The team formerly known as the Oakland Athletics are just two years away from officially moving to Las Vegas.
After decades in Oakland, it was a frustrating, heartbreaking conclusion for the remaining diehard fans of the franchise, brought on by Major League Baseball’s worst stadium situation.
For years, the Athletics and the city of Oakland tried to work out a deal on a new stadium, with several different locations tossed around. They even came close at one point, with a mega-waterfront site deal nearing fruition. The A’s even tried to move south to the San Jose area, hoping to capitalize on the growing, and generally wealthy, Silicon Valley subset of the Bay Area.
None of it ever worked out, though, and the Athletics are set to play three years in a minor league facility in Sacramento before moving to Vegas. There’s plenty of blame to go around, but one of the team’s former owners has one obvious culprit: the… San Francisco Giants?
Wolff is out with a new book, called “Moments,” and took a big shot at the Giants organization for pushing the Athletics to leave.
In the book, per The Athletic, he said the move was “100 percent due to the nasty, shameful, and continuing opposition of the Giants.” Why? Because the Giants blocked the A’s from moving to anywhere nearby, on the grounds that it would encroach into their MLB-defined local broadcast territory.
That territory included San Jose, because at one point, decades earlier, the Giants had explored moving there themselves. At one point, the city of San Jose sued the Giants over their ability to block the A’s from moving there, but lost and the A’s deal fizzled.
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“John Fisher gets blamed for things he doesn’t deserve to be blamed for,” he said. “We tried everything we could think of, but the real key was we had no leverage. The Giants’ position really, really messed us up in trying to even negotiate with Oakland.”
There’s some truth to that, though at the same time, many of the issues that arise from stadium deals start because owners want to spend as little as possible of their own money on construction. Las Vegas and the state of Nevada gave the Athletics hundreds of millions of dollars to build their new stadium on The Strip, a handout that Oakland likely couldn’t match. It raises the question that if these stadiums are such good investments, why shouldn’t owners arrange financing themselves?
The answer, of course, is that they don’t want to, because it’s much more beneficial to get taxpayers to fund a substantial percentage of it for them. Sure, the Giants didn’t help, and the Athletics probably should have been able to move to San Jose without interference. Of course, MLB’s arcane antitrust exemption and their territorial rights interfered. Still, they had decades to get something done in Oakland and couldn’t.
The new Vegas stadium will be a gigantic improvement, and the city has already shown support for the Golden Knights and Raiders. None of that will make Oakland fans any happier though.
