A’s will finally turn out the lights on Pro Sports in Oakland
One by one they left Oakland.
First, the Warriors headed back across the Bay to San Francisco in 2019, a return for a basketball franchise whose recent reign has been defined more by glitz than grit. Then, a year later, it was the roving Raiders heading to Las Vegas, the eye patch on their bandit logo obscuring an apparently wandering eye.
On Thursday, the final departure became all but official: owners of Major League Baseball approved unanimously a move to Las Vegas by the Athletics, which not long ago used the marketing slogan “rooted in Oakland.”
There is still a lot to be done for the ball club. The Athletics have one year left on their lease in Oakland and their new stadium — a $1.5 billion ballpark with 30,000 seats and a retractable roof for which the Nevada Legislature has approved state funding — won’t be ready until 2028. is an open question. The Nevada teachers union is trying to put the grant on the ballot for voters.
But the A’s impending move, as inevitable as it seemed, landed in Oakland like a fastball to the ribs.
“I don’t want this to sound hyperbolic, but to me it’s not just the death of the A’s and of professional sports in the East Bay,” said Jim Zelinski, who co-founded Save Oakland Sports more than a decade ago. one of several groups that have emerged over the years to prevent teams from leaving the East Bay. “What this vote symbolizes for me is that this is truly the death of the regular, everyday fan.”
The working man has long been a central figure in American sports. He was drawn to the games as a distraction from the 9-to-5 grind and viewed them as a more level playing field than other social arenas, including the workplace.
When professional sports began expanding west in the late 1950s, Oakland—anchored by shipbuilding, auto manufacturing and the port—became an obvious landing spot.
Within just over a decade, Oakland became home to the Raiders of the upstart American Football League, the Athletics, the Warriors and, briefly, the California Golden Seals of the National Hockey League, who for a time played in old-fashioned white skates.
All teams played at a complex centered on a vast asphalt field, flanked by a major highway and a railway line.
The plot will soon be vacant. This isn’t because Oakland has changed; it has largely retained its working-class ethos, albeit with Californian rents. Rather, the business calculus for teams has evolved.
Franchise revenues are now driven more by television deals and sponsorships than by ticket sales, although those prices have skyrocketed. The transformation of sports into media products has relegated cities to backdrops and fans to props – a point made clear during the coronavirus pandemic when the games took place in vacant or largely empty stadiums.
If it’s baffling why athletics is leaving the Bay Area, that’s the 10th largest marketAccording to the Nielsen Company, for Las Vegas, the 40th largest market, there is another factor at play, said Roger Noll, a sports economist emeritus at Stanford.
Sports gambling.
As regional sports networks, a cash cow for sports teams, begin to falter — and in some cases collapse — Mr. Noll says sports gambling via streaming broadcasts is “the next golden goose” for sports franchises.
While Nevada has predictably welcomed Internet gambling, California has not: Two measures, one of which was backed by the MLB, were defeated last year in what was the nation’s most expensive ballot campaign, with more than $450 million raised by both parties.
“If this is the next big thing, California sports teams will be hurt,” Mr. Noll said. “The old dynamics of the big and small markets will no longer favor the Bay Area and Los Angeles teams if there is no primary source of new revenue available to them.”
The Athletics Association has been looking for a new stadium for decades, under at least three different owners. They have tried to build a new ballpark in south Fremont and San Jose, downtown at Laney College or on the water at Howard Terminal, as well as at their current location.
Building new stadiums in California is a contact sport in itself, given high labor costs, stringent environmental standards and taxpayer aversion to subsidies for sports franchises. But it’s not impossible, as the Clippers’ new arena, opening next year in Inglewood, will be the last to be demonstrated.
In Oakland, this was perhaps its most challenging time, thanks to a record $360 million budget deficit — and long memories of the time the city lured Raiders owner Al Davis back from Los Angeles in 1995 with a sweetheart loan deal that turned into a boondoggle for the city. A towering set of suites — called Mount Davis — was also built in the outfield, opening a revenue stream for the Raiders but cutting off sweeping views of the Oakland Hills.
Over the years, the old Colosseum showed its age.
It had the concrete charm of a Soviet-era city block, the sewers were regularly maintained – prompting an adjustment of the Raiders’ mantra to “Commitment to Excrement” – and the arrival of food trucks was a culinary life raft for fans who didn’t longer had to settle for concession offers that clearly tasted like cardboard.
Yet athletics remained competitive and reinvented itself by cleverly using data to assess undervalued skills, a process that became known as “Moneyball,” after the best-selling book. The A’s haven’t reached the World Series since 1990, but have been to the playoffs 11 times since 2000 – more than the Mets and the San Francisco Giants, and as many times as the Boston Red Sox.
However, turnout remained stuck in the bottom third drum-beating fans in right field Creating a noise at night created a certain atmosphere. But as the team began its final teardown, trading away its best players for prospects rather than paying their rising salaries, fans finally had enough of John Fisher, the owner, who had raised ticket prices before last season in what according to many it was a trick. to suppress attendance as a pretext for moving.
Last season, the A’s averaged 10,276 fans, the fewest in baseball. They finished 50-112, threatening for a while the record for futility set by the expansion Mets in 1962.
Fans who did come to the Coliseum often wore T-shirts or banners promoting Mr. Fisher urged him to sell the team.
Those who miss Athletics the most are perhaps people like Matthias Haas.
He grew up a few miles from the Coliseum, steeped in the city’s rich baseball history, which stretches from Frank Robinson to Rickey Henderson, Dave Stewart and Jimmy Rollins, all of whom went from the Sandlots in Oakland to stardom in the major leagues came. He learned the ropes of the game on the diamonds down the street at 66th and International in competitions that helped fund athletics. He has a lasting memory of being in the stands during the 2012 playoffs when the old mausoleum was turned upside down.
“There is a certain pride in being an Oakland Athletics fan,” said Mr. Haas, who plays baseball at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, picked the adjectives “gritty” and “tough” to define his tribe. “People from Oakland say they’re from Oakland, not the Bay Area. This is what it felt like to be an A fan.”