Stadium/Arena Saga Omnibus

[NYCdog]

5 minutes ago, SCMODS said:

Fisher also owns the Earthquakes. Yikes. 

 
Fisher took over for Lew Wolff, who got Quakes 2 up and running after AEG moved Quakes 1 to Houston to become the Dynamo. Speaking of, who exactly do you think saved soccer in the Bay Area by leading the effort to build PayPal Park in San Jose. 
 

DAVE KAVAL. (Let’s vilify him too lol) 

 

It’s literally the reason why the A’s hired him. To help negotiate a deal to save the A’s in Oakland. This game has literally been on going since HOK study in Uptown Oakland in 2002. Every other professional sports owner would’ve relocated 5 years tops. Fisher remained, extending leases at a dilapidated Coliseum for 18 YEARS. And it got him nothing from Oakland in the end: 

[SCMODS]

5 minutes ago, NYCdog said:

 
Fisher took over for Lew Wolff, who got Quakes 2 up and running after AEG moved Quakes 1 to Houston to become the Dynamo. Speaking of, who exactly do you think saved soccer in the Bay Area by leading the effort to build PayPal Park in San Jose. 
 

DAVE KAVAL. (Let’s vilify him too lol) 

 

It’s literally the reason why the A’s hired him. To help negotiate a deal to save the A’s in Oakland. This game has literally been on going since HOK study in Uptown Oakland in 2002. Every other professional sports owner would’ve relocated 5 years tops. Fisher remained, extending leases at a dilapidated Coliseum for 18 YEARS. And it got him nothing from Oakland in the end: 

 

Hey Dog, it's the Bay Area. Taxpayers are not going to fork over money for stadiums. 

[tp49]

Bill passed the Nevada Assembly.

[NYCdog]

23 minutes ago, SCMODS said:

 

Hey Dog, it's the Bay Area. Taxpayers are not going to fork over money for stadiums. 

[tp49]

3 hours ago, Ferdinand Cesarano said:

 

This take is so wrong it's almost comical.

 

The Oakland mayor was legitimately blindsided by the Las Vegas announcement in April because the negotiations on the Howard Terminal stadium were near completion.   By walking away from the negotiations after the A's pulled their double-crossing move, the mayor behaved shrewdly by not allowing the A's to use the nearly-done Howard Terminal plan as a pressuring device in their rushed presentations to the Nevada state legislature. 

 

Either way this works out, her move was the right one. If A's cannot fool enough of the Nevada legislators, then they have nowhere to go.  While the mayor has confirmed that she would take a call from Fisher or Kaval to resume the negotiations, it's hard to imagine their doing that in such a weakened posure. More likely, if the Nevada legislature does its job, then the sale that all of yesterday's reverse-boycotters are demanding would likely occur, and the negotiations would resume with the new ownership.  Indeed, the mayor has confirmed that a new ownership group could just step right in and bring the thing over the finish line.

 

But if the A's snow job prevails and the legislature agrees to flush money down the toilet in a state whose education system is rated near the very bottom in the country, then the Oakland mayor retains her dignity.  And Howard Terminal still gets improvments from federal money, even if there's no ballpark.

 

Still, if that terrible scenario comes to pass this time, the Oakland government — under both the current mayor and the previous one — can hold their heads high with dignity and can be secure in the knowledge that they did the right thing throughout, first by leveraging the team's stadium demands into an agreement to also build affordable housing for city residents, and eventually by refusing to be a pawn in a huckster's dishonest game.

 

Are you serious?

 

I might buy that take if Mayor Thao assumed office with no experience in Oakland government.  Fact is she's been on the City Council since 2018.  She knew or should have known what was happening regarding negotiations with the A's.  Even if she was blindsided by the A's announcement, when negotiating deals, the worst-case scenario is always in your mind and a strong possibility until the contract is signed and you always, always have a contingency plan.

 

The A's have been trying to get a stadium deal done in some form since at least when Jerry Brown was mayor covering the administrations of Brown, Dellums, Quan, Schaff and now Thao.  While there's fault on ownership's side there's plenty of fault to go around on the side of the City of Oakland and now more like when they leave with the Nevada legislature passing the funding bill, the Oakland government shoulders blame too.  We can debate the degree but they do have blame. 

[GDAWG]

They have one more year left on their lease. so are they going to break that at the end of this season?

[Sykotyk]

22 minutes ago, GDAWG said:

They have one more year left on their lease. so are they going to break that at the end of this season?

Raiders waited out their lease.  Or, rather, waited for their new stadium to be built. The main argument seemed to be they didn't want to unveil themselves in Las Vegas at Sam Boyd Stadium for a few years, and there was really nowhere else to go.

 

Chargers went to StubHub Center since staying in San Diego was basically impossible. And they were limited where they could play (not at the Coliseum, the Rose Bowl has restrictions on dates, and neither baseball stadium could/would even be considered as viable).

 

Plus, there's the 'aura' of the Raiders that their fans would follow them to Las Vegas, even if via television. So, sticking out two unproductive years in Oakland wasn't exactly a negative like it would've been for the Chargers.

 

The A's though... we saw how bad the support will be when they just THOUGHT they weren't going to play in Oakland. If they sign a deal and construction starts in Vegas... they could count attendance with three digits at some games. The fans would simply shun them. Baseball relies much more on the ticket buyer than other sports. Part of having 81 home games. They'd fare better playing at LV Ballpark for a year or two at exorbitant MLB adjusted rates in the 10k stadium than to even consider playing in Oakland another year. As for the lease having a year left. There's got to be a financial out clause, and I have to imagine they'd pay whatever fee was necessary and recoup the money in Vegas at the small stadium for two years.

[bosrs1]

3 hours ago, SCMODS said:

Fisher also owns the Earthquakes. Yikes. 

 

Why yikes? Earthquakes got their new stadium in San Jose, unlike the A’s. If the A’s had been able to make Cisco Field happen they’d have stayed in the Bay Area at least if not Oakland. 

[bosrs1]

1 hour ago, Sykotyk said:

Raiders waited out their lease.  Or, rather, waited for their new stadium to be built. The main argument seemed to be they didn't want to unveil themselves in Las Vegas at Sam Boyd Stadium for a few years, and there was really nowhere else to go.

 

Chargers went to StubHub Center since staying in San Diego was basically impossible. And they were limited where they could play (not at the Coliseum, the Rose Bowl has restrictions on dates, and neither baseball stadium could/would even be considered as viable).

 

Plus, there's the 'aura' of the Raiders that their fans would follow them to Las Vegas, even if via television. So, sticking out two unproductive years in Oakland wasn't exactly a negative like it would've been for the Chargers.

 

The A's though... we saw how bad the support will be when they just THOUGHT they weren't going to play in Oakland. If they sign a deal and construction starts in Vegas... they could count attendance with three digits at some games. The fans would simply shun them. Baseball relies much more on the ticket buyer than other sports. Part of having 81 home games. They'd fare better playing at LV Ballpark for a year or two at exorbitant MLB adjusted rates in the 10k stadium than to even consider playing in Oakland another year. As for the lease having a year left. There's got to be a financial out clause, and I have to imagine they'd pay whatever fee was necessary and recoup the money in Vegas at the small stadium for two years.

 

Agreed. If the move is approved by the owners and it become publicly known, you’ll be able to walk the Coliseum and shake ever fan in attendance’s hand by the end of the second inning. It’ll be bad enough finishing out this year, they won’t play out the current lease. Sand given the feeling in the city, I wouldn’t count on a lease extension to cover the rest of the years to 2028. No they’ll either tough out a couple of years at Vegas Ballpark in Summerlin, or find some other temp venue that’s slightly more temperate, like Sacramento. 

 

I would imagine October 1 will be the Oakland Athletics final curtain call.

[GDAWG]

RIP Major League Sports in Oakland 1960-2023.  

 

 

[SCMODS]

1 hour ago, bosrs1 said:

 

Agreed. If the move is approved by the owners and it become publicly known, you’ll be able to walk the Coliseum and shake ever fan in attendance’s hand by the end of the second inning. It’ll be bad enough finishing out this year, they won’t play out the current lease. Sand given the feeling in the city, I wouldn’t count on a lease extension to cover the rest of the years to 2028. No they’ll either tough out a couple of years at Vegas Ballpark in Summerlin, or find some other temp venue that’s slightly more temperate, like Sacramento. 

 

I would imagine October 1 will be the Oakland Athletics final curtain call.

 

I seriously doubt the Rivercats will share their ballpark with the A's, even for a couple years, when they're now the Giants affiliate. 

[bosrs1]

40 minutes ago, SCMODS said:

 

I seriously doubt the Rivercats will share their ballpark with the A's, even for a couple years, when they're now the Giants affiliate. 

 

Oh I don’t think that’s the likely outcome either. If I were in Vegas and in a position to put money on it I’d say they’re heading to Vegas Ballpark for a few seasons. 

[bosrs1]

1 hour ago, GDAWG said:

RIP Major League Sports in Oakland 1960-2023.  

 

 

 

I believe Oakland has the dubious distinctions of both being the first city to lose all of its teams it once had in all 4 of the Big 4 leagues (Seals, Warriors, Raiders and now A’s) and the first city to lose 3 teams in under 5 years.

[Walk-Off]

As this year's "Southern Nevada Tourism Innovation Act" awaits the current Nevada governor's signature, I want to express my very mixed opinions and very mixed emotions on this issue.

 

On one hand, I find it shameful that John Fisher, his partners, and their allies are looking to inflict such raw deals upon people in both California and Nevada.  Fisher seems all too willing to become the next Walter O'Malley -- that is, someone who takes a Major League Baseball team away from a gritty, largely working-class, ethnically diverse, religiously diverse community full of people who have loved and cared for the team deeply for many decades, and then puts the team in a place with a far warmer and sunnier climate and a much glitzier and more glamorous image.  At least the Dodgers as owned and run by O'Malley had a steady stream of success on and off the field during both their last few years in Brooklyn and their first few years in Los Angeles, and at least O'Malley's hunger for government aid, as far as I know, was confined to wanting a municipal government to condemn a large swath of land so that he could buy said land inexpensively and then build his own new home field for the Dodgers with only his own money.  By contrast, Fisher and his underlings are seeking to force the residents and businesses that occupy any and every square inch of Nevada -- even the residents that live and the businesses that operate in parts of Nevada that are closer to Boise, Idaho than to Las Vegas or even Reno -- to spend years sacrificing hundreds of millions of their tax dollars for a venue that will be exempt from practically any substantive means of taxation, all to host a franchise that, under its current ownership, has been quick to jettison any player or coach the moment that he is thought to become too costly to keep.  In the meantime, the sports fans that the A's would be leaving behind in Northern California will still have to endure the, to put it kindly, thrifty practices of the Fisher clique's "stewardship" of Major League Soccer's San José Earthquakes.

 

On the other hand, I cannot help but feel what would be best described as frustration toward what I believe to be some naïve and unrealistic expectations and preferences within the whole #FisherOut / #SellTheTeam movement.  My impression is that too many current fans of the A's have been expecting one of only three possible courses of action -- Fisher et al. (a) go full speed ahead toward moving the A's to Las Vegas, (b) have a change of heart and reconcile with Oakland for a deal on a new ballpark, or (c) sell the A's to someone who keeps the team in Oakland -- with the latter two scenarios seeming to be treated by these fans as the only two possible consequences of a failure to secure a relocation to Las Vegas.  To me, such thinking overlooks the possibility that Fisher and his associates would try to move the A's to Portland, Salt Lake City, Sacramento, etc. if the Las Vegas option falls apart or that the A's would be sold to a person or group that is even more determined to move the team to a different Bay Area locale (e.g. San José) at best or a market hundreds of miles away at worst.  (In other words, in that last scenario, John Fisher avoids becoming his generation's equivalent of Walter O'Malley, but is instead MLB's answer to Howard Schultz, the man who sold the Seattle SuperSonics to Clay Bennett.)

 

Further hurting the #FisherOut / #SellTheTeam crowd's argument in my eyes is that movement's apparently widespread fanboyism toward Joe Lacob.  He had the Warriors ditch Oakland for San Francisco, and yet we are supposed to take him at his word if and when he says that he would keep the A's in Oakland should he ever get his hands on that team?  Yeah, right!

 

Yet another frequent example of naïveté that I have seen from #FisherOut / #SellTheTeam activists is an insistence that anyone wanting an MLB team in the Las Vegas area should hold out for an expansion franchise.  When one looks at how Fisher and his minions have commanded the A's and what Fisher and his lackeys have been demanding from both Nevada's political leadership and the general public throughout the Silver State, such advice seems to be very sensible.  Unfortunately, such advice also seems to ignore (a) the Las Vegas area's current lack of any MLB expansion team advocacy campaign that is genuinely comparable to the Portland Diamond Project and/or the Big League Utah group and (b) the fact that the Sacramento market, the Portland market, and even the Salt Lake City market are more populous, per-capita wealthier, and definitely less tourism-dependent alternatives to the Las Vegas market for an MLB expansion team in the Western United States.

 

Finally, with regard to something that could have given the A's a brighter and more sustainable future in the Bay Area (though maybe not in Oakland per se), I have to agree with @NYCdog and disagree with @Ferdinand Cesarano on the territorial rights issue.  Yes, the A's made a sportsmanlike gift of South Bay territorial rights to the Giants more than thirty years ago.  Yes, I can understand why anyone with fond memories of the most triumphant era(s) in the history of the A's in Oakland would want the team to keep playing specifically in Oakland.  However, neither of those factors changes the fact that the Giants (a) built what is now Oracle Park within that team's original Bay Area territorial footprint, at a site that is the farthest away from the South Bay of any regular home venue so far in the Giants' Bay Area history; (b) have retained the freedom to locate their permanent home field in many more parts of the Bay Area than do the A's, ever since receiving that South Bay gift; and (c) have a lock on putting their home ballpark in practically any and all of the wealthiest communities in the Bay Area, whereas the selection of ballpark sites available to the A's has been financially poorer per capita in addition to being geographically narrower.  To make matters worse on the territorial rights front, if and when the A's are gone from the Bay Area for good, I expect that the Giants will then make every effort imaginable to have their territorial rights expanded to encompass the few counties that the A's have been allowed to claim.  Should that happen, then any attempt to put a new MLB team in Oakland or even in the East Bay in general would face all of the same hurdles that stand against any effort to bring an MLB franchise to San José or anyplace else in the South Bay.

[TBGKon]

4 hours ago, bosrs1 said:

 

Oh I don’t think that’s the likely outcome either. If I were in Vegas and in a position to put money on it I’d say they’re heading to Vegas Ballpark for a few seasons. 

You can find more info here, but Sacramento is in play because of the media market.

 

https://ballparkdigest.com/2023/05/30/legislators-debate-new-las-vegas-ballpark-sacramento-to-host-as/

 

Quote

But in terms of media revenues, the A’s are in the middle of the pack, thanks to a $53 million deal with NBC Sports California in 2022. Could the A’s receive that sort of money on a Vegas TV rights deal? Currently the Vegas media world is topsy-turvy. The NHL’s Vegas Golden Knights signed a deal earlier this month with Scripps Sports to locally broadcast Golden Knights games for free to residents of Nevada and surrounding states within the team’s broadcast territory. Scripps will air Golden Knights games on its local station KMCC-TV channel 34, which will be rebranded as an independent station before the 2023-24 NHL season begins. Scripps and the Knights will partner on a direct-to-consumer streaming option as part of this partnership. 

 

Staying in Sacramento–at least for two years–would keep the A’s in a much larger media market–Sacramento/Stockton (#20 market in the United States) vs. what will be the smallest media market, #40 nationally, in MLB. The Knights were forced into a play with a Scripps startup because AT&T SportsNet Rocky Mountain regional sports network, which served Las Vegas, is reportedly shutting down at the end of the MLB season, leaving a local void in Vegas.

 

[FiddySicks]

20 hours ago, NYCdog said:

Also, the SF Giants. Their territorial rights claim on San Jose is literally robbing sports fans throughout the entire Bay Area (Oakland included) from having a second baseball team in the region. That’s why we’re here today, with A’s moving to Vegas.  Otherwise the A’s would’ve been in SJ a decade ago. Now the Giants have the entire region to themselves and they’ll probably fight off any hopes for replacement expansion franchise in Oakland. 

Sigh, no. I’ve said it a million times here before and I’ll say it again. The A’s have absolutely nobody but themselves to blame for not having access to the South Bay. The South Bay territory was (foolishly) given to the Giants by the A’s, who then have OVER A DECADE to claim it back free of charge and just never bothered to file the paperwork. Then both teams were sold, and in the Giants case the rights to the South Bay were factored into the valuation of the team (the Giants owners had the foresight to see that the SB was going to explode, and the A’s just didn’t). The Giants have offered the South Bay back to the A’s, but considering they actually paid for those rights, they want fair compensation for it. The A’s balked at the idea, saying they shouldn’t have to pay a dime for them. It’d be like if someone gave you their underdeveloped back 40, it turned into a new downtown/entertainment district, and then they said “Hey! I want that back now that it’s actually valuable!” It would simply be bad business to gift that back to your in market rivals. It’s also yet another example of the A’s trying to cheap out and shift the financial burden for their operations to anyone else they can that isn’t themselves. 
 

 

 

I know it’s fun to hate on the Giants for this, but it’s ridiculous and off base. It’s some garbage nonsense put out by the A’s and I’m baffled that people are actually buying into it (why do people buy ANYTHING the A’s say at this point?). The A’s have spent the last four decades making dumb business decision after dumb business decision, and that’s probably their biggest single blunder. And now they’re asking the Giants to make an equally dumb business decision “in good faith” to make up for their own idiocy. Hell no, screw that.  Like I’ve said before, the A’s made their own bed, and now it’s time to lie in it. They can off to Vegas, Sacramento, Timbuktu, who cares. Good riddance. 

[Digby]

9 hours ago, bosrs1 said:

 

Why yikes? Earthquakes got their new stadium in San Jose, unlike the A’s. If the A’s had been able to make Cisco Field happen they’d have stayed in the Bay Area at least if not Oakland. 

 

Arguably the most underachieving team in MLS, on and off the pitch. Should be a major market, is actually an afterthought. I wouldn't want to help these guys build anything on the cheap and half-empty, either.

[Digby]

2 minutes ago, FiddySicks said:

(why do people buy ANYTHING the A’s say at this point?)

 

Only when it's a convenient proxy for partisan political arguments.

[bosrs1]

7 minutes ago, Digby said:

 

Arguably the most underachieving team in MLS, on and off the pitch. Should be a major market, is actually an afterthought. I wouldn't want to help these guys build anything on the cheap and half-empty, either.

 

Oh I agree, this Vegas venture is going to flop harder than LeBron James if Fisher doesn’t ultimately sell. The Earthquakes are what results when Fisher does get his stadium, you still have a poorly run team, just in a new venue. And given the effort that will be needed to make the A’s successful in Vegas…

[Ferdinand Cesarano]

6 hours ago, Walk-Off said:

Fisher seems all too willing to become the next Walter O'Malley

 

No one should ever compare O'Malley to Fisher.

 

 

6 hours ago, Walk-Off said:

O'Malley's hunger for government aid, as far as I know, was confined to wanting a municipal government to condemn a large swath of land so that he could buy said land inexpensively and then build his own new home field for the Dodgers with only his own money. 

 

And that is why such a comparison is wrong.  O'Malley fully intended to build a ballpark at the current site of the Nets' arena.  But he ran into the immovable object of New York politics of the day, the unaccountable Robert Moses.  If Fisher had been behaving like O'Malley, the A's new Oakland ballpark would have been built already.

 

 

6 hours ago, Walk-Off said:

Walter O'Malley -- that is, someone who takes a Major League Baseball team away from a gritty, largely working-class, ethnically diverse, religiously diverse community full of people who have loved and cared for the team deeply for many decades,

 

This is pure fiction.  O'Malley did not leave Brooklyn of his own choosing. The only reason that Dodger Stadium is in Chavez Ravine rather than on Atlantic Avenue is the corruption in New York politics that allowed an unelected person to accumulate so much power.

 

Robert Moses is sometimes referred to as the New York City parks commissioner; but that doesn't come close to capturing his power, which exceeded that of mayors and governors, and spanned generations. Moses was so entrenched, with multiple overlapping posts within the City and State government, that he had already given O'Malley a firm "no" on the idea of accumulating the land for the footprint of a privately-built Downtown Brooklyn stadium before anyone else in the New York City government even knew what was going on.

 

By the time the actual elected government of New York City got wind of this fiasco, O'Malley had already built a relationship with a Los Angeles government that had embraced him and that was willing to provide him with everything that New York City (in the person of Moses) had refused to provide. All that New York City could offer at that point was a municipal stadium in Queens at the site where Shea Stadium was later built, an offer which is obviously inadequate.

 

The important point is that O'Malley didn't abandon Brooklyn; rather, he was kicked out of Brooklyn by Moses.

 

For the full story, read the excellent book The Dodgers Move West, by Neil Sullivan.