If the A’s want to leave Oakland, they now have their excuse.
But I doubt that’s the way it’ll go down.
Despite a 6-1 “yes” vote Tuesday from the Oakland City Council on a non-binding term sheet, nothing has truly been accomplished. A checkpoint has merely been crossed and the ball has been kicked into the A’s court.
There’s still so much work that needs to be done to build a new ballpark at Howard Terminal, keeping the A’s in Oakland. But that work can be done. Reasonable parties can figure this out.
So are the A’s reasonable? Do they want to stay in Oakland? It’s time to put up or shut up — the A’s have to show their cards.
In the upset of the century, the city seems reasonable and aligned in this process. Despite A’s president Dave Kaval’s online antics, the city has made significant concessions to the team and on Tuesday announced that they have found the funds to fill a more than $350 million gap in infrastructure costs — arguably the key issue in this process.
So while Kaval will claim otherwise after not having the team’s term-sheet voted upon, the truth is nothing that happened Tuesday was a true deal-breaker. What we learned, most of all, is that for all the performative politics of Bay Area government, the city showed that it wants to make this development happen.
That’s great a win for the A’s.
If A’s owner John Fisher and his proxy, Kaval, really want Howard Terminal, it’s there for the taking. It’ll just take a bit more elbow grease. The city might not have voted on the A’s proposal Tuesday, but in a circuitous route, the A’s will likely get everything they want from Oakland in the end. The city is clearly scared of losing the team and is bending over backward to keep it around. I imagine that further negotiations would only increase the number of concessions from Oakland.
But, again, it’s the A’s call if negotiations continue.
Of course, if the A’s always wanted leave Oakland, now would be a good time to announce that.
But such a move would be unreasonable. The A’s are the cheapest team west of the Mississippi and they claim they’ve spent more than $200 million on making Howard Terminal happen (far more than they’ve ever spent on team payroll). They’re close on Howard Terminal — much closer after Tuesday — and they have Oakland on the ropes. Why would they walk away now?
The truth is that this team has never lacked reasons to relocate. Yet they’re still here. What’s a bit more time if they’ll get almost everything they want in Oakland? Why start from scratch somewhere else — even if that city throws billions in free money their way?
They have a strange way of showing it, but perhaps the A’s really are “rooted” in Oakland.
For now, the A’s will keep posturing. Their relocation threats put serious pressure on the city and Alameda county and more pressure is certainly needed to get over the finish line with this project. So the A’s and Major League Baseball will keep courting Las Vegas — or, more specifically, its suburbs — and probably get Portland and maybe even Nashville or Charlotte involved, too. Kaval’s going to have more frequent flier miles than anyone in the East Bay by the time all of this is done.
But if any of those markets were truly viable, Tuesday’s vote wouldn’t have even happened. Like the Warriors and Raiders before them, the A’s exit would have been deemed inevitable.
But that’s not the case. Especially not after Tuesday.
So I think the A’s will head back to the table and figure it out.
You see, both Oakland and the A’s need each other. It’s a depressing co-dependency. The city can’t lose its last major professional sports team and the A’s don’t have a better market available to them than the growing East Bay and the well more than 3 million people in Alameda, Contra Costa, and Solano Counties. That doesn’t even mention the 2.5 million in the Sacramento metro area, where the A’s, for a short stretch, had their flagship radio station. That’s a lot of people, and in a sport that’s still extremely reliant on local television and gate revenues, population is critical, even if it’s shared with another team.
Let’s be clear: No one is happy about any of what went down Tuesday. Not Kaval, not the city, and certainly not anyone looking for an immediate resolution. Councilmember Dan Kalb said he was voting yes but “holding my nose and probably going to the bathroom and throwing up afterward.”
But this was the way it was always going to be when you have a public-private partnership of this scale and level of difficulty.
And while there are a million more pratfalls remaining in this project, I think Kaval, for all his comments about how the term sheet voted on Tuesday “doesn’t work for the A’s,” gave away the game in his early comments to the council:
“I’m very keen on moving this process forward, getting a ‘yes’ on something we all agree on, and working in tandem to create this incredible vision and make it a reality.”
That doesn’t sound like someone ready to move to Vegas to me.
