Professional sports’ exodus from Oakland, California gets sadder all the time. The Golden State Warriors’ move across the Bay Bridge to San Francisco in 2019 was tough for Oaklanders to swallow. The two cities aren’t the same, after all. But at least the Warriors stayed nearby. The NFL’s Raiders left for Las Vegas in 2020, an even rougher departure given the distance between the Bay and the desert. And now Oakland has taken a body blow, as the final major professional team in the city has headed for the exits: Major League Baseball’s Athletics, whose own move to Sin City was finalized last week.
The drying-out of the pro sports landscape in Oakland is, on some level, the same simple story that gets written every time a city loses a team. The Warriors played in an old arena that left them lagging behind the rest of the NBA in commercial opportunities. The Raiders and A’s played in an old stadium, the Oakland Coliseum, that put them at a similar disadvantage to their NFL and MLB peers, respectively. And when the Oakland football and baseball franchises couldn’t get local governments to give in to their demands for public assistance to subsidize a sporting venue whose benefits would mostly be reaped by billionaire club owners, the teams simply cut and ran. The Warriors, blessedly, financed their new home privately. Nevada taxpayers are on the hook for the Raiders and A’s, however.
Indeed, Oakland is an acute victim of a stadium-financing racket that has existed for decades. But the loss of the city’s teams is not just a sign of how wealthy team owners can play localities against each other. It is also a sporting tragedy because of the momentous history of pro sports in Oakland – something that the city’s departed teams will have a hard time replicating as they charge into their new eras elsewhere.
The Raiders were born in Oakland. And though they attracted a durable, passionate following in Los Angeles in the 1980s and 90s, Oakland is where the Raiders became the Raiders. It was in Oakland that the Raiders developed a national reputation for their crazed, costume-clad fans who turned every game into a Halloween party. It was in Oakland that a legendary coach, John Madden, built his career and got on the path to becoming the voice of the sport and the face of its video game. It was in Oakland where the Raiders became a legitimate cultural unifier in a working-class city that the team came to embody. It was also in Oakland where the team won two of its three Super Bowls, the other coming in LA in 1983, when then-owner Al Davis had yanked his team south as he lobbied the Bay Area for stadium improvements. The Raiders returned in 1995 before exiting for good 25 years later.
The Athletics, unlike their football contemporaries, did not hail from Oakland. But they did build something special there. The franchise started playing ballgames in Philadelphia in 1901 and won five World Series there. But by the middle of the 20th century, in what’s now a sad bit of foreshadowing, the financially stingy A’s found themselves eclipsed in local popularity by the bigger-spending Phillies. A new owner took the team to Kansas City in 1955, and then to Oakland in 1968. The club won three World Series in a row starting in 1972 and a fourth in 1989. The A’s took on myriad shapes and had an eclectic revolving door of superstars, ranging from stolen base king Rickey Henderson to steroid-addled home run mashers Mark McGwire and José Canseco. In their Moneyball era under general manager Billy Beane, they had a feared pitching rotation headlined by Tim Hudson and two crafty lefthanders, Barry Zito and Mark Mulder. When the A’s were good, the ugly Coliseum rocked.
The Warriors, of course, have stayed in the neighborhood. But their best days were in Oakland. The rise of the Stephen Curry-led, Steve Kerr-coached dynasty of the 2010s happened at Oakland’s Oracle Arena. Draymond Green’s technical fouls and elite defense? Never better than in the East Bay. Klay Thompson’s endless parade of three-point shots alongside Curry? Most prolific in Oakland. Kevin Durant’s three-year stopover with the franchise, which included two NBA finals victories and a third appearance? All in Oakland, right before the franchise relocated to its new home in San Francisco.
What will Oakland’s Nevadan defectors find in Las Vegas? It will likely vary. Things are already fine for the Raiders, who sell out every game (as is typical in the NFL) and play in the sort of glistening new stadium they craved in Oakland. The Raiders will always be OK because they are an NFL team, and the NFL is a rocketship that never, ever runs out of fuel. Owner Mark Davis could mismanage the franchise to an epic extent – and arguably he already has, given the hirings and firings of coaches like Jon Gruden (for racism and homophobia) and Josh McDaniels (for poor coaching) – and the Raiders could continue to be a thriving business. If things get bad enough on the field, the Raiders will get a potentially great quarterback one day in the draft. The league is set up to prevent anyone from bottoming out for too long.
The Vegas Golden Knights are another exciting data point for the A’s as they get ready to move for the 2028 season. After joining the NHL as an expansion franchise in 2018, the Golden Knights made the Stanley Cup Ffnal in their first season. They’ve built a rabid following and been competitive almost every year, and earlier this year, they won the Stanley Cup in their sixth year of existence. Build a good team in Vegas, and they will come – to the tune of huge attendance figures.
That’s just the thing, though: To get so good so quickly, the local hockey team needed help from the league it was joining. The NHL’s salary cap structure encourages parity among clubs, and Vegas also benefitted from an extremely generous expansion draft structure that allowed them to raid the rosters of the league’s other teams. (The format was so kind to Vegas that the NHL rolled it back a bit by the time the next expansion team, the Seattle Kraken, joined up two seasons ago.)
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The A’s will have no such help. Baseball has no salary cap or salary floor. Some teams spend money as their owners make a sincere effort to field contenders, and some teams do not. The Athletics very much do not. Owner John Fisher, the son of the co-founders of the Gap clothing store, always has the Athletics near the bottom of MLB payroll lists. When the club gets good players, it can enjoy them for a few years until they begin to get expensive, at which point Fisher trades them away.
Fisher’s lack of apparent care in spending money on a winner has given A’s fans precious little reason to maintain an emotional investment in the team. Sometimes the A’s have won anyway. Before Fisher bought the club in 2005, the A’s were the team of Moneyball, which out-thought bigger spenders and contended on a shoestring budget under general manager Billy Beane. But now every team is analytically inclined, and winning in a spendthrift fashion has become difficult. The A’s were the worst team in baseball last season with a 50-112 record. A’s fans have implored him to sell the team, but why would he? Fisher has a valuable financial asset, taxpayer help on a new stadium in Vegas, and, for now, no reason to compete.
Fisher and MLB commissioner Rob Manfred have been dismissive of pained fans in Oakland. Fisher reportedly told protesting A’s fans last week that the team’s relocation drama has “been a lot worse than me for you”. When fans last season staged a protest at a game, turning out in season-high numbers to show that Oakland still had fans even as Fisher tanked his team, Manfred mocked them. “It’s great to see what is this year almost an average Major League Baseball crowd in the facility for one night,” Manfred told a reporter, with dripping condescension in his voice. “That’s a great thing.” The A’s will surely bring fans to the ballpark more regularly when they open their new stadium in Vegas. But unless the team changes its behavior, those fans will one day stop showing up to games, too. The A’s say Vegas tourists will fill the stadium out, but those projections, experts say, look bunk. Maybe it would help to put a competitive product on the field for a change. Just ask the baseball fans the latest, greatest ghost town in US sports.