Money, Ball
By
Yesterday, the Athletics played their final game in Oakland. 46,889 fans – up from the few thousand, at most, often in attendance in recent years – showed up to say goodbye. And they got one final win. Great opening from Jack Nicas:
The Athletics want their next home to be a $1.5 billion dome on the Las Vegas Strip built from five interlocking arches meant to evoke baseball pennants. One arch would carry a Jumbotron the size of four basketball courts. Another would be mostly glass, revealing the sparkle of the casinos beyond.
The award-winning architect behind the design calls it a “spherical armadillo.” Others have compared it to the elegant layered architecture of the Sydney Opera House.
By comparison, the Athletics’ current home, the Oakland Coliseum, has been called “a giant concrete toilet bowl.”
It is, indeed, a hulking mass of concrete, and there is nothing like it left in professional sports. There is exposed rebar, barbed wire, tangled cables and trough urinals. Chairs are coming loose. The lights are failing. Nearly 100 feral cats have moved in. And a broadcast booth has at times been abandoned because a possum was living in the walls.
The Oakland Coliseum is and was awful. Having lived in the Bay Area for 15 years, I was there a number of times. For A's games. For Raiders' games. Concerts. Even a soccer match or two. It's just a dump. But Oakland knew that and for years there was talk that the city would build a new stadium, perhaps also on the waterfront – how cool would it have been to have a beautiful new ballpark that overlooked the San Francisco Giants (fantastic) ballpark across the Bay? Alas, once the Raiders bailed for Las Vegas, the writing was probably on the wall – especially given the success that team has seen there, financially, if not on the field:
For decades, the A’s and the Raiders had shared the Coliseum, and it was there that Raiders fans had developed a reputation of being among the most notorious in sports. They created the Black Hole, a growling pit of unhinged men and women dressed in black and adorned with spikes and skulls who would shout obscenities and taunts at startled opponents.
But Mark Davis, who inherited the Raiders from his father, eventually decided there was more money to be made elsewhere. So in 2020 he moved the team to a $2 billion stadium in Las Vegas. Nevada taxpayers paid for $750 million of that bill.
The move was a jackpot. The Raiders are now one of the hottest tickets in the N.F.L. — and the team’s prices have more than doubled over the past decade, to the highest in the league. One of the team’s new luxury suites can cost as much as $75,000 a game.
The valuation of the Raiders franchise has increased to $6.7 billion today from $1.4 billion in 2015, the year before relocation talks began, according to Forbes’s annual valuations.
You read that and think, "yeah, the A's were always gone", it's honestly not even clear why they played any games with the city of Oakland to give fans hope. Beyond better confines, a team in Vegas attracts fans from all over the world – not necessarily of the team, just those who want to add a sporting event to their Vegas entertainment bonanza. In many ways, it's wild all the leagues didn't move there sooner (the NBA will at the time of the next expansion – perhaps a team owned by LeBron James?), but puritanical views on gambling got in the way. Now it's all business, all the time.
"Just win, baby" has a whole new meaning in Vegas.
For Oakland, this sucks. Even before they lost the Raiders and A's, the Golden State Warriors, who played at the arena next store (which was okay – but did get loud, creating a nice atmosphere), moved across that Bay to the heart of San Francisco. People were upset by that too, but mainly because of change in cost to attend a game. This wasn't like the "San Francisco" 49ers moving to Santa Clara, which among other things, is decidedly not San Francisco as it's not anywhere close to San Francisco. Oakland is close to San Francisco.1 Oakland is about a 9 hour drive to Vegas. Perhaps that alone is stopping some sort of "Oakland Athletics of Las Vegas" compromise nonsense.
Oakland now has no professional sports teams in the largest leagues. That's sort of wild. Three to zero in just a few short years.
I grew up in Cleveland quite envious of the Oakland Athletics,2 beyond the "Bash Brothers", they were very good in the 1980s – winning the World Series in 1989, in the crazy "Battle of the Bay" against the San Francisco Giants, which infamously featured an earthquake, when the Loma Prieta earthquake struck right before the start of Game 3. That was the A's last championship.
That Cleveland connection has me feeling especially bad for Oakland right now since I was a teenager when Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell "stole" the team – moving them in the middle of the night to Baltimore (due to yes, a stadium dispute), where, after some lawsuits and promises of future expansion, they became the Ravens. The head coach of the Browns the year they were stolen? A guy named Bill Belichick. He joined the Patriots the next year. Meanwhile, the Ravens won the Super Bowl a few years later. The Browns have never been to a Super Bowl, let alone won one. But I digress...
At least with the Oakland A's we'll always have Moneyball. Both Michael Lewis' book, but also the highly underrated 2011 film directed by Bennett Miller. Brad Pitt's performance as the GM of the A's, Billy Beane, remains one of his subtle best. That was about the magical run of the 2002 team, which won 20 straight games despite having a payroll of $40M – second lowest in baseball, just ahead of Tampa Bay, and despite being a playoff team the year prior.
There will be a different type of moneyball in Las Vegas,3 one imagines.
1 So much so that their airport is playing mind games with travelers to try to trick people into using their airport more. And it's working. That's stupid. (SF is suing.)
2 The Indians (now Guardians) lost over 100 games twice in the 1980s (and 105 in 1991), and were generally in last or second-to-last place in their division while the A's were almost always awesome in the latter half of the decade.
3 That is, when they actually start playing there in... 2028. Before then, they'll be in Sacremento. Can't wait to see what the attendance is there for some weirdly temporarily relocated team. Regardless, they should take on that name and leave Oakland alone now.