I can continue to point out that A's owner John Fisher is a soulless ghoul or that team president Dave Kaval is a charlatan, but, let's be honest, it's becoming reductive.
There is plenty of blame to go around, after all.
The A's will move to Las Vegas (at some point) primarily because of those two mountebanks, but systems and people also enabled them.
Those two weren't clever enough to make this happen on their own.
This by no means exonerates them, but when the A's leaves Oakland — and that day can't come soon enough — there will be green blood on more hands than just Fisher and Kaval's.
They were enabled by MLB commissioner — aka the owners' lawyer — Rob Manfred, who was hands-off in the team's stadium quest, only chiming in with empty rhetoric that signaled how little he cared about the situation. Manfred failed to exert any authority when it became clear years ago that Fisher wasn't a serious owner, or that Kaval was unemployable in his role.
Worse yet, Manfred pushed forward with the status quo when the league's governing rules were renegotiated before last season.
Fisher and Kaval were enabled by a system that only fiscally rewards owners that try really hard to win (and achieve that status) or owners that treat the a Major League team like a set-and-forget index fund and let their teams rot on the vine. Five or six teams raise the tide in baseball; even the run-down, no-maintenance ships are lifted.
Tony Clark, the president of the players' association, is complicit in this part. When the players and owners re-negotiated the sport's collective bargaining agreement, Clark did not prioritize a league-wide salary floor. Without one, the A's can continue to field a 26-man roster that makes less than Mets starting pitcher Max Scherzer annually.
Major League Baseball is fine with teams like the A's, Reds, Pirates, and Marlins never spending money. While it shouldn't be the players' job to provide accountability to those teams, that's where the responsibility fell, and they failed to change a thing.
Here's some good news: American professional sports is at the start of a massive reckoning, as regional sports networks run by Sinclair and Warner Brothers/Discovery are set to sunset amid bankruptcies and reorganizations.
In baseball, only 12 of 30 Major League teams can claim, at the moment, to have a solid television contract. The A's are one of those teams due to their local TV deal with NBC Sports Bay Area, which is partially owned by the Giants.
Despite low viewership, I understand that the A's TV deal can still cover the team's entire (paltry) payroll. Add in some revenue sharing, and you're making solid money.
But if this team ever actually packs its bags and leaves the Bay Area — the nation's 10th largest media market, per Nielsen (No. 3 if you include the Sacramento region, where the A's are broadcast) — there will not be a new TV deal on the other side in the No. 40 market, Las Vegas, as the area's regional sports network — the Denver-based AT&T SportsNet Rocky Mountain — is shutting down.
That's a significant revenue hit, especially for a team already pushing that it will be for Las Vegas locals.
Playing in an outdoor, Triple-A ballpark in the suburbs — though unquestionably nicer than the Coliseum — isn't likely to line the A's coffers until a new stadium is built, either.
And there's no guarantee the A's receive the $500 million in free money they want from Nevada and Clark County.
The A's are making a big bet with Vegas, and there's a better-than-decent chance they go bust.
After all, it is Fisher and Kaval running the show.
All this to say that while the A's have turned their back on Oakland, all they have to show for it is a truck stop they purchased on the wrong side of the highway.
I know a piece of land on the wrong side of the highway in Oakland. It's called the Coliseum Complex.
It's been suggested that I am letting Oakland City government off the hook for this fiasco.
I find that laughable — as I find most things the city of Oakland does.
The A's and the city of Oakland deserved each other. They traded off in efforts of collective and self-sabotage. And the truth is that once Libby Schaaf stepped down as mayor, the A's lost their biggest champion in local government and arguably the only person at Ogawa Plaza with the ability and power to turn the poorly-greased gears.
New mayor Sheng Thao was no adversary, but she was hardly an advocate. Her priority wasn't the A's, and Fisher and company responded by not making Oakland their priority.
Mark Davis' comments in the Las Vegas Review-Journal rang true to me.
"We ended up in Las Vegas, which is absolutely fantastic and couldn't be better," Davis said, amongst so many other things. "But the A's never gave us a real good chance to stay up in Oakland."
Davis is no saint, but I believe he wanted to stay in Oakland — or California, at least. His issue is that he has no money, so he had to go wherever he could to get a free stadium.
In his case, that was Las Vegas. He would have lost his team if he had not taken the deal — effectively bankrolled by the NFL after initial funding failed. That's a line he refused to cross.
Could Davis have handled the situation better? Absolutely. He was as clumsy as his haircut through the process. But there was a transparency to the situation, too: No one could have expected much better from him.
Fisher, meanwhile, has never sat for an interview with any major news source in the Bay Area. I'm among the few media people in the Bay to have met the man. The meeting lasted 30 seconds in the A's dugout. It was awkward as hell — his problem, not mine — and accomplished nothing.
Any normal owner would feel the heat from these relocation sagas and sell their teams. I promise that there would have been local buyers.
But Davis' daddy issues never allowed for that possibility, and Fisher is anything but a normal owner.
No, for Fisher, the profit he made from bottoming out the A's was too good. The possibility of receiving free money or free land from some government because of the team was too enticing. Fisher was willing to spend for that — Kaval has been keen to point out that the A's spent nine figures in their effort to keep the team in Oakland — but not on putting a winning ball team on the field.
There was a recent stretch when Oakland was saddled with arguably the three worst owners in professional sports — the elder or younger Davis, Fisher, and Chris Cohan.
The Davises were too weird and broke, Fisher is too greedy, and Cohan was too incompetent.
And when Cohan finally did a smart thing and sold the Warriors to Joe Lacob and Peter Gruber — two competent men — they built the team up and then decided they were too good for Oakland and the East Bay.
There's bad luck. Then there's Oakland luck.
I can't help but think that the A's exit will let the region's more popular team — the San Francisco Giants — off the hook.
Amid a string of free-agent failures, the Giants' brass has dabbled with a brand of ownership I call FIshernomics.
The Giants can get away with mediocrity today because there's no actual big-league competition in the market. The Giants have the more attractive ballpark, so if you're going to pay $30 to park and $17 for four chicken tenders and fries — roughly the price at both Bay Area ballparks this season — you might as well have something nice to look at in the process.
A new A's ballpark might not have split the market, but it would have provided a strong push for the Giants to start acting like the big-money team they are. Remember: there's a reason the Giants opposed the A's efforts to move to San Jose back in the day.
But if the A's finally move, what will incentivize the Giants to try?
Pride? There's no money in pride in Major League Baseball.
The Giants' summer competition in this region is soccer — the San Jose Earthquakes, the new NWSL team in the South Bay, and the second-division Oakland Roots and Oakland Soul.
One of those teams — the biggest one, in fact — is owned by Fisher.
So, no, it's not much competition. We're left hoping for a Lacob-owned WNBA team at Chase Center to push the Giants.
Yes, Fisher has been great for the Giants' bottom line. The only thing better for the Giants is the A's leaving the market altogether.
At that point, the team's current "profit with mediocrity" plan might not even need the second part.
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