Does a Path for the A's to Stay in Oakland Exist?
Does Oakland need John Fisher attached to the team in order to stand a chance at keeping baseball in the East Bay? He's loathed among the fans in Oakland and across the sports landscape, which is making it hard for anyone to get excited about a project he's attached to. Still, that doesn't mean that there's a clear path back to Oakland that can be used as an escape route.
Right now there are a few options for where the team could be playing games in the near future. The leading candidate is Las Vegas, where the A’s have already secured $380 million in public financing. The team also doesn’t seem to have a firm financial plan on how to make the ballpark happen in Sin City. So what happens if that money never comes together, or the public funding goes away due to a potential referendum and Vegas falls apart?
The A’s have toured the facilities of Triple-A ballparks in both Sacramento and Utah, and if Vegas isn’t an option for games in 2028 and beyond, sharing a minor league complex with another team would almost certainly be out of the question as a long-term solution. So Sacramento is out.
Slightly better would be kicking out the Salt Lake Bees and having the A’s play in Daybreak, Utah where the Bees plan to play games when their new ballpark opens in 2025. The minor league team could continue to play at Smith's Ballpark while the A's use the newer facility and await their new big-league ballpark either in Utah or elsewhere.
If MLB stepped in and forced Fisher to sell (big if), they would have the final say on who ends up owning the team. There would likely be some group of people in Vegas that would love to be involved in the A’s franchise, just not with Fisher attached. So if Fisher puts the team up for sale tomorrow, you have to think that they land in Vegas. There’s already a site and public money. The new group could even switch sites to one that they prefer, which would be better for locals. If they privately finance the park, then that would be a number of big wins for a new baseball team in Nevada that the residents could actually get excited about.
Vegas is a market that’s ready for a baseball team, be it the A’s under new ownership or an expansion franchise. When the dust settles with expansion in a few years, there will likely be baseball being played in the desert one way or another. MLB seems to want to be in that market.
Utah is also making a strong push to land a baseball team and a hockey team, as Brodie Brazil has been mentioning on his YouTube channel in recent days. If they’re willing to play ball with MLB and give the A’s a place to crash while they get a ballpark built, removed from “Sell the team” chants, that’s the type of political move that can get a deal done.
The question is: How do the A’s or any MLB franchise land in Oakland when all is said and done? If Fisher sells, the A’s go to Vegas. If he relocates the team to Utah for the 2025-27 seasons and runs into trouble in Vegas, then they may just end up staying long-term, in which case Vegas gets an expansion team and a fresh start while the A's may just end up staying in Utah.
For baseball fans in Oakland to have a team to root for, it seems the clearest path forward would be for the A’s to renew their lease at the Coliseum, which may take a literal miracle to happen since the two sides aren’t speaking. Then, Vegas funding would have to fall apart and John Fisher would then have to sell.
Meanwhile, there has been a rumor swirling around which may or may not be something that is under consideration, that the A's may just disband from 2025-27 and then the league would hold an expansion draft for them ahead of the 2028 season. If this is something that is actually an option, it just shows how unwilling John Fisher and Major League Baseball are to having a baseball team in Oakland. They'd rather not have a 30th franchise for three full seasons than return to The Town.
So as of right now, even if the funding in Las Vegas goes away, or Fisher actually sells the team, it doesn't seem likely that the A's would just return to Oakland.
The one saving grace for Oakland fans could be the Player's Association and just how much they're willing to put up with in order to get Fisher his ballpark. They're not going to want to let 40 jobs just disappear, even for a short period of time, along with the uncertainty of what would happen to all of the minor leaguers in the A's system. For them, it'll be a question of how much leverage they're willing to burn in this potential fight.
When it comes to the A's relocation attempt, there isn't a whole lot of certainty. That said, the way things sit right now, Oakland doesn't even look like the fallback option either.