As a Bay Area local, I remember watching a baseball game between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland Athletics in the summer of 2023. Although I was wearing a Giants hat and hoodie, I vividly remember the Athletics (A’s) fans around me passionately chanting the phrase “sell the team!” I was uneducated about the tumultuous period of ownership negotiations that were taking place at the time, but that recently changed after the A’s officially announced that they were relocating to Las Vegas.
The Athletics played their final home game this year on Sept. 26 against the Texas Rangers, winning by a score of 3-2. After 57 years of calling the Oakland Coliseum home, the Athletics are set to play in Sacramento for three years and then permanently move to Las Vegas, following a long stretch of negotiations regarding team ownership.
The primary reason behind negotiations for the move to Las Vegas was for the A’s to have access to a better home stadium, for which a plan was proposed in 2018. The new stadium was supposed to be built in the Jack London Square neighborhood in Oakland, Calif., but these plans were halted by the COVID-19 pandemic and eventually abandoned when Major League Baseball (MLB) and the A’s bought land in Las Vegas to build a stadium.
My hearing A’s fans chant “sell the team” was not an uncommon experience at home games this year. They were protesting current owner John Fisher’s decision to relocate the team to Las Vegas, as opposed to selling the team in the hopes of another owner keeping the A’s in Oakland. The chant originated when Fisher announced the move to Las Vegas, which was controversial among fans as they saw the move as a cash grab for Fisher and the rest of the front office.
“[T]here was a legitimate effort to try to stay here. And I think that’s the hardest part because there’s a lot of history behind Oakland. A lot of people my dad’s age, they grew up watching a lot of the great ’70s teams and even into the ’80s,” said Blake Treinan, Athletics pitcher for three seasons.
Unfortunately, the A’s seem to be following a recent trend of professional sports teams abandoning Oakland. The Warriors, Raiders and now the Athletics have all left Oakland within the last five years. This trend may be partly due to other cities such as Las Vegas being more willing to use tax dollars to build stadiums. National Football League teams including the Tennessee Titans and the Buffalo Bills have been able to negotiate new stadiums using tax-provided funding.
The movement of these teams out of Oakland has a detrimental economic effect on the city. Without these teams, Oakland will feel the loss of tourism and the lessening of job opportunities for locals.
The loss of the A’s will “definitely [be] a hit to the economy; there are jobs at the coliseum, Union jobs, people depend on those jobs, if we built a new stadium those would be construction jobs as well,” said Nate Miley, president of the Alameda County Board of Supervisors.
While the A’s move to Las Vegas will have a detrimental effect on the local economy, it will also have an impact on the city’s shared identity tied together by the nostalgia and loyalty of the Oakland A’s fanbase. The Oakland Athletics provided a sense of community and morale, bonding families and friendships over the last six decades.
