Oakland faces a “devastating” future without professional sports

OAKLAND, Calif. – While sitting in the Oakland Athletics dugout last week, Tony Kemp couldn’t avoid the sights and sounds of protesters as they marched through the stadium in green T-shirts with the words “Sell The Team” on the front side. with signs lamenting the likely fate of the team.

The rest of the fans, the few that were there, joined in the chants of the protesters urging John Fisher, the owner of the A’s, to relinquish his grip on the club. They also shouted in rhythmic unison to the team, “Stay in Oakland” and “Save their jobs”, referring to friendly ushers and guards, sympathetic to their cause.

“It’s tough,” said Kemp, who is in his fourth season in Oakland. “You are in the dugout and you just feel for them. You think of generations, people raising their families here and wanting to take their kids to A’s games because they were brought to A’s games as kids. It is very difficult.”

Kemp, like most track and field players, sympathizes with the fans, but “hard” doesn’t adequately reflect their plight. The team announced last month that it had reached a deal to buy land in Nevada for a new stadium and that it planned to move to the Las Vegas Strip by the 2027 season. It was a crushing blow to the loyal fans, some of whom have cherished the A’s since they moved to Oakland, California in 1968.

Even worse, if the move goes through, the A’s would become the third and final major sports team to leave Oakland since 2019, following the NBA’s Golden State Warriors, who crossed the bay to San Francisco, and the NFL’s Raiders, who Fled Oakland for Las Vegas in 2020. All three teams thrived at different times on the same asphalt acreage in an industrial corner of the city southeast of downtown. But if the A’s actually raise enough money to carry out their plans, there won’t be a major professional sports team left.

For a city and a region with proud, resilient residents, it would be a crushing triple rejection.

“For the last few years, people have just been plagued by the loss of the Warriors, the loss of the Raiders, and now the A’s,” said Jim Zelinski, a co-founder of SOS (Save Oakland Sports). “It’s just devastating.”

Zelinski, who attended Oakland A’s first home game on April 17, 1968, when he was 10, started the advocacy group in 2012. He and his friends feared that all three clubs wanted to move, and they petitioned team owners, local politicians , league offices and other fan groups to prevent their departure. They may have put it off for a while, but now the worst seems to have happened.

Sports teams all too often switch cities for the fans left behind, and Oakland once benefited from the wounds felt elsewhere. The A’s were born in Philadelphia in 1901, moved to Kansas City, Mo in 1955.

“Oakland had a professional sports empire as good as any other,” Zelenski said. “But it has been dismantled and it is currently hanging on only one pillar.”

Zelinski, along with his friends, fellow protesters, and many A’s fans disagree on the degree of blame city officials bear for the situation. But most agree that Fisher is a prime culprit. They believe he deliberately fielded poor teams in recent years and refused to make stadium improvements to dampen attendance numbers. other option than to move the franchise.

“Absolutely, the whole region believes that,” said Anson Casanares, 36, one of the protesters and a lifelong resident of Oakland. “We are losing more than just a team. We are losing our civic pride.”

Oakland’s opponent on the night of the protest was the Cincinnati Reds, the team the A’s defeated in their first World Series in Oakland in 1972. They also played the Reds in the 1990 Fall Classic, a third straight World Series- performing during a period when the A’s were among the most feared and popular teams in Major League Baseball. They drew 2.9 million fans that year, for an average of over 36,000 per game.

“The Coliseum was Oakland’s town square, where people of all backgrounds could gather, and there were generations of fans,” said Andy Dolich, the team’s vice president from 1980-94, when the club changed ownership. “You’ve taken that heart, mind and soul of a city and ripped it out.”

Dolich, who also served as the chief operating officer of the San Francisco 49ers, recently co-wrote “Goodbye Oakland” with Dave Newhouse, a sports columnist for The Oakland Tribune, about the triumph and loss of professional sports in Oakland. Dolich said city officials, including current and former mayors, were protecting civic interests by not giving in to financial demands from the Raiders and A’s, who he said deliberately downsized their own product to force a move.

“I believe this situation is absolutely self-inflicted,” he said, “without a doubt.”

Dave Kaval, the chairman of the A’s, denied that. He said the team tried harder than the Raiders or the Warriors to stay in Oakland, spending $2 million a month for the better part of two years trying to find a local fix. He said the A’s committed to Las Vegas only after it became clear that the yet-to-be-completed plan to build a new waterfront stadium at Howard Terminal in the Port of Oakland would take at least seven or eight years.

“That timeline just isn’t sustainable,” Kaval said in a phone interview.

But fans once flocked to the A’s. In 2019, they drew 1.67 million fans, better than seven MLB teams, and in 2014 they drew more than two million. Both seasons, the A’s made the playoffs, which shows that when the club is good, fans show up. Known for decades for low player wages, the A’s still managed to find good, undervalued players through an analytical approach favored by the team’s former general manager Billy Beane, who is still always an advisor.

But lately, the team’s payrolls have been falling. This year it sits at around $56 million, the lowest of the 30 MLB teams. In 2022, it was $47.8 million, 29th in the league.

Those cuts coincided with the decision two years ago to simultaneously pursue new stadiums in both Oakland and Las Vegas. Kaval said the A’s said they were instructed to do so by MLB, but that the announcement angered fans who weren’t willing to pay to see a team they believed was destined to leave, which seemed to create a self-fulfilling result. Attendance fell by more than half, from 1.66 million in 2019 (the last year before pandemic-related stadium restrictions) to 787,902 in 2022.

To make matters worse, before the 2022 season, the A’s traded their top two players, first baseman Matt Olson and third baseman Matt Chapman, further enraging disgruntled fans. In 2020, the A’s declined to re-sign free agent infielder Marcus Semien, a local star, who grew up attending both high school and college in the East Bay. The team’s top pitchers, Sean Manaea and Frankie Montas, were also traded last year.

Then, following the team’s 102-loss season in 2022, the final blow was dealt when catcher Sean Murphy, the team’s last notable veteran, was traded to Atlanta, where he is once again a teammate of Olson.

Meanwhile, the stadium, a remnant of multi-sport concrete violence in the late 1960s, remained a crumbling, festering ruin – invaded by possums in the press box – with entire swaths of seating covered in tarps and numerous shuttered grandstands.

“It’s 10 years past expiration,” said Kaval, noting that the A’s paid for recent stadium upgrades.

But the upgrades are modest at best. Dolich, A’s former executive, also questioned the true intent of the Howard Terminal project, centered in one of the world’s busiest ports. He called it a “fig of the imagination” and added, “You can’t have a more complicated location.”

There were concerns about car and public transportation access, and the proposal included a gondola system to take fans to the park.

Joe Audelo, a construction manager, has owned two sets of A’s season tickets since 1988 (he also owned two sets for the Raiders). He attended a recent meeting with A’s executives and asked about the capacity of the gondolas. He was told they could carry 5,000 people an hour, he said.

“So it’s going to take seven hours to fill the stadium?” he said Friday night from his seats behind home plate. “It never seemed real to me.”

Some fans and observers, such as Dolich, still think the Las Vegas deal could fall through. Audelo said his gut tells him it’s over in Oakland. He is another co-founder of Save Oakland Sports and he has been disappointed twice before in the past four years.

“It’s so sad,” said his wife, Jennifer Audelo, a lifelong A’s and Raiders fan from nearby Concord, California. “My husband has lost all his teams. It’s like he’s in mourning.”

Not surprisingly, the team is terrible in the midst of this year’s turmoil. Going 6-25 through Wednesday, they had the worst record in baseball through Wednesday, matching their lowest payroll and worst attendance status. Yet last Friday, in the team’s first home game since its announcement in Las Vegas, there was more noise and energy in the stands, from just 6,423 fans, than all year. Most came from protesters.

The clubhouse was dead silent.

“I hate it for the fans,” said Jace Peterson, an A’s outfielder. “Hopefully we can play well and do our part to make it a little bit better for them.”