As Athletics move closer to Las Vegas, systemic rot won’t stay rooted in Oakland

Let’s be clear: Las Vegas would not be inheriting the Oakland Athletics of Reggie Jackson and Catfish Hunter, of Billyball and Rickey Henderson and Dave Stewart and Moneyball.

They would be inheriting John Fisher, best known for inheriting the Gap from his daddy and Billy Beane from previous ownership regimes.

Fisher’s A’s continued their inexorable crawl toward the desert with the purchase of 49 acres of land near the Las Vegas Strip, a “binding purchase agreement” accompanied by the boilerplate fait accompli statements from appropriate stakeholders late Wednesday, served up like a slice of prime rib on a buffet platter.

Naturally, there are years to go and billions of dollars to move into Fisher’s pockets before a stadium is approved, funded, constructed and the A’s gaggle of bright young stars – perhaps you’ve heard of Ryan Noda, Mason Miller, Esteury Ruiz? Maybe not? – take their talents from Hegenberger Road to Dean Martin Drive come 2027.

For the moment, it’s instructive to follow the tenses.

A’s president Dave Kaval is speaking in the past tense about Oakland and the present about Vegas. Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred, who has served as Fisher’s reluctant hatchet man as needed, says his office supports the A’s “turning their focus on Las Vegas” and “bringing finality” to the process.

Meanwhile, Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo has one eye on the multi-billion dollar legislative pie fight that still awaits, saying that an A’s move “would be” great news for his state and they’ll “continue to navigate this opportunity.”

Thee Oakland Athletics entered a land purchase agreement for an area near the Las Vegas strip.

Naturally, 49 acres of desert land is useless without plumbing and electricity. And that may very well prove to be the force that drives the A’s from Oakland: Infrastructure.

The club and the city of Oakland have navigated a Byzantine series of approvals and environmental impact reports to bring Fisher’s dream of a $12 billion real estate project that includes a ballpark closer to reality. But the Howard Terminal project was dealt a key setback in January when the city of Oakland was denied a $182 million federal grant from the Department of Transportation, a huge chunk of the nearly $600 million estimate needed for infrastructure.

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The city had cobbled together more than $300 million through proverbial loose change beneath various funding couches, hopeful not to pass the costs on to the taxpayer.  Yet as inflation rose and city and team failed to strike a deal, the original infrastructure cost nearly doubled, with the city already expected to create a special tax district containing Fisher’s 3,000 homes, hotel and other commercial opportunities.

And this is where Oakland draws the line where other municipalities might merely capitulate to the franchise owner.

Fisher, worth an estimated $2.4 billion, could simply bridge that gap in funding, or at least make a good faith effort to close it. Yet that’s anathema to owners and their leagues, who wince when reaching into their pockets for a new stadium when public money will do. They’d rather stick up a municipality than set a precedent by writing their own check, even in California, where Manfred has acknowledged political processes “are their own sort of animal” compared to stadium efforts in other cities and states.

Translation: Oakland is not Nashville.

Perhaps you’ve missed it, but the NFL’s Tennessee Titans are just one city council vote from winning approval for a $2.1 billion stadium – a price tag that includes $1.26 billion in public funds. Go ahead and calculate what that might pay for the public across the decades; instead, it’ll see eight annual football games, an occasional Final Four or Super Bowl and perhaps a Morgan Wallen concert or three, all for a project even the conservative Nashville area narrowly opposes.

Oakland lost the stomach for such giveaways decades ago, when a $600 million deal for the Raiders went bad almost immediately. Al and Mark Davis reaped the benefits on the front and back end of the deal, the latter moving the team to Las Vegas even as the public still faced $55 million to pay off bonds from the 1995 move. Just for kicks, public officials allowed the team to avoid repayment on loans totaling $64 million, a cost that with interest grew to $189 million.

A view of Oakland’s RingCentral Coliseum.

It was a disastrous deal in 1995 and the state of play is even worse now, with a full-blown regional housing crisis atop the enduring challenges of poverty, income inequality and funding shortfalls facing the city. Nonetheless, Fisher quickly adopted a “waterfront condos or bust” mentality, getting Manfred to play along by calling the Coliseum site inappropriate for a new facility, even if approval and construction would’ve been a relative breeze.

Perhaps this was Fisher’s game all along: Las Vegas, unless Oakland capitulates. The issue had been framed in opposite terms up to now, until Kaval spoke of “parallel paths” in Oakland and Vegas and the grim intonations from Manfred came more frequently.

And even still, there remains no deal. It’s easy to forget that in May 2022, Washington Commanders owner Dan Snyder caused a brief stir when he obtained the rights to purchase land in a particularly dank and inaccessible corner of the capital region. A year later, and Snyder soon won’t own the team, let alone develop a new stadium.

A’s fans would surely appreciate a similar outcome. Fisher has been a passive at best and malignant at worst steward of the franchise, which he took over after Lew Wolff sold his controlling interest in 2016. While the A’s have been lauded for their plucky and overachieving ways, it’s easy to forget the innovative Beane joined the organization in 1990, and current GM David Forst about a decade later; under Fisher, the club’s good young players only get traded sooner and sooner, the on-field product growing uglier.

Kaval’s early tenure as club president briefly inspired hope, through vague platitudes on social media and the workshopping of myriad new stadium ideas at the aging Coliseum – a “treehouse” for in-game fun, creative ticket packaging and experiential visions for the ‘Gram.

The A’s used to lean into their rough-hewn fan base, even dubbing the experience “Green Collar Baseball” for a while. Yet in retrospect, a 35,000-seat waterfront stadium, at Bay Area prices, likely would have excluded many of those drum-pounding fanatics on most nights, anyway.

Years later, Kaval has ghosted the fan base, as the Coliseum falls further into disrepair. The myriad “lol Coliseum” moments over the years – be it sewage, feral cats or possums – technically fall under the purview of the Joint Powers Authority, which operates the yard. Yet owners can always pour a little TLC into a facility, if they care.

The A’s stopped caring about Oakland a few years ago, their Vegas gambit practically a nod to franchise history that saw them move from Philadelphia to Kansas City to the Bay Area, surviving there even through the penurious Charles O. Finley years, an expected move to Denver and a football-driven ruination of a once-pleasant ballpark.

Manfred is fond of saying that deadlines drive action and that’s probably the case here, too. The 2022 collective bargaining agreement mandated that the A’s strike a deal for a new stadium – in any city – by Jan. 15, 2024, or the club would once again be weaned off MLB’s revenue-sharing plan.

Hitting Fisher in the wallet is certainly one way to end the inertia.

Now, Las Vegas, where the club hopes to play by 2027. We’re past the point of wondering whether a sports franchise can make it in the desert, not after Raiders Nation followed them there, the Golden Knights made the Stanley Cup Finals and the NCAA and several conferences are making it the de facto capital of college basketball.

Eighty-one home dates, largely during the worst tourist periods of the year, will be a different challenge. The bigger one may come from Fisher, whose inelegant leadership in Oakland suggests a theme Las Vegas’ politicians and citizens might want to adopt as this “parallel path” gets cleared.

Buyer beware.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Athletics’ Las Vegas relocation would carry systemic rot from Oakland