadium there. This is definitely a common take, since the Coliseum site wouldn’t require $855 million in infrastructure work to make it accessible by both roads and public transit, but Kaval & Co. keep rejecting it. Whether that’s their legitimate conviction or just yet another leverage move is impossible to say — but if there’s one important takeaway from Busch’s interview, it’s that sports team owners will lie to your face and happily admit later that it was all just standard business practice.