The Oakland Athletics have started the process of moving to Las Vegas, leaving countless bitter, angry and disappointed fans in their wake.
If Fisher wanted to stay in Oakland, it seems unlikely that Manfred would've told the A's to officially start leaving. That statement in May 2021 allowed the A's to hit the turbo button on their relocation plans.
As Manfred said in the statement, the stadium project had not been moving as quickly as MLB would've liked. It's true that very little progress was made in 2020, but that was true about countless things that year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The planetary tragedy that resulted in a global work stoppage conveniently became another delay that Manfred used to help the A's force their way out of Oakland. Manfred also said in 2021 that he and MLB believe the A's need a new ballpark to be competitive. A ballpark that people enjoy going to, one that doesn't spew sewage on visiting players, is something that makes a team profitable, but it doesn't necessarily make it competitive. Manfred appears to conflate"profitable" with"competitive" and in doing so ends up ignoring the main reason the A's exist: to play baseball. The A's need a good team to be competitive, but that never seems to be at the top of Manfred's list.What's Oakland's culpability in all this? How much blame does a fully functional city with numerous daily responsibilities to its residents truly shoulder? If you ask Manfred, a lot. "We have shown an unbelievable commitment to the fans in Oakland by exhausting every possible opportunity to try to get something done in Oakland,""Unfortunately, the government doesn't seem to have the will to get it done." Oakland was willing to do a lot for the A's. The Howard Terminal project was developed to entice them to stay. But things got complicated when it came to actually negotiating the financial terms of the deal.in public, taxpayer-funded money to cover infrastructure costs. In the face of Fisher, a multibillionaire who inherited his fortune from his parents , asking the city and its residents for $855 million he didn't want to pay, Oakland did what Arlington, Texas, and Cobb County, Georgia couldn't do: It said no. In July 2021, the city council passed a, and the A's were so unhappy that they almost cut off negotiations. But they didn't, and it looked like things would move forward until the A's and the city were sued several times in 2022 by parties trying to stop the Howard Terminal project. All of those suits were dismissed by March 2023, but in the meantime, the A's and Oakland missed aby the end of 2022. Negotiations bled into 2023, which Kaval said would"doom" the team's efforts in Oakland. Oakland didn't ask to be sued. The city didn't ask for COVID, which required time and budget dollars to manage and delayed work on the stadium project. And it didn't ask the A's to sign a binding agreement to purchase land for a Las Vegas ballpark while still in active negotiations.they did nothing to deserve thisOakland is a small-market team. The city has fewer than 500,000 residents and is just across the bridge from San Francisco, meaning the Giants control the market, and the A's are the perpetual also-rans in their own backyard. But the love between a fan and a team doesn't recognize any of that. A's fans adore their team just as much as Yankees fans, Red Sox fans or Cubs fans do. Despite Manfred's comment that A's attendance has never been"outstanding," fans loyally attended games for years. Attendance swelled when the A's were good, but can you blame fans for staying away and not spending their hard-earned money on tickets when the owner never spent any money to maintain those good teams? Fans don't ask for a lot. Owners and executives make it seem like they do, but they don't. They want reasonably priced tickets and concessions so anyone — including families — can attend without breaking the bank. They want an enjoyable, feces-free experience. They want to watch a team that was put together to win, instead of one that was put together to fit within the embarrassingly meager budget set by its multibillionaire owner. That's not too much to ask, no matter what an owner or GM says. But Fisher wasn't willing to give the dedicated fans even one of those things. Now he gets to dive into a Scrooge McDuck vault full of money while the fans in Oakland are left with a gaping hole in their hearts.
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