All right - running a little behind this year, but I figure I should at least start this. If history is any guide, I'll finish about 10-12 of these before getting distracted by work and other ventures, but in the meantime, we have some teams to bid farewell to. We begin, of course, with
______________________________________
“It was hell for me – or not Hell, something worse than Hell.”
“What could be worse than Hell?” he said.
“Purgatory,” I said.
- Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night
___________________________________
Let’s get this out of the way: even on its best days, the Mt. Davis-era Coliseum has always been a terrible place to play baseball. It’s cavernous, sterile, and run down; the location is in the middle of nowhere; the field still bears the scars of multi-purpose-dom….we all know the list. When the A’s re-upped with another ten year lease back in 2014, everyone knew that the lease would likely be the stadium’s last. Bud Selig had made his life’s mission to make every stadium a chapel, and Oakland was one of the few remaining holdouts from era of multi-sport, Soviet-style stadiums built of concrete and asceticism.
So where would this new stadium be built? Right on the site of the old one, of course. Or as Bud Selig put it back in 2014:
"I continue to believe that the Athletics need a new facility and am fully supportive of the club's view that the best site in Oakland is the Coliseum site."
And where would it not be built? Selig had something to say about that, too:
"Contrary to what some have suggested, the committee that has studied this issue did not determine that the Howard Terminal site was the best location for a new facility in Oakland."
Then, just for good measure, erstwhile owner Lew Wolff added his two cents:
"Howard Terminal as a potential ballpark site has been and is totally rejected by MLB and the A's."
__________________________________________________________________________________
Apparently much has changed for the A’s in the last ten years, and a big part of that change is that John Fisher took over as the sole owner of the team.
A's fans have always been a little distrustful of Fisher, and for good reason: he’s the cheapest owner in baseball. The A’s are currently last in the league in payroll, which is not a new position for them – they’ve had a bottom-ten payroll in each of the last fifteen seasons. The last homegrown star that the A’s re-signed was Eric Chavez, who inked a $66 million deal at a time when Friends was still releasing new episodes and “The Curse” was still a thing that made Dan Shaughnessy money. “Moneyball” has become a baseball cliché, but we’ve spent so long using it to mean “analytics-driven team building” that we forget that it originally meant “how to win at baseball without spending any money.”
So it was with some lingering bad feelings that the new stadium process began. Fisher brought in Dave Kaval, a man whose forte was, you guessed it, getting public financing for stadiums, to jump-start the process, and what occurred over the next several years could only be described as a disaster for all involved. Kaval narrowed the potential sites down to three: the Coliseum site, the Howard Terminal downtown, and the Laney College/Peralta District. In 2017, Kaval announced that Laney had been selected, which would likely have been a joyous occasion....if anyone had thought to talk to the trustees of the Peralta District first. Since they did not, the pushback from the board and the nearby citizens was swift and fierce, and the A’s were forced to regroup and pick again.
With Laney/Peralta off the table, the A’s examined the two remaining sites and...came to the exact opposite conclusion as Selig and Wolff. A stadium surrounded by parking lots, declared Kaval, was the outdated 1960’s model, whereas all teams nowadays were opening new stadiums downtown like Camden Yards. (We will ignore for now that the Braves just did the opposite.) Thus, the only option – the sole hope for keeping A’s baseball in the Bay Area - was the Howard Terminal site.
To say that the Howard project proposal was "complicated" is an understatement. In addition to local and state regulations – and the fact that the city wanted more out of the arrangement than just the opportunity to be a piggy bank for a rich owner – there was a.) the fact that the Howard Terminal is one of the busiest shipping ports in North America, and b.) the fact that when an owner says they want a “downtown stadium," they usually mean that they want to own a village downtown with restaurants and housing and such...and also a stadium. The ensuing several years of negotiations had to sort out nautical traffic and housing demands (including affordable housing requirements), as well as the more standard questions of who gets to control parking and gate receipts, what infrastructure needs to be upgraded, who is responsible for maintaining the various aspects of the stadium and the surrounding area, who controls which rights to the stadium, and of course how much money will be paid by each party.
Attempting to speed up the process in 2021, Kaval and Fisher launched a “Rooted in Oakland” campaign, tying A’s fandom to a new ballpark and imploring fans to contact their local representatives and put pressure on the Oakland city council. Surprisingly, the tactic worked – for a while – right up until Kaval turned his Instagram account into a “My Fun Vacation in Vegas!” page in late May. A series of pictures Kaval meeting various people of importance around Las Vegas, including a particularly galling picture of the team president at a Golden Knights playoff game on the same night as a big A’s-Mariners matchup, left Oakland fans disillusioned with the whole campaign and largely saw the city turn on the team. The A’s continued to negotiate with Oakland, but much of their leverage was now gone, and the process began to bog down significantly.
From there, everything fell apart. Fisher announced (through team officials) that there would be no free agent spending until there were “shovels in the ground.” The contending A's roster from 2021 was stripped down and sold off for prospects. The front office essentially gave up on fan relations, raising ticket and parking prices and slashing season-ticket-holder benefits. Negotiations stalled out with the city, with the A’s and Rob Manfred claiming (falsely) that Oakland had never even made a counteroffer (which the city disputed, with mayor Sheng Thao going so far as to personally fly to the All-Star game and hand the counteroffer to Manfred herself). In true A’s fashion, the franchise eventually signed an agreement for a plot of land in Las Vegas, then decided to “explore other sites in Vegas” before picking a completely different spot in Vegas for their team, then had to beg the Nevada legislature to hold a special legislative session to pass the funding for the stadium (since they submitted their requests too late for the regular session). Whatever the machinations, the deal now appears to be done - although it’s entirely possible that something might get screwed up yet again - with the A’s slated to move in 2028. The exciting news for A’s ownership is that they will now, finally, be in a market of their own where they can start spending lots of money, with the caveats being that a.) the Vegas market is tiny and saturated with sports teams and b.) the new stadium looks like it will only hold about 30,000-35,000 people. But other than that, everything looks great!
And in the meantime, while the clock ticks down on the move to Vegas….the Oakland Athletics now inhabit a bizarre, halfway form of existence. The stadium is empty and run-down, with the city largely disinterested in maintaining the facility; feral cats scurry the corridors and a “pooping possum” occasionally terrorizes the visiting TV booth. The fans have mostly abandoned the franchise, reappearing only for a "reverse boycott" at home and “sell the team” movements on the road. The team itself is a glorified Triple-A roster, with a lineup staffed by Brent Roker, Ryan Noda, and a bunch of people of questionable use to a major league club, a defense that has battled the Red Sox nine for worst-in-the-bigs honors all season, and a pitching staff so bad that they’ve single-handedly pulled the American League’s FIP up by six points. The A's don't even know where they’re playing after next season – the Vegas stadium won’t be ready until 2028, but Oakland won’t extend the Coliseum lease unless the A’s agree to a list of Mayor Shao’s demands, and the Triple-A stadium that’s available to them in Vegas is outdoors and scorching-hot in the summer. For now, the Oakland A’s are a team that exists somewhere between the present and the past, somewhere between real and remembered, somewhere between Oakland and Las Vegas, somewhere between the majors and minors – in short, they are in purgatory.
The A’s last made the playoffs in 2020. Their last title was in 1989.
______________________________________
“It was hell for me – or not Hell, something worse than Hell.”
“What could be worse than Hell?” he said.
“Purgatory,” I said.
- Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night
___________________________________
Let’s get this out of the way: even on its best days, the Mt. Davis-era Coliseum has always been a terrible place to play baseball. It’s cavernous, sterile, and run down; the location is in the middle of nowhere; the field still bears the scars of multi-purpose-dom….we all know the list. When the A’s re-upped with another ten year lease back in 2014, everyone knew that the lease would likely be the stadium’s last. Bud Selig had made his life’s mission to make every stadium a chapel, and Oakland was one of the few remaining holdouts from era of multi-sport, Soviet-style stadiums built of concrete and asceticism.
So where would this new stadium be built? Right on the site of the old one, of course. Or as Bud Selig put it back in 2014:
"I continue to believe that the Athletics need a new facility and am fully supportive of the club's view that the best site in Oakland is the Coliseum site."
And where would it not be built? Selig had something to say about that, too:
"Contrary to what some have suggested, the committee that has studied this issue did not determine that the Howard Terminal site was the best location for a new facility in Oakland."
Then, just for good measure, erstwhile owner Lew Wolff added his two cents:
"Howard Terminal as a potential ballpark site has been and is totally rejected by MLB and the A's."
__________________________________________________________________________________
Apparently much has changed for the A’s in the last ten years, and a big part of that change is that John Fisher took over as the sole owner of the team.
A's fans have always been a little distrustful of Fisher, and for good reason: he’s the cheapest owner in baseball. The A’s are currently last in the league in payroll, which is not a new position for them – they’ve had a bottom-ten payroll in each of the last fifteen seasons. The last homegrown star that the A’s re-signed was Eric Chavez, who inked a $66 million deal at a time when Friends was still releasing new episodes and “The Curse” was still a thing that made Dan Shaughnessy money. “Moneyball” has become a baseball cliché, but we’ve spent so long using it to mean “analytics-driven team building” that we forget that it originally meant “how to win at baseball without spending any money.”
So it was with some lingering bad feelings that the new stadium process began. Fisher brought in Dave Kaval, a man whose forte was, you guessed it, getting public financing for stadiums, to jump-start the process, and what occurred over the next several years could only be described as a disaster for all involved. Kaval narrowed the potential sites down to three: the Coliseum site, the Howard Terminal downtown, and the Laney College/Peralta District. In 2017, Kaval announced that Laney had been selected, which would likely have been a joyous occasion....if anyone had thought to talk to the trustees of the Peralta District first. Since they did not, the pushback from the board and the nearby citizens was swift and fierce, and the A’s were forced to regroup and pick again.
With Laney/Peralta off the table, the A’s examined the two remaining sites and...came to the exact opposite conclusion as Selig and Wolff. A stadium surrounded by parking lots, declared Kaval, was the outdated 1960’s model, whereas all teams nowadays were opening new stadiums downtown like Camden Yards. (We will ignore for now that the Braves just did the opposite.) Thus, the only option – the sole hope for keeping A’s baseball in the Bay Area - was the Howard Terminal site.
To say that the Howard project proposal was "complicated" is an understatement. In addition to local and state regulations – and the fact that the city wanted more out of the arrangement than just the opportunity to be a piggy bank for a rich owner – there was a.) the fact that the Howard Terminal is one of the busiest shipping ports in North America, and b.) the fact that when an owner says they want a “downtown stadium," they usually mean that they want to own a village downtown with restaurants and housing and such...and also a stadium. The ensuing several years of negotiations had to sort out nautical traffic and housing demands (including affordable housing requirements), as well as the more standard questions of who gets to control parking and gate receipts, what infrastructure needs to be upgraded, who is responsible for maintaining the various aspects of the stadium and the surrounding area, who controls which rights to the stadium, and of course how much money will be paid by each party.
Attempting to speed up the process in 2021, Kaval and Fisher launched a “Rooted in Oakland” campaign, tying A’s fandom to a new ballpark and imploring fans to contact their local representatives and put pressure on the Oakland city council. Surprisingly, the tactic worked – for a while – right up until Kaval turned his Instagram account into a “My Fun Vacation in Vegas!” page in late May. A series of pictures Kaval meeting various people of importance around Las Vegas, including a particularly galling picture of the team president at a Golden Knights playoff game on the same night as a big A’s-Mariners matchup, left Oakland fans disillusioned with the whole campaign and largely saw the city turn on the team. The A’s continued to negotiate with Oakland, but much of their leverage was now gone, and the process began to bog down significantly.
From there, everything fell apart. Fisher announced (through team officials) that there would be no free agent spending until there were “shovels in the ground.” The contending A's roster from 2021 was stripped down and sold off for prospects. The front office essentially gave up on fan relations, raising ticket and parking prices and slashing season-ticket-holder benefits. Negotiations stalled out with the city, with the A’s and Rob Manfred claiming (falsely) that Oakland had never even made a counteroffer (which the city disputed, with mayor Sheng Thao going so far as to personally fly to the All-Star game and hand the counteroffer to Manfred herself). In true A’s fashion, the franchise eventually signed an agreement for a plot of land in Las Vegas, then decided to “explore other sites in Vegas” before picking a completely different spot in Vegas for their team, then had to beg the Nevada legislature to hold a special legislative session to pass the funding for the stadium (since they submitted their requests too late for the regular session). Whatever the machinations, the deal now appears to be done - although it’s entirely possible that something might get screwed up yet again - with the A’s slated to move in 2028. The exciting news for A’s ownership is that they will now, finally, be in a market of their own where they can start spending lots of money, with the caveats being that a.) the Vegas market is tiny and saturated with sports teams and b.) the new stadium looks like it will only hold about 30,000-35,000 people. But other than that, everything looks great!
And in the meantime, while the clock ticks down on the move to Vegas….the Oakland Athletics now inhabit a bizarre, halfway form of existence. The stadium is empty and run-down, with the city largely disinterested in maintaining the facility; feral cats scurry the corridors and a “pooping possum” occasionally terrorizes the visiting TV booth. The fans have mostly abandoned the franchise, reappearing only for a "reverse boycott" at home and “sell the team” movements on the road. The team itself is a glorified Triple-A roster, with a lineup staffed by Brent Roker, Ryan Noda, and a bunch of people of questionable use to a major league club, a defense that has battled the Red Sox nine for worst-in-the-bigs honors all season, and a pitching staff so bad that they’ve single-handedly pulled the American League’s FIP up by six points. The A's don't even know where they’re playing after next season – the Vegas stadium won’t be ready until 2028, but Oakland won’t extend the Coliseum lease unless the A’s agree to a list of Mayor Shao’s demands, and the Triple-A stadium that’s available to them in Vegas is outdoors and scorching-hot in the summer. For now, the Oakland A’s are a team that exists somewhere between the present and the past, somewhere between real and remembered, somewhere between Oakland and Las Vegas, somewhere between the majors and minors – in short, they are in purgatory.
The A’s last made the playoffs in 2020. Their last title was in 1989.
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