Oakland Rallying to Try To Keep A’s In Town
It seemed like a done deal that the Athletics were on their way to Las Vegas for the 2028 season (it is yet undetermined where they will play from 2024-2027). The Nevada governor signed the bill that would allow partial public funding of a new 30,000 seat stadium, and team owner John Fisher appeared committed to moving the ball club to the desert. While the move may ultimately happen, the city of Oakland will not go away quietly.
Oakland’s mayor, Sheng Thao, met with Commissioner Rob Manfred on July 9 to outline a proposal to keep the Athletics in the Bay Area. It was the first meeting between the two. Thao requested the meeting to clarify the notion that Oakland had not proposed building a new stadium for the Athletics.
Ken Rosenthal quoted Thao in an article in The Athletic:
“For me, it was very important that (Manfred), and not just him, but the (league’s relocation) committee and the owners had a copy of all that we are presenting, for transparency purposes,” Thao said. “Through the press, we have heard that Manfred has stated there was no proposal. We wanted to dispel that notion. If people were misinformed, we wanted to make sure everybody had all the real-time information of how close we were to a ballpark.”
Baseball’s relocation committee has to approve the move, and has not yet met to do so. Manfred had this to say about his meeting with the mayor, from the article:
“We had a good meeting, a very open exchange of views,” Manfred said Tuesday before the All-Star Game. “I understand she came to the process late and is doing her best to figure out if there is something that can be done in a process that was in a lot of ways kind of over when she showed up on the scene.”
Thao presented not only Manfred with a proposal of Oakland’s plan, she made copies for each team in MLB. The current thinking is that Oakland can help fund a new stadium to be built at a waterfront site at Howard Terminal. The ballpark would be part of a $12 billion renovation of the area. Thao pointed out that in Las Vegas, the team would be getting a $1.5 billion dollar facility, but no area renovation has been planned.
Oakland Coliseum.
In the presentation that Thao provided for Manfred and all teams (there were three booklets included), it states that the city of Oakland has secured more than $425 million in funding to cover offsite infrastructure costs, $65 million more than the A’s requested. The team would pay for onsite infrastructure and development, but the city would reimburse about $500 million of that cost through the creation of an infrastructure financing district.
Of course, the A’s need to decide to stay in Oakland for any of Thao’s plans to move forward. The city has not heard from Fisher on its most recent proposal. Thao made three points, over and above financing of the facility, on why the A’s should stay. First, she pointed out that the weather in Oakland is for more appealing than the searing heat of the Las Vegas desert. Second, the Oakland-San Francisco market is the 10th largest in the country, versus Las Vegas which ranks 40th. Third, Thao said that MLB talks about reaching diverse audiences, and Oakland offers an ethnically-diverse population.
The curious part of this story is that Manfred said in June that Oakland had not made any offer to build a new stadium for the A’s. Thao said that was not true.
Thao, in a cover letter to Manfred, said, “Oakland very much had a specific and concrete proposal on the table,” and believed it was “extremely close to finalizing a deal with the current ownership of the A’s.
Based on the above, it seems Manfred, and the rest of MLB, prefers that the A’s relocate to Las Vegas. When the team owner does not respond to an offer to stay, and the commissioner claims (seemingly falsely) that no offer was made for a new stadium, the move is probably a fait accompli. The official approval of the relocation committee is likely nothing more than a formality.
Oakland had a nice run. The city saw four World Championships, including three in a row (1972-1974), from the time the team relocated there from Kansas City for the 1968 season. The cliché says that all things must end. Apparently, the A’s time in Oakland is coming to an end.
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