Oakland mayor Sheng Thao quietly met with MLB commissioner at All-Star Game: reports

Even under baseball’s brightest spotlight over the All-Star weekend, some things can slip through undetected.

And as Oakland A’s fans were making their presence felt throughout the weekend in Seattle, Oakland mayor Sheng Thao was able to quietly get a face-to-face meeting with MLB commissioner Rob Manfred.

According to multiple reports, Thao and several workers from her office flew up to Seattle for a one-hour meeting with Manfred and MLB deputy commissioner Dan Halem on Sunday, where Thao detailed Oakland’s effort to build a ballpark at Howard Terminal.’

In a Q&A with The Athletic, Thao said the impetus for working to have this meeting — her first ever with Manfred since taking over as Oakland Mayor in January — was to bring transparency to the A’s attempted relocation to Las Vegas.

“Through the press, we have heard that Manfred has stated there was no proposal. We wanted to dispel that notion,” Thao told The Athletic. “If people were misinformed, we wanted to make sure everybody had all the real-time information of how close we were to a ballpark.”

Thao brought 31 printed packages — one for each of MLB’s 30 owners, including A’s owner John Fisher, and one personally for Manfred — with the details that would directly refute Manfred’s claim that the city hadn’t done anything.

“There is no Oakland offer, okay?” Manfred said on June 15 after baseball’s most recent owners meeting. “They never got to a point where they had a plan to build a stadium at any site.”

Thao had her office’s chief of staff Leigh Hanson, chief of communications Pati Navalta and Howard Terminal project manager Molly Mayburn with her in the meeting in Seattle. While it reportedly went well, Manfred would again passed the blame for the lack of stadium in Oakland on to the city, rather than to Fisher, when speaking to the media two days later.

“My single biggest disappointment is because of the kind of political process in Oakland, we didn’t find a solution to keep the A’s in Oakland,” Manfred said on Tuesday. “That’s number one on the disappointment list.”

Manfred also confirmed that the A’s have begun the process of applying to move to Las Vegas, though the team hasn’t submitted the full relocation application. The A’s are seeking to build a $1.5 billion, 30,000-seat ballpark with a retractable roof on nine acres of the Tropicana hotel site of the Las Vegas Strip

In talking to the San Francisco Chronicle, Thao reiterated past statements that the team’s plan to build just a stadium in Las Vegas is not only equally feasible at Howard Terminal, where the A’s have sought to build several ancillary buildings of mixed use (residential, commercial and retail space), but could get started “within 18 months.”

“There was a very concrete proposal under discussion and Oakland had gone above and beyond to clear hurdles, including securing funding for infrastructure, providing an environmental review and working with other agencies to finalize approvals,” spokeswoman Julie Edwards said in a statement on June 15. “The reality is the A’s ownership had insisted on a multibillion-dollar, 55-acre project that included a ballpark, residential, commercial and retail space. In Las Vegas, for whatever reason, they seem satisfied with a 9-acre leased ballpark on leased land. If they had proposed a similar project in Oakland, we feel confident a new ballpark would already be under construction.”

Thao also asserted that, while she doesn’t want to predict what will happen, she remains hopeful that the A’s could remain in Oakland in the end.

“I don’t believe in completely closed windows,” Thao told The Athletic. “What I believe is that it’s an option for people to open windows. And I’m going to continue to push for that window to be open if they do think it is closed.”