The Oakland Athletics of Las Vegas

Rolls off the tongue

The Oakland Athletics, an aspiring real estate company that is currently forced to field a professional baseball team due to arcane technicalities, announced that they have secured a land deal to move to Las Vegas. They will abandon Oakland, which they have called their home since 1968, for the metaphorically greener pastures of southern Nevada.

I mean, unless they don’t get $500 million from the Nevada legislature, which is not a done deal. Like, extremely not a done deal. Like, Nevada legislators said “that they had little information about the Oakland Athletics’ plans to move to Las Vegas, beyond that a land purchase deal is in place, a funding bill is coming and there is no timeline for action.”

Seems like the kind of thing that could be an issue!

Ha ha, just kidding. It’s not like the A’s would just announce a stadium deal that isn’t done in the hope that the announcement would put pressure on politicians to give them a sweetheart deal, right?

Well, okay, but-

I mean, sure, but-

Yeah, I get it, but-

Hm, feels like there might be a pattern developing, but I’ll need at least 14 more examples before I start to learn anything from it.

Anyway, I’m sure that after all those failures, the ownership group of the Oakland A’s got all their ducks in a row before making this announcement. They probably have some kind of assurance that they’ll get that half billion dollars in taxpayer money, right?

“That’s something that they’ve come up with,” said Naft of the A’s funding ask. “You don’t always get what you want. And I think that’s probably going to be the case with the $500 million.”

So if a deal isn’t done, and if the A’s are uniquely bad at making deals happen and are therefore just throwing eggs in the air so they can catch them with their face, which does seem to be the case, why are they announcing this now?

The current CBA calls for the team to lose its revenue sharing next year if it doesn’t have a resolution to the stadium.

(That’s from The Athletic)

Just money. Just John Fisher, the A’s owner, being the absolute cheapest fuck who’s ever bought a professional sports team with money that he has because his parents founded The Gap. It’s not complicated.

John Fisher wants money for nothing. He wants other owners to pay him tens of millions of dollars so that he personally does not have to invest in the baseball team he owns. He wants local and state governments to pay him hundreds of millions of dollars so that he personally does not have to invest in the baseball stadium he would like to own. He wants businesses to invest in his mixed-use neighborhoods so that he does not have to personally put up upfront money for the new basbeall stadium he would like to build.

That’s it. That’s literally everything that’s happening here. That’s everything that has ever happened. Ever since Lew Wolff and John Fisher bought the team almost two decades ago, Oakland A’s ownership has done nothing but scheme to leverage their baseball team to make money in real estate, whether it was in Fremont or Howard Terminal or, now, Las Vegas.

Yes, finding a way to make it work in Oakland, among the richest areas in the country, would make them more money in the long-term. But that would involve risk, so they don’t want to do it. It would involve not ripping off local taxpayers, which is the entire point of building a new stadium. It would involve building something instead of tearing it down, and folks, American business people just don’t build shit anymore. It is faster and easier to make money by stripping everything for parts, so why not do that? What’s the downside? A little less money? Sure, but it’s guaranteed.

Baseball’s line, of course, is that this is all Oakland’s fault. Take it away, Rob Manfred:

“The will to get it done,” in this context, means “bilking taxpayers out of hundreds of millions of dollars which every credible study has shown will bring them no tangible benefit.”

So they’re going to try to take off for Las Vegas, where they’re claiming things will be different. In Las Vegas, the A’s won’t cut payroll to the bone because it’ll guarantee them a profit. In Las Vegas, the A’s will make an effort to draw fans. In Las Vegas, they’ll be a real, honest, professional baseball team. No foolin’!

What a crock of shit.

If the A’s do get to Las Vegas, they will do things exactly the same way. Sure, they presumably won’t shit all over their own stadium constantly, but they will still be utter cheapskates. They will still tear everything down after three years of good baseball in order to get better prospects. They will still cut their marketing budget to the bone because they don’t want to pay it. They will still be the Oakland Athletics, only in another location. They will be in a different city, but they won’t be any different.

Tweets aren’t embedding right now, which I assume has to do with Elon Musk picking a fight with Substack, so here’s a screenshot of a tweet from Tony Frye:

There’s no reason to expect them to do anything different. Manfred and Kaval and Fisher can talk all they want to about how Oakland failed them and the Giants failed them and everyone else failed them, but the fact is that they failed themselves. They didn’t try, and they expected everyone else to pick up the slack.

The A’s have been coasting for more than 20 years on their reputation that was established in Moneyball. The smart, scrappy underdogs! The guys without the financial resources that the big dogs have! The guys who do things differently! How exciting! How romantic!

It’s all a crock of shit. They’re cheap. They’re cheap because they can be, and because no one is holding their feet to the fire. They’re cheap because their owners don’t want to spend money, and the other owners also don’t want them to spend money. They’re cheap because they’re getting a good enough deal without spending money, so why spend it? They’re cheap because they’re allowed to be.

It’s all just a grift. That’s all any of it has ever been. If only there were some other grift that the A’s were choosing to associate with, in order to really drive home how cynical and stupid this entire endeavor is.

Game recognize game.