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- MLB Owners Vote Unanimously To Give The Middle Finger To Oakland
MLB Owners Vote Unanimously To Give The Middle Finger To Oakland
Photo by Wendy Thurm: the reverse boycott at the Oakland Coliseum on June 13, 2023
The thirty MLB owners voted unanimously Thursday to approve the Oakland Athletics’ proposed move to Las Vegas. The vote ends the long saga of the A’s efforts to leave the Oakland Coliseum and play in a new, smaller, baseball-only ballpark.
Under the plan approved by the owners, the A’s will open the 2028 season at that new ballpark, nestled on the Las Vegas strip at the site of the current Tropicana Hotel. The new ballpark will seat 33,000, making it the smallest ballpark in the league. Progressive Field in Cleveland currently seats 34,830.
The A’s have one year remaining on their Coliseum lease and will play the 2024 season there. It is still unclear where the A’s will play during the 2025, 2026, and 2027 seasons. USA Today reported:
The A’s told MLB they plan to play in a revolving series of sites until they move, one MLB owner told USA TODAY Sports on the condition of anonymity because MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred has yet to publicly address the plans. They will play games in Summerlin, Nevada, home of the A’s Triple-A team, Oracle Park in San Francisco, where the San Francisco Giants play, and perhaps also the Coliseum.
Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao has told the A’s and MLB that the city is open to extending the A’s lease at the Coliseum through the 2027 season, but only under certain conditions. Among other demands, Thao wants the Athletics name and branding to stay in Oakland and for the league to put the city at the top of its list of expansion cities.
The possibility of the A’s paying the Giants for the right to play games at Oracle Park is rich with irony in light of everything the Giants did over the years to stop the A’s from building a new ballpark in nearby Santa Clara county.
Here is a map of the 14 counties that comprise the San Francisco Bay Area.
In the other two-team MLB markets—Mets-Yankees, Cubs-White Sox, and Dodgers-Angels—the teams share the same territory for TV, radio, and marketing purposes. Not so with the Giants and the A’s. The A’s territory includes Alameda and Contra Costa counties; the Giants’ territory includes San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Cruz, Monterey and Marin counties, “plus Santa Clara County with respect to another major league team.”
What does that last part mean?
It may seem like ancient history now, but the Giants had their own, multi-year saga to leave cold and windy Candlestick Park and build a new baseball-only stadium. In 1987 and 1989, San Francisco voters rejected ballot initiatives that would have provided public financing for a new ballpark in San Francisco. Then the Giants explored the possibility of building a new stadium in Santa Clara county. As you can see on the above map, Santa Clara county abuts Alameda county, where Oakland is located, but does not abut San Francisco county. San Mateo county sits in between.
In 1990, MLB owners approved a resolution that granted the Giants “exclusive rights” to build a new ballpark in Santa Clara county. The San Francisco Chronicle unearthed minutes from that meeting and reported:
The minutes from the 1990 meeting explained how Giants then-owner Bob Lurie received permission from A’s then-owner Walter Haas to take over Santa Clara for the purpose of a possible ballpark site for the Giants.
“Mr. Haas said it would be difficult to assess the impact; perhaps it might be slightly negative,” the minutes read. “He added, however, that the Oakland club did not wish to stand in the way and hence Oakland would vote to approve.”
According to the minutes, Lurie’s team “desires to relocate its operations from Candlestick Park to a new stadium to be constructed in Santa Clara, California, subject to a satisfactory completion of the stadium project and execution of a satisfactory stadium lease.”
The resolution was for the Giants to relocate “provided that the new stadium in Santa Clara is satisfactory in all respects to the Commissioner of Baseball and that such stadium is leased to the Club on terms which are approved by the Commissioner.”
The Giants never built a stadium in Santa Clara county, because several voter initiatives to fund such a stadium failed in 1990 and 1992. Instead, Bob Lurie sold the Giants to a Peter Magowan-led group, who in turn privately financed what is now called Oracle Park, in downtown San Francisco.
But the MLB rule granting the Giants “Santa Clara County with respect to another major league team” was never amended.
In 2012, with the Giants thriving in their jewel of a ballpark, the A’s proposed building their own new stadium in San Jose, the largest city in Santa Clara county. The Giants threw roadblock after roadblock in the way of the A’s San Jose ballpark plan. Then-Commissioner Bud Selig appointed a committee to examine the territorial rights issue—a move seen largely as a stall tactic. A group called Stand for San Jose—which everyone understood as a front for the Giants— successfully sued to stop the A’s from purchasing the land in San Jose to build the new ballpark.
The Giants also supported MLB when the city of San Jose sued the league over its refusal to allow the A’s to relocate. San Jose directly challenged MLB’s court-created exemption from federal antitrust laws. I covered that lawsuit in detail over at FanGraphs. You can read about it here, here, and here. In the end, the federal district court and Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the antitrust exemption and dismissed San Jose’s claims.
With a San Jose ballpark at a dead end, the A’s turned their attention back to a plan to build a new ballpark somewhere in Oakland. Discussions were held over a new ballpark at the site of the current Coliseum, near Lake Merritt on land owned by the local community college district, and on the waterfront at Howard Terminal.
The Howard Terminal plans were extensive. According to Oakland Mayor Thao, the city was very close to obtaining the hundreds of millions in financing needed to make that plan a reality when the A’s pulled up stakes and decided on the move to Las Vegas.
As I wrote last Friday, a group called Schools over Stadiums has launched an effort to undo the $380 million in public financing the Nevada Legislature approved to defray some of the costs of building the A’s new Las Vegas ballpark. The group—backed by Nevada teachers’ unions—is pursuing a two-pronged strategy: gather enough signatures to place an initiative on the ballot in November 2024 to overturn the Legislature’s vote; and file a lawsuit claiming that the funding violates the Nevada Constitution.
We’ll have to see how that strategy plays out. Right now, it’s unclear whether the ballpark plan would be killed entirely if that $380 million in public financing disappeared or whether it would cause only a delay.
If history is any guide, we should expect more twists and turns in this story before a new ballpark opens for business in Las Vegas. Or if it does.
After the ownership vote was announced this morning, Bill Shakin, the longtime baseball reporter for the Los Angeles Times, tweeted out a story he wrote in 2016. In that story, he quotes MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred saying that league would regret a decision to allow the A’s to leave Oakland:
“I am committed to Oakland as a major league site,” Manfred said Tuesday. “If we were to leave Oakland, I think 10 years from now, we would be more likely than not looking backward, saying we made a mistake.”
I couldn’t agree more.
Oakland and the rest of Alameda County reflect the demographics MLB needs to grow the game. The city and the county have young, diverse populations. In Oakland, nearly 20% of the population is under 18 and only 13% is over 65. Those numbers are similar for Alameda County. Oakland is a minority-majority city. Black, Asian, Latino and mixed-race residents make up 70% of the population. In Alameda, the non-white population is 53%. The median household income in both Oakland and Alameda are higher than in Las Vegas.
That’s why the A’s and MLB are hoping that the new ballpark becomes a big attraction for the three-plus million tourists who visit Las Vegas every month.
Good luck with that.
In related news, the Wisconsin Legislature today approved a funding package to pay for improvements to American Family Field in Milwaukee, the home ballpark of the Brewers. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Wisconsin will pay more than $360 million, Milwaukee County and the city of Milwaukee will each pay $65 million, and the Brewers will pay $150 million toward the cost of the renovations. Tickets surcharges and other fees will be used to raise the remaining funds.
How will that money be used?
Much of the cash included in the deal will pay for things fans don't see. That includes new TV broadcast equipment, chillers, boiler rooms and other items highlighted on a recent stadium tour for state legislators. A report commissioned by the Brewers — reviewed by a state consultant — classified "architecture and interiors" as the single-biggest expense category. That includes replacing the stadium's outfield glass panels, new seats, suite upgrades, retail space improvements and concourse replacements.
The Brewers made noise about abandoning Milwaukee and Wisconsin and moving to another city if the financial package wasn’t approved—the classic billionaire’s grift. These ultra rich teams owners demand millions and millions in public funds to build or renovate stadiums that they then use to add millions more to their private bank accounts.
It worked for the Brewers. It worked for the A’s in Las Vegas. And it will work over and over again into the future.
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