Pracheth Sanka
October
56 seasons. 21 playoff appearances. 6 American League Pennants and 4 World Series Championships: the Athletics’ storied time in Oakland came to an end late this September with a 3-2 win over the Texas Rangers, their final game in the city’s Coliseum.
The team’s departure is part of a larger effort to permanently move the franchise to Las Vegas, with a quick pit-stop in Sacramento before moving into their new $1.5 billion publicly-financed home on the Strip. The A’s owner, John Fisher, remained silent on the team's relocation, though it is no secret that his inability to compromise with Oakland city officials played a major role in his decision.
The feud stemmed from the team’s plans to move from the single-function Coliseum to a 55-acre, multi-use commercial area on the Oakland waterfront. The city’s inability to raise public funds pushed Fisher to look elsewhere, despite recent traction in allocating federal infrastructure money and clearing bureaucratic hurdles to initiate the project. Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred, who initially objected to Fisher’s proposals, allowed the A’s to submit a relocation application in early 2023.
After securing $380 million from the Government of Nevada and leasing out an area in the heart of Las Vegas, the team began preparing for a full push to move from Oakland. By November 2023, Manfred started warming up to relocation efforts, and the 30-team league voted unanimously in favor of the A’s relocation.
Oakland is now left without a professional sports team for the first time in sixty years, following similar relocations by the National Basketball League’s Golden State Warriors and the National Football League’s Raiders earlier this decade.
Like the A’s, the Raiders moved from the aging, run-down Oakland Coliseum to the custom-made, fittingly all-black, multi-billion dollar Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas. Unlike Fisher, Raiders owner Mark Davis spared no suspense on the motive behind his move: money. Without the billion-dollar cost of constructing a new Oakland stadium, and with the aid of $750 million from the city of Las Vegas, Davis finalized his move to the team-barren Nevada desert, capitalizing on the area’s lack of professional sports teams.
Vegas, however, was not Davis’ first choice. In competition with the then-St. Louis Rams, and in collaboration with the then-San Diego Chargers, the Raiders hoped to upgrade from the tenth-biggest sports market in the United States to the second: Los Angeles.
While the Chargers and Rams were eventually successful in a bid to move to the city, it was originally the Chargers and Raiders who wished to jointly finance a stadium just south of city limits in Carson, even gaining the support of an N.F.L. relocation commission. Despite the difference in outcome, both the Chargers’ and Rams’ stories paint eerily similar pictures to that of Oakland.
In San Diego, ownership attempted to replace the fifty-year-old Qualcomm Stadium with a $1.2 billion downtown arena. This failed to attract lawmaker support, who were reluctant to divert millions of taxpayer dollars towards it. Owner Dean Spanos instead decided to buy into a joint stadium with Rams’ owner Stan Kroenke, who himself harbored his fair share of reasons to leave his St. Louis home. Chief among them was the city’s promises to maintain a modern, N.F.L. caliber stadium, which was one of the main temptations for Kroenke to move the team to Missouri in the first place.
As city officials repeatedly failed their contractual obligation to uphold the stadium, Kroenke became increasingly frustrated and detached from the team’s midwest home. Los Angeles, the Rams’ former home, was an open market for any football team, having remained teamless for 21 years. With the prospect of creating a modernized stadium in the largest untapped market in the U.S., Kroenke took an all-out bid on L.A., buying land in Inglewood before the owners even held a vote on the relocation.
But were these moves worth it? Sure, the free market ideals of expanding into an untouched consumer pool can be exciting, but these ventures are not inexpensive. Even with government aid, financing the world’s most expensive stadium was much more costly than staying in their respective cities.
With the aid of the N.F.L. and sponsorship rights, Spanos would have only needed to cover around $600 million, government aid not included. A move to Los Angeles cost him a relocation fee of $645 million, along with a $200 million loan to build the stadium. What is markedly more absurd though, is that this nearly $1 billion number pales in comparison to the astronomical costs incurred by the Rams.
With what was expected to be a just over $2 billion project, Kroenke ended up contributing a monster $5.5 billion to build SoFi Stadium. On top of that, Kroenke was sued for $790 million by the City of St. Louis, a figure that itself rivals the $1.1 billion cost projected for a new stadium in Missouri.
What is not accounted for in any balance sheet, however, is the hidden cost of fan alienation. As the new Los Angeles Rams found their way to Super Bowl LII, St. Louis bar patrons were offered free drinks for every Patriots’ score in a show of symbolic hatred towards their old team. Chargers fans rented a billboard near their new stadium to express that the team had “no freaking loyalty.” Raiders fans, while a bit split and muted in their protest, sold many of their season tickets away in the team's last stint in Oakland, uneager to financially support a team that was moving away.
And this fan alienation came with no guarantee of fan attraction in their new cities. While the Nevada television market was often zoned for Raiders games, the area saw rival viewership with the Kansas City Chiefs, and Las Vegas is in closer proximity to the Phoenix-based Arizona Cardinals than to Oakland. This was reflected in the team's fan attendance rates, where visiting teams could often be greeted at a stadium almost halfway full with their supporters, though this trend is slowly improving.
With the A’s move fast approaching, management should be wary of the fate of their relocated predecessors. The present-day success of the Chargers and Rams came at a high cost and there is no guarantee that the Raiders will be able to establish themselves as a serious anchor in the competitive Las Vegas market. Leaving Oakland can give the A’s a new start, a chance to build a strong legacy in Sin City, but only the future will tell if their big gamble will result in a winning hand.