A’s fans lingered long after the third out of their 3-2 win over the Texas Rangers, soaking up every last minute inside the massive concrete Oakland Coliseum one final time. Now the club, one of Major League Baseball’s most storied franchises – founded in Philadelphia before a stint in Kansas City – is set to abandon the city of Oakland and its colorful fanbase after 56 seasons. The Athletics aren’t departing for greener pastures, but potentially – and we still don’t really know for sure – for a desert locale that didn’t ask for them. Oakland-born Dave Stewart, an All-Star hurler on the city’s last World Series champion in 1989, posed the question of the day on the A’s pre-game broadcast.
“What happened?” Stewart said. “There’s no real explanation for it. And any explanation that you give, it doesn’t cover the impact, and it doesn’t cover all the details of what really took place, for the Oakland A’s to be leaving this city, playing [in at] minor league baseball [stadium] in Sacramento for three years, and then eventually ending up in Las Vegas.”
Impact is the word that stands out, especially when you consider the emotional investment fans make in ball clubs and what it means to lose a franchise to another city. Kristin Young was not one of the over 46,000 price-gouged supporters that sat through cliché-soaked, disingenuous pre-game “tributes”, that begged fans to not “be sad it’s over” but to “be happy it happened”, and to “celebrate and have a good time”. She had already made the decision to stay away for the final game and the season which preceded it.
“Everyone’s like, ‘Kristin, you’re going to do it, right? Like, don’t regret it.’ I’ve literally gone back and forth up until like last week. And even [my friend] Tara was like, ‘I’ll get my husband to set up a TV outside. So you don’t have to go into the stadium. Just tailgate with us.’ I was like, no, it’s going to be worse for me …. I’ve pushed past the anger. So now I’m just sad.”
Like so many baseball fans in the East Bay, the club has been part of her makeup from the start. Her grandmother, Eva Young, purchased season tickets in 1988, taking her grandkids to games as soon as they could walk. Memories were built over decades, including learning to read by sounding out players’ names on the back of uniforms. Section 216 was the second home for a busy family that always found time to bond over baseball.
After Eva passed away in 2018, the family gathered annually to honor her on family “suite day” in one of the only MLB parks with affordable luxury boxes. On Thursday, the misty-eyed A’s fan clad in a green Mark McGwire T-shirt lamented the end of the traditions and the latest professional sports void on the “bright side of the Bay”.
“You get used to seeing the same concession people, the same ticket takers,” Kristin Young said. “I’ll miss knowing the shortcut walks, the weird B [parking] lot entrance that looks like a terrifying war zone … and I won’t have that same experience like with my kids or even my nieces and nephews, taking them to the games. I know that you can still tell all the stories later, but I’ll miss telling those stories like in the stadium. I’ll miss being able to share those experiences with other people in the places that they happened.”
There is only one reason why Oakland is leaving and that’s because owner John Fisher, who inherited his family’s Gap fortune, decided to take a logic-defying leap eastward in what seems like a lose-lose deal for almost every party involved: the owner, Oakland’s fans, future Vegas A’s fans, the city of Oakland, the city of Las Vegas, Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association.
No wonder then that Walter J Haas, a former president of the club – whose family owned the Athletics during the team’s greatest success in the Bay, winning a World Series title while setting a franchise attendance record – calls the move “frankly unforgivable”.
The A’s highly publicized, agonizing search for a new ballpark to replace the aging and infamous Coliseum, baseball’s “last dive bar”, is a long running, complex saga that has spanned multiple owners, mayors and even included the cross-Bay Giants. However, that search finally seemed to be nearing a resolution with the team receiving $774.5m in tax-subsidized infrastructure improvements and other grants to relocate to a 55-acre former shipyard site known as Howard Terminal. The project, which was seen as the latest mixed-used development plan that has become popular among the owners of North American sports teams, featured impressive waterfront vistas of San Francisco, the Golden Gate bridge and the Oakland Bay bridge, and was close to downtown. It made sense for a city still reeling from the loss of the NFL’s Raiders and the NBA’s Warriors, and to Fisher, who had a chance to build something unique on the East Bay.
“And then abruptly John Fisher switched gears and said, ‘No, we’re looking at buying land in Las Vegas’”, Neil deMause, a journalist who co-authored the book Field of Schemes, told The Guardian. “And nobody is really sure whether that was because he felt like Oakland wasn’t showing him enough love or because he thought that he could use it as leverage to try and get something else from Oakland.”
The city of Oakland didn’t take the bait, and the A’s, who were threatening a relocation to Las Vegas to pressure city officials into the best deal possible, went ahead and moved forward with Sin City.
“And now, he’s a dog who’s caught the car and has to figure out what he’s going to do with it,” deMause said.
So Fisher, who for years has traded away the best of the A’s talent pool, fielded some of the lowest payrolls in the game, raised season ticket prices and alienated every baseball fan in the area, is moving to Las Vegas with government stadium funding amounting to $300m less than Oakland was attempting to offer. They will move into the smallest stadium in MLB, in the smallest television market in MLB, on a site of just nine acres of land which comes with absolutely no development rights and may not be large enough to occupy the desired dome.
Despite all of these factors, MLB’s owners, never one to punish one of their own for unsound business decisions (lest they want to make some of their own bad business moves one day), voted 30-0 to allow relocation. Currently, there is no announced funding for the remaining portion of the stadium and so there’s every chance the situation could get even worse. A’s players will now have the pleasure of playing in a Sacramento minor league park while their new stadium is built, if it’s built. And if the team does land in Las Vegas, there’s every possibility the low-budget A’s will still be a revenue-sharing team that struggles to sign free-agent players, something that will surely fire up their new fans.
In theory, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred could have reversed the owners vote under the “best interests in baseball” clause, forcing a sale to an investor such as Warriors owner Joe Lacob, who was willing keep the A’s in Oakland. But clearly the best interests of baseball were not enough.
And so the saga of the A’s will continue for some time, all while Oakland fans are left to ponder once more the question of the day and a lifetime: What happened?
