A's Ballpark Tour a Distraction
It's not often that you have to hand it to the Oakland A's these days, but kudos to them for throwing people off the scent this week. For months, the question has been where the team plans to play their home games from 2025-27 once their lease at the Oakland Coliseum runs out. This week we potentially got some clarity, but was it all for show to distract the public from the other big news of the week?
On Tuesday, there was a deadline in Nevada for representatives to file their C&E's, and a lot of people involved with handing the A's their $380 million in public funding for the ballpark in Nevada received some campaign donations for their efforts. According to the Nevada Current, the total reached up to $112,000.
Sure, this was written about and discussed for about a day in a number of outlets, but the A's decided to send John Fisher, Dave Kaval, and the rest of the clown show to Sacramento and Salt Lake City (well, Daybreak), Utah to check out a couple of potential homes for the meandering A's and the politician payout story disappeared.
They made sure people knew that they were going, too. A reporter in Sacramento caught a picture of the scoreboard with the names of the five people checking out the park. That's one way to grab people's attention.
Then after their visit to Salt Lake City, Big League Utah, the group that is trying to attract a MLB team to the state posted a press release on social media basically rolling out the red carpet for the A's.
These are not subtle actions.
The cherry on top is the fact that Mick Akers of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the A's personal source for publishing whatever they want out in the world, said that the A's had been in Sacramento, confirming reports, and that they'd also be in Daybreak checking out the yet-to-open facility there. He just laid the breadcrumbs to lead people's attention to those locales.
Neither Sacramento nor Daybreak are perfect solutions to the A's ballpark issues. With SacTown, they'd receive some smaller amount of their RSN payout from Comcast Sports California (which would have to be negotiated), which is a huge plus. On the other hand, the fans may not be terribly happy to see them, and they'd still be within striking distance of another boycott game and further protests.
In Utah, they would be less likely to have fans chanting "Sell the team!" but they wouldn't receive any of their RSN money. That extra money could be used by Fisher to help improve the team for their planned arrival in Las Vegas and would be free money if he stays in the Bay Area.
While this is all important in the process of the A's relocation saga, the fact that they chose this week to finally start looking for a place to play games for three full seasons was not by accident.