OT: It's basically official now, Oakland A's are moving to Vegas
Give credit to the Oakland A's team President for knowing how to do a news dump ----- at 10:30 PT (1:30 ET) last night, after the team just lost 12-2, he made the announcement Oakland has signed a binding agreement to purchase land for a ballpark on the southern Strip.
Awesome info -
How about most different nicknames?
A couple that come to mind...
What about the Cleveland Spiders? Was that a different franchise?
1887-1899. National League.
April 20th, 2023 at 11:58 AM ^
Vegas Aces?
April 20th, 2023 at 12:04 PM ^
That's their WNBA team lol
April 20th, 2023 at 12:18 PM ^
Vegas O-Aces?
Okay, Vegas Maces
I like the Vegas Bookies
Vegas Un-Athletics.
April 20th, 2023 at 12:00 PM ^
I liked the format of this entire situation better when it was in the movie Major League.
April 20th, 2023 at 12:00 PM ^
So much for hot dogs and cracker jack.
April 20th, 2023 at 12:00 PM ^
Vegas just needs a basketball team and they'll have all four major sports covered. It's amazing what they've been able to do for 20 years on a relatively limited budget.
April 20th, 2023 at 12:38 PM ^
Gotta think an NBA team is a matter of when, not if.
Pair them with a new Seattle team, ship Minnesota and Memphis to the East, bump OKC to the Southwest, and the division map starts to look reasonable again.
just get rid of divisions and have everyone play everyone home-and-home in the NBA
That will be happening when Lebron retires.
Is Vegas a big enough market to support all these teams? When the NHL first went there it made some sense, since they had no major teams, but now they might be hitting the saturation point. The whole state of Nevada only has 3 million people.
A-Rod is moving the Timberwolves to Vegas.
The thing is, Vegas is a basketball town. UNLV was the first real franchise in town and virtually all the conferences west of the Mississippi play tournament games there. Lot of top HS talent comes through there too mayn.
April 20th, 2023 at 12:02 PM ^
It's a business and I'm sure it will be financially beneficial to the owner, especially if they get a sweetheart deal on the stadium.
Not sure the market is really any bigger, it may even be smaller, but being out from the shadow of the Giants is worth a little something.
April 20th, 2023 at 12:03 PM ^
Calling it now, they're 100% changing their logo to something to do with an Ace playing card to match the Las Vegas A's rebrand
April 20th, 2023 at 12:07 PM ^
Las Vegas Aces are the WNBA team
April 20th, 2023 at 12:21 PM ^
MLB is certainly able to buy out a team nickname from a WNBA team if they want to. However, baseball is the oldest and most traditional of the major sports and will likely keep the Athletics name, it's a brand built up over 100 years.
I’m not denying the ability to, but as a woman’s sports team in todays climate, the aces would be dragged up and down for selling the name to a men’s team.
It would offer the only route to (short term) profitability for a WNBA team.
Why spend money buying out a nickname when you can just keep your own. They haven’t changed in over 100 years, doubt they will now.
Why spend money buying out a nickname when you can just keep your own. They haven’t changed in over 100 years, doubt they will now.
However, baseball is the oldest and most traditional of the major sports and will likely keep the Athletics name, it's a brand built up over 100 years.
The Cleveland Indians would like a word with you.
Slightly different situations there.
I don’t think “A’s” is perceived as racially insensitive.
April 20th, 2023 at 12:48 PM ^
Nah. The A’s are a founding member of the American League, and the elephant has been around since 1902.
April 20th, 2023 at 12:05 PM ^
don’t blame them …. the stadium was a dump when I used to go to As games in the early 2000s and it likely hasn’t gotten better
April 20th, 2023 at 12:34 PM ^
Plus they are getting out of the city of Oakland and the State of California. Win-win.
April 20th, 2023 at 12:56 PM ^
Yeah. Never saw a game there, but was outside a few times as that was where you got off the BART to grab the transfer bus to Oakland's airport. It was shocking that pro sports teams (isn't that where the Raiders used to play, too?) called that their home. Or maybe embarrassing is the better word...
April 20th, 2023 at 10:52 PM ^
Had the same reaction last year.
I totally blame them. Long story short: 1) blocked by Fremont-NIMBYs 2) incompetent in San Jose 3) indecisive in oakland 4) incompetent at Laney college 5) finally picked a viable site 6) Covid 7) they pull a "Major League"
#1 isn't their fault, and neither is #6, but 2-4 are absolutely on them, and 7 was a dick move. In detail:
First, they tried to move to Fremont and were blocked by locals - this is the only part of this story where they weren't incompetent and ran into California NIMBYs. Then they tried to move to San Jose - without consulting the Giants, who had rights to the area, and blocked that move. At the same time, the city of Oakland proposed both the port site to them and redeveloping the Coliseum. Instead, the A's decide they want to move to property owned by Laney College - without consulting the college. Finally, in 2018 they decide on the current site, and the approval gets delayed by COVID (and California's NIMBY policies - but really, not that much) - but immediately after the pandemic they announce they plan on "parallel paths" to Vegas, right as attendance restrictions get lifted. AND they were 6 games back of the WC in '21, and one of the worst teams in baseball in '22 and look to be again in '23. So they basically pulled a Major League right after COVID.
We shouldn't be surprised. This is a team that has defined itself for the past 20 years by being successful cheapskates. And here they are, yet again, being cheapskates.
April 20th, 2023 at 12:13 PM ^
Cubs just played them (I'm a Cubs fan). Usually the Cubs can half-fill a road venue with their out of market fans. I don't know what's going on in Oakland, but the attendance for this past Cubs/A's set was the worst I've ever seen at a Cubs road series. They have a "guess the attendance" segment on Cubs radio, and the commentators joked about it being the first ever 3-digit number.
To make it even worse, the A's roster is so bad that their big upcoming giveaway (advertised behind home plate) is a Tony Kemp poster giveaway. Tony Kemp is basically a journeyman bench utility player, prior to being on the A's back field, spring training caliber roster. If that's how they're hoping to sell tickets in Oakland, then it's time to move.
What’s happening is the team has been trying to leave Oakland and shit on their fans for a decade plus as part of the excuse to make it happen.
And the stadium situation is bad partly because Oakland isn’t dumb enough to use public money for a new stadium so a billionaire owner can raise the value of their asset. The As could have built a privately funded stadium if they wanted to stay.
It would have had to included infrastructure & affordable housing in addition to the cost of the stadium. It was not a hard decision for the A’s.
It seems like the A's have had attendance problems even in their good times though. Even going back their period of utter dominance in the AL in the early 1970s, they weren't drawing 1,000,000 per year, as I recall, and indeed, by the late 1970s, they had games where mere hundreds showed up. I remember reading about a game in April 1979 for which they sold all of about 650 tickets and less than half those people came. Who knows how many stayed for the whole thing, as supposedly the weather that night was not great. It seems like this has always been their way and I don't know if Vegas solves that - I doubt it does.
...when Haas bought the team in 1980, it was a chance to finally get it right. And they did. The Coliseum, pre-Mount Davis, was superior to Candlestick Park in those days. So were the baseball teams. The A’s didn’t have trouble drawing when they won three straight pennants from 1988 to 1990, with a World Series title in 1989. They’d draw again in the early 2000s. Even in an aging ballpark, those Moneyball-era teams drew more than 2 million in attendance for five straight seasons. I was there for that, too.
As recently as 2014, with a team that reached the playoffs for the third straight year, playing in a stadium that was already past its useful life, the A’s eclipsed 2 million fans. So, spare me the “they don’t support the team” narrative that John Fisher and Dave Kaval have seized upon to grease the wheels for their business transaction.
I don’t fault these folks for getting their bag in Las Vegas. That’s business. But to lay the blame entirely on the fans? That’s dishonest, and that’s the part that I can’t stomach.
April 20th, 2023 at 12:23 PM ^
I feel sorry for the Oakland A's fans. All six of them.
Almost makes you wonder how a team that sold out its stadium in 2019, and throughout the first decade of the millenium cratered their fan support so much. Like maybe it has to do with the swindlers moving them to Vegas now
April 20th, 2023 at 12:27 PM ^
So much for "Rooted in Oakland."
April 20th, 2023 at 12:44 PM ^
Last team out of Oakland must turn off the lights!
April 20th, 2023 at 12:58 PM ^
You lost the Raiders to Vegas, you lost the Warriors to the other side of the Bay, and now the A's, too.
I'd be upset if I was an Oakland fan, but at the same time, you can't blame the Oakland brass for making this call. The stadium is a dump. It was a dump when I saw a game there and that was almost 25 years ago, when McGwire and Canseco were playing there (man that made me feel old). I can't imagine their attendance is any good, the team stinks, and while I don't pay enough attention to know this for sure, I'm going to guess the Oakland community didn't want to pay the taxes it would take to get a new stadium built.
At the end of the day, it didn't seem like the A's had a lot of choice here.
If I'm going to Vegas, though, I'd better hope that stadium is climate-controlled. A 1pm game in the dead of summer in Vegas? Outside, without climate control? Can't imagine how many heat strokes fans would be suffering through during those games, let alone the players.
The death blow was the Feds' denial of Oakland's application for a $180 million Department of Transportation Mega Grant. Getting the entire $180 million was always a longshot, but the city was counting on snagging at least some DoT money for the on- and off-site infrastructure improvements that would have been needed to support a stadium on the proposed site.
The A's were going to foot the massive bill for the new stadium but not the infrastructure improvements. The city wouldn't agree to any deal that might have required it to dip into its general fund to pay for the improvements, and there just isn't enough grease in the city's complex political machinery (which was further complicated by a new mayor taking office at a critical phase in the negotiations) to enact the tax increases necessary to bridge the gap.
Sad situation all around for Oakland and the Bay Area.
That was a killer. No reason they couldn’t have received those funds. I think that was in the era of “pay back” politics because someone didn’t like that all the voters in Oakland voted against them.
I'm not sure that was it. The Mega Grant program was enacted under Biden, and Oakland is probably the bluest city in the bluest state in the country. The 2023 grants were all awarded to bridge and roadway projects, which makes sense since it's a Department of Transportation grant program. My guess is the Feds weren't convinced that Oakland's proposed use of the funds was sufficiently related to transportation. In other words, it was tough for Oakland to make a compelling case for a project proposal whose purpose was to support a different, non-transportation related project.