Category: Oakland A’s

Friday roundup: Bengals lease a mystery even to officials who voted for it, Congress and lobbyists pressure DC to okay Commanders’ $7B+ stadium deal

access_time personNeil deMause

How’s everyone doing out there? The news has been a lot lately, both the stadium shenanigans and the other non-stadium stuff, I get it, I’m as tempted as anyone to just shut off the outside world and watch Murderbot. Feel no obligation to read this week’s news roundup if you’re out of spoons, but do know that whenever you’re ready for it, it has some classic Rob Manfred garblequotes in it, those are kind of amusing at least:

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Oakland mayor losing recall vote after A’s departure, if anyone still cares

access_time personNeil deMause

I would love to report here on what the results of the U.S. presidential and congressional elections will mean for stadium and arena subsidies — and they are undoubtedly going to mean a lot, for a whole hell of a lot of things — but that’s going to have to wait until I can do a deeper analysis of the fine print of Project 2025. (And see what the likelihood is of even half its proposed economic policy changes happening, especially if the second Trump Administration gets bogged down in figuring out how to detain and deport 13 million people.) In the meantime, there looks to be one likely stadium-related outcome of the just-completed vote:

Early election results Tuesday evening showed 65% of voters favoring the recall of Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao, the labor-backed progressive who has struggled to build trust around the city during the first two years of her term…

The early returns indicated that Thao, who was elected in 2022 to a four-year term, was on her way to being removed from office, with voters supporting her recall by nearly a two-to-one margin — the culmination of an expensive recall effort that has focused primarily on Oakland’s crime woes.

Thao’s recall doubles the number of U.S. mayors who have seen sports teams leave their cities and then been removed from office during the next vote, to two. (Former Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels appreciates finally having some company.) While the A’s moving to Sacramento and thence to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ was certainly a factor in the recall, most of the vote was drummed up by a recall campaign funded by a hedge fund billionaire who doesn’t even live in Oakland and inflamed by a moral panic about street crime; if Nickels’ epitaph will be “didn’t shovel the snow,” Thao’s will likely be “didn’t save In-N-Out Burger.”

Still! The A’s leaving clearly didn’t help Thao: It’s one of the top four accusations leveled against her on the recall’s campaign site. While it’s still more likely for elected officials to be removed from office for approving sports subsidies than opposing them — George Petak, Tim Lee, Carlos Alvarez, and several others have entered the chat — they both have their risks, as does pissing off the local coal baron, apparently.

More on this breaking story as news develops. Meantime, I gotta go read me some Heritage Foundation plans for world domination — banning unions for government workers and requiring states to report to the federal government who’s having abortions, you say? Cool, cool.

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A’s owner totally can get $1.1B in Vegas stadium money, says someone whose checks he signs

access_time personNeil deMause

While we’re at it with the unnamed sources, one “close to the Oakland Athletics” tells the Nevada Independent that team owner John Fisher does too have $1.1 billion in private financing lined up for a new Las Vegas stadium, he just won’t tell anyone what it is for a couple of months yet:

The financing plan covering a $1.5 billion baseball stadium on the Strip “is in place,” according to sources close to the Oakland Athletics, but any public discussion of funding will wait until December…

In December, the A’s are expected to provide written confirmation of the financing for the ballpark, according to a team source. The financing needs to be in place before construction can begin on the ballpark.

Seriously, Nevada Independent, why is this news? “A’s officials say Fisher will be able to pay for his share of Vegas stadium” has already been reported, so what’s new about different A’s officials (or the same ones, who knows?) saying so again, this time on condition they not be identified? Did you only watch “All the President’s Men” while looking at your phone and come to think that the reason Deep Throat was to be believed was that he was standing in a shadowy parking lot, not that he had provided verifiable information previously?

Fisher’s people did provide some information yesterday, but it wasn’t about the finances. Rather, they released new draft development and lease agreements for discussion at today’s Las Vegas Stadium Authority Board, which included some fresh stadium schematics:

It’s still a little tough to tell exactly how Fisher plans to fit an entire stadium onto a 9-acre site, but it looks like part of it will be keeping the actual seating section relatively small — only 30,000 actual seats, plus 3,000 standing-room spaces — and limiting the concessions areas to the spaces under the seating decks, which goes against current trends and could limit his ability to create massive food courts and club spaces that have helped boost revenues at other new stadiums. I’d also be interested to hear from any engineers about whether that massive roof has enough support structures planned to hold it up — it would be weird for schematics like these not to include that, but given the massive columns that other stadiums’ roofs need, it’s a question worth asking.

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Tropicana hotel demolished to make way for Vegas A’s vaporstadium

access_time personNeil deMause

The Tropicana Hotel on the Las Vegas Strip was blowed up real good last night, to clear the land for an eventual Las Vegas A’s stadium along with other redevelopment by the site’s owner, the Bally’s Corporation:

And speaking of that planned A’s stadium, how’s the financing for that going?

In July, the Athletic’s’ executives said the stadium would be financed in three parts. Nevada taxpayers would pay about $350 million, debt financing would contribute another $300 million, and Fisher would pay the remaining $850 million.

That’s true as far as it goes, but A’s board member Sandy Dean’s testimony at the time was incredibly nonspecific about where Fisher’s $850 million would come from, beyond saying that A’s owner John Fisher was in “good shape” raising money and that “it would be a positive to have outside investors” — a positive for Fisher, sure, though it’s still unclear what Fisher would have left over to offer to investors after paying off $300 million in loans plus whatever ROI his family will want for their cut of the stadium costs. The team still hasn’t submitted a detailed financial plan to the Vegas stadium authority and may not until December; stadium authority chair Steve Hill, who moonlights as an unregistered A’s lobbyist, said yesterday that after something between “an audit and a look” at the Fisher family’s finances, “it is clear that the Fishers have the ability to provide the financing for the stadium, period,” which isn’t the same thing as saying that the Fishers can pay for the stadium and earn their money back, which would seem to be the point of the whole exercise.

Until Fisher presents an “irrevocable” financing plan, Nevada won’t release its $380 million in stadium funding approved last summer — along with an additional $180 million in property tax breaks and $100 million in ticket tax exemptions — so right now the whole thing still remains on hold. Except for the site being cleared, but Bally’s is free to use that for something other than a stadium if Fisher’s financing falls through. In the meantime, enjoy the sardonic laughter of the Bay Area’s KGO-TV news anchors as their reporter notes, “If the A’s can get it together, they hope to start playing in Las Vegas in 2028.”

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Friday roundup: A’s bid Bay adieu, D-Backs give Phoenix the finger

access_time personNeil deMause

This week’s roundup is a little abbreviated as I’m traveling again, but I didn’t want to miss out on all of the week’s remaindered news:

  • Last night was the final Oakland A’s home game ever, maybe, and it went … okay? Let’s go with okay: Fans got to chant “Sell the team!”, the A’s won, and nobody tried walking off with any stadium seats. Sure, there was some light throwing of objects and one person running on the field, but compared to some other cities hosting last-ever MLB games, that was downright tame. My sympathies to A’s fans, and here’s hoping that the East Bay gets another team — or, hell, the same one — in not too long.
  • Last week’s roundup missed this update on how the Arizona Diamondbacks owners’ lease extension talks with Maricopa County are going, which can be summed up as “badly.” Tl;dr: The county only wants to rezone the area around the D-Backs’ stadium for a mixed-use development (along with giving tax kickbacks to team owner Ken Kendrick) if the D-Backs promise to spend at least $200 million on stadium renovations, and team execs are steamed. (Sorry, that was pretty tl itself, hope you still read it.) Diamondbacks CEO Derrick Hall said the county’s latest offer is “ridiculous” and he doesn’t “see a deal in sight,” and now he’ll “continue to work with the state and city” to work out a deal that he’s happy with: “If we can find that by [early 2025], we’ll be fine.” Or else what, he didn’t say, leaving that to the imagination of sportswriters.
  • The Federal Emergency Management Agency and the NFL have selected four stadiums to be “mission ready venues” in case of national emergencies, which I suppose is nice and all but which only gets the bridge of this stuck in my head.
  • The group in Portland, Oregon that wants an MLB expansion team bought some land to put a stadium on, now all they need is the money to buy an expansion team and build a stadium.

Posting may remain a bit sporadic early next week depending on my internet access — if so, feel free to use this item’s comments as an open thread for anything that needs discussing in the meantime.

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A’s owner Fisher marks last Oakland home game with misspelled non-apology letter

access_time personNeil deMause

The Oakland A’s are scheduled to play their last home game ever in Oakland after 57 years there this Thursday, and team owner John Fisher marked the occasion yesterday by releasing an open letter to A’s fans. It is, and this will not surprise you if you have observed literally anything Fisher has done ever, very, very bad:

  • “Triumphs, near misses, the 1989 Loma Preita earthquake in Game 3 of the Bay Bridge Series, the 20-game win streak, a Hollywood movie, and an unmatched cast of players, coaches, and fans,” the letter said. “We’ve had it all.” That’s an odd list — filming “Moneyball” get a shoutout but not the A’s threepeat in the 1970s? — but most of the attention has been focused on the misspelling of Loma Prieta, which is pretty bad if you know how Loma Prieta is pronounced and how Spanish vowels work, at least one of which Fisher or his ghostwriters apparently does not.
  • “We proposed and pursued five different locations in the Bay Area. And despite mutual and ongoing efforts to get a deal done for the Howard Terminal project, we came up short. … Though I wish I could speak to each one of you individually, I can tell you this from the heart: we tried. Staying in Oakland was our goal, it was our mission, and we failed to achieve it. And for that I am genuinely sorry.” Actually, Fisher and top honcho Dave Kaval abruptly announced they planned to focus on moving the team to Las Vegas amid a snit over whether Oakland would provide more than the $775 million in infrastructure money it had agreed to now that interest rates were on the rise and the Howard Terminal project no longer looked as juicy to Fisher’s accountants. As apologies go, this came off as somewhat less sincere than Dave Grohl’s.
  • The bit about “I wish I could speak to each one of you individually” rang hollow for an owner who famously doesn’t attend his own team’s games.

Still, it’s all very on brand for a guy who announced his own team’s temporary move to Sacramento by not being able to name a single A’s player.

Whether this is actually the final A’s game in Oakland is still a somewhat open question: Fisher still doesn’t have financing finalized for a stadium in Las Vegas, and he can’t keep playing in a minor-league stadium in Sacramento indefinitely. It’s at the very last the last game for now, though, and Fisher is reportedly marking the occasion by hiring extra security out of fears of fan violence, even telling A’s manager Mark Kotsay not to address the fans after the game but “instead retreat to the clubhouse.” And so the Oakland A’s end, not with a bang but with a whinge.

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Friday roundup: Florida Panthers’ lease extension could be one of the priciest ever for taxpayers

access_time personNeil deMause

I’ve been trying to write about this all week, but stuff kept happening: Broward County commissioners agreed to a term sheet that would give the Florida Panthers a five-year lease extension through 2033, and the money part is so convoluted that it calls for its own set of bullet points:

  • Panthers owner Vincent Viola will give the county $51.5 million to pay off the remaining debt on the arena where the team plays, which cost the county $185 million to build in 1998.
  • The county will continue to spend $25 million a year in hotel tax money on operations, maintenance, and upgrades to the arena, for the life of the lease extension.
  • The county has two five-year options to extend the lease. If it doesn’t do so, it has to return some or all of Viola’s $51.5 million debt payment.
  • Viola gets development rights to land around the arena, which he had given up as part of a 2015 deal to get access to the hotel tax funding and get the out clause in his lease that is the whole reason why the county is renegotiating his lease now instead of waiting until 2028.

I’m hesitant to put a dollar figure on the whole thing, but it looks like if Broward County picks up the two five-year lease extensions it gets the $51.5 million while spending $25 million a year over 15 years, which comes to around $250 million in present value, plus gives up development rights to 140 acres of land, which is worth who knows — let’s guesstimate it as $250-300 million in subsidies from the county to Viola. On the other hand, if Broward doesn’t do the extensions, it doesn’t get the $51.5 million, but also its annual arena subsidies go down to more like $100 million, so that’d be more like a $150-200 million subsidy — but also it would need to redo the Panthers’ lease a decade sooner.

So on a per-year basis — math’s almost done, I promise! — that’s either $17-20 million a year for a 15-year extension, or $30-40 million a year for a 5-year extension. That would still be less than the current record $43 million a year lease extension that Charlotte gave the Carolina Panthers (no relation), but it’s a chunk of change regardless.

The Broward County Board of Commissioners still needs to give final approval to the deal, so maybe if we’re lucky we’ll get some hearings or something that will shed more light on the bouncing dollar signs. In the meantime, we had more news this week, let’s get to that:

  • Illinois House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch says if Chicago White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf wants a new stadium, he should mostly pay for it with private money. Welch also revealed that the White Sox greats at that private ballfield event Reinsdorf held this week for elected officials included Bo Jackson, Ron Kittle, Harold Baines, and Ozzie Guillen, and they didn’t even play catch — though given Kittle’s career –7.5 defensive wins above replacement, you probably don’t want to let him throw many baseballs your direction anyway.
  • Frisco, Texas approved that $141 million-plus renovation for the F.C. Dallas stadium that it was set to vote on Tuesday, as expected. At least the new sun roof looks cool, even if the provided rendering shows lots of fans still sitting in the sun.
  • My former employer Gothamist, continuing its race away from quality journalism that saw it earlier this week write about New York police shooting a bystander on a subway car in the head by only asking former cops whether it was justified, opines that the Philadelphia 76ers not moving to Camden is a loss for New Jersey officials who proposed the idea. Not mentioned: All the other things New Jersey can do with $400 million if it doesn’t give it to Sixers owner Josh Harris. Guess this is what happens when keep laying off your news staff.
  • The design of the Oakland Athletics‘ proposed Las Vegas stadium is 50% complete, and no, I don’t know what that means either. It would only have 30,000 seats, with another 3,000 in standing room. If you don’t count the Tampa Bay Rays stadium, which only holds 25,000 because its upper deck has been closed since 2019, this would be the smallest MLB ballpark since the 1969 Seattle Pilots played at 25,000-seat Sick’s Stadium, which went so well that the Pilots moved to Milwaukee the next spring.
  • Cleveland.com asked some sports economists if a new Cleveland Browns stadium would be good for local jobs or tax revenue, and got the expected answer. It’s a good overview of the existing economic findings, though, and worth reading if you want to dive into the details of why sports subsidies don’t pay off for taxpayers, not even if you count the value of keeping a team from leaving town.
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Friday roundup: A’s dunno where 2025 playoff games (LOL) would be played, NY ethics panel probing pols’ use of Bills suite

access_time personNeil deMause

Thanks to travel plans, much of this week’s roundup was written on Wednesday and Thursday, so if there’s anything that needs updating, please just note it politely in the comments and we’ll take it from there.

  • If the no-city-designation Athletics make the postseason next year — stop snickering, it’s mathematically possible, at least until the 2025 season actually gets underway — they haven’t decided yet if playoff games would be played in Sacramento’s 10,600-seat stadium or somewhere else, though the team did issue a statement that “A’s season ticket holders will have priority purchase access for tickets.” The right to buy playoff tickets for a city to be determined, that should boost season ticket sales even more than “watch Aaron Judge hit homers off our pitchers,” John Fisher’s remaining staff are truly marketing geniuses.
  • In other A’s news, a Las Vegas stadium groundbreaking has been set for the second quarter of 2025, which means nothing since breaking ground doesn’t necessarily mean building anything. And the son of ex-A’s owner Walter Haas says it’s “unforgivable” that Fisher is choosing to move the team instead of selling it to someone else who would keep it in Oakland.
  • The Buffalo Bills gave New York state officials a luxury suite as part of a 2012 lease deal to get $130 million in stadium upgrades, and New York state officials sure do love sitting in it: One game last December saw Gov. Kathy Hochul, assembly speaker Carl Heastie, and assembly majority leader Crystal Peoples-Stokes all hanging out in the I Love NY suite — along with Heastie’s girlfriend and college roommate, who the Buffalo News notes in passing are “both registered lobbyists,” which may be the most telling part of this whole story. (State officials who use the suite have to make a contribution to charity equal to the value of the tickets.) Anyway, the suite is only supposed to be used for “encouraging and fostering economic development, tourism and public awareness for the City of Buffalo, Erie County and the State of New York,” so the state ethics commission is investigating whether state officials just hanging out and watching Bills games might be illegal; though presumably the suite helped cement the new stadium deal rammed through by Hochul that made New York the poster child for handing over $1 billion in tax money with no legislative debate, and that’s a kind of public awareness, right?
  • Chicago Bears CEO Kevin Warren said he’d be willing to share a stadium with the White Sox, or maybe just share a strategy for shaking loose public dollars, who can be bothered to ask the difference.
  • Ottawa Senators owner Michael Andlauer and the federal National Capital Commission have a September 20 deadline to work out a deal for a new hockey arena at LeBreton Flats, something that’s been in the works for … good grief, ten years now, how time flies. When last heard from, Andlauer was talking about the government funding half of a $900 million arena; neither he nor the NCC gave many details this week other than “still talking,” and that deadline appears to be a self-imposed one, so this is less actual news than a placeholder for real news to come soonish, maybe, because a sports billionaire said it is. Why yes, journalism is broken, thanks for asking!
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Judge tosses Nevada union’s A’s funding suit, what will this mean for Vegas stadium?

access_time personNeil deMause

If you’ve been waiting patiently for the results of the Nevada teachers union’s lawsuit against the state’s stadium deal for the Oakland A’s, wait no longer: On Friday a judge tossed it, not because of anything about the merits of the case — which claimed that the state legislature illegally passed the stadium subsidy measure with a majority vote when a two-thirds one was needed — but because she ruled that the union didn’t have standing to bring the suit.

“[T]his Court concludes that the Plaintiffs lack standing,” [Carson City District Court Judge Kristin Luis] wrote, noting that because the lawsuit doesn’t affect those who filed it and the law establishing the public financing deal has not yet been fully implemented, the court would not rule on the constitutional questions raised in the lawsuit…

In her ruling, Luis wrote that the law passed by the Legislature “does not mention public education or education funding at all,” pointing out that the word “education” is used only four times in “negligible ways” in the legislation creating the funding deal and there’s no provision of the law that indicates money will be diverted from education in a way that violates the Nevada Constitution.

That’s splitting hairs, certainly: The money has to come from somewhere, and it may well end up being education, even if the Nevada legislature mostly stood there whistling while gesturing toward a guy behind a tree.

But what’s done is done — if still appealable — and the immediate question is: What does this mean for A’s owner John Fisher’s Las Vegas stadium funding push? One of the presumed reasons it’s been going nowhere is that nobody wants to commit to putting private money in when the public money is still up in the air. Now, presumably, we’ll get to see if anybody wants to commit to putting in private money when there’s just the likelihood that they’ll never see it again, because a stadium in Las Vegas is going to have a hell of a time earning back $1 billion in private construction costs. It feels like we’re getting to the end of a chapter of something, anyway, even if it may end up being a cliffhanger.

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Friday roundup: Sacramento celebrates A’s move with new golf simulators, KC residents say cap public stadium funds at one-third

access_time personNeil deMause

Sports economist Victor Matheson and I were both on a radio show this week to discuss the Cleveland Browns and Kansas City Royals and Chiefs stadium situations — you can listen to it here, but first check out the rest of this week’s stadium and arena news, it’ll be quick, I promise:

  • There’s a “major economic boost” coming to Sacramento now that the Oakland A’s are relocating there temporarily, reports KCRA-TV: A new brunch-and-golf-simulators venue is opening across the street! (It was going to open there anyway, but now that the A’s are coming, the owner is trying to open it earlier.) Also, the mayor is “in discussions” with three new restaurants! Feel the excitement!
  • There is no excitement in St. Louis, where the Cardinals are still technically in the playoff hunt, but fans in the best baseball city in the world don’t want to watch .500 baseball, it turns out, or even buy hot dogs. “I love being the hot dog lady,” says hot dog lady Karen Boschert. “I’ve cut my staff down. My prices are reasonable. You can take my food into the stadium.” Maybe she could pivot her sales pitch to point out that you can buy her food and not bring it into the stadium? Just an idea.
  • Pollsters in Missouri decided to ask an unusual question of local voters: not whether taxpayers should pay toward new stadiums for the Kansas City Chiefs and Royals, but how much. The average was two-thirds team, one-sixth state, one-sixth city and county, which is kind of arbitrary and doesn’t account for whether the public would get back any share of revenues or community benefits or anything, but sure it sounds fair. Ish. Time will tell if the team owners come back with “zero-thirds team, poke in the eye with a sharp stick public.”
  • Most of the San Antonio residents who testified at a Wednesday hearing on a $160 million Missions minor-league baseball stadium “voiced concerns and skepticism,” according to Fox San Antonio. For actual quotes we have to turn to KSAT, which notes that a local arts and social justice activist said, “This project is all about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer,” while a resident of a housing complex that would be demolished to make way for the stadium said, “I would not be able to get somewhere else, and I would end up in the street yet again.”
  • Chicago’s city budget is facing a $982.4 million shortfall, and Mayor Brandon Johnson says, “There are sacrifices that will be made,” but not new Bears and White Sox stadiums, those are important even if they would cost the city upwards of $1.2 billion and $2 billion respectively, sacrifices are for little people.
  • Team-funded studies of a Philadelphia 76ers arena say it would be great, other studies show it would be a disaster; the Philadelphia Inquirer editorial board says it’s up to the mayor and city council to figure out where the truth lies in the middle!
  • Another group of developers unrelated to either the Royals or the city has come up with renderings for a new downtown baseball stadium, and guys, you should at least look up how many players are on the field for a baseball game.
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