A's Owner John Fisher Doesn't Care
The Oakland Las Vegas Raiders opened up preseason action at their fairly shiny and fairly new stadium on Sunday, and while it was a 34-7 victory over the visiting San Francisco 49ers, it was tough to tell who was the home team by the fans in the stands.
A viral clip was posted on social media which saw a sea of red, or in other words, Niners fans that had traveled to watch their team play on the road. This is a familiar occurrence for the Las Vegas Raiders, and while it's easy to poke fun at the team for not being able to draw locally, the Raiders are still selling plenty of tickets.
During the legislative session for SB1, the A's ballpark bill, part of the pitch to the lawmakers was that 30% of the fans in attendance day in and day out would be from out of town. When you look at how well the Raiders draw out of towners, it's hard to argue that point if you're not familiar with baseball.
One issue is that this is not a one-to-one correlation. Football is played once a week and you can book a weekend in Las Vegas and have the football game be one of a few Las Vegas events you take in. With baseball, it's more or less played every day, in the summer, and there is less room to operate a wide array of evening events if you're going to be at the ballpark at 7 p.m. each night.
There's also weekday games to account for, where 9,000 fans from other cities would need to take time off work year after year, like clockwork, in order to attend these games (and make sure the bonds are paid back).
The other issue here is that there doesn't seem to be a huge amount of local interest in the Raiders product. Sure the tickets are being sold, but the public isn't sharing in the profits of the stadium--they just helped fund it--and now they don't even appear to care about going to the games.
There has been a lot of discourse online about the A's potential move to Las Vegas, but the main question that should be asked is whether or not the public even wants this team. If given a choice between no baseball team and the A's, they'd likely take the green and gold, but it could be close. If it was between the A's and expansion, expansion wins every time.
But John Fisher doesn't care what the public wants in Las Vegas or in Oakland. You could say that he's a cold and calculated billionaire, but the truth is he's just a billionaire. Nothing about his search for a home for the A's has been calculated. Numerous venues across numerous cities have been not only discussed, but announced, since 2005 when he took over ownership.
Here is basically what he has boiled 55 years in Oakland down to: money. That shouldn't be a shock, but let's show our work, shall we?
Forbes lists the A's franchise value at $1.18 billion. Fisher bought the team for $180 million. That's a pretty good profit. Back in April there were rumors that John Fisher was looking to do a "pump and dump" with the A's, where he increases the franchise's value by getting a ballpark built, then sells the team.
Stanford economics professor Roger Noll told the Chronicle last month that the value of the franchise could double with a move to Las Vegas, up to about $2.5 billion. It would also presumably be a little less expensive to construct in Nevada than California. That $2.5 billion figure would be right up there with the Forbes valuation of the reigning World Series champion Houston Astros, who have been to the ALCS in each of the last seven seasons.
How much of an impact a new ballpark in Las Vegas over Oakland impacts the franchise value is all theoretical and there aren't concrete numbers on either side, but let's use that doubled franchise value from the Chronicle.
Regardless of the site (in this example), the franchise's value goes up by roughly how much Fisher would have to pay to get a new ballpark built, which is at least $1.1 billion per the passed legislation in Nevada. The A's are also on the hook for overruns. This leads to an obvious question: Why pay to get the ballpark built if the franchise value is only going up roughly the same amount that it costs to get a ballpark built?
That could be the key question that may ultimately lead to the A's leaving Oakland. The answer could be fairly simple, too.
Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred has said numerous times that once the A's and Tampa Bay Rays have their ballpark situations figured out, then the league would look into expansion. John Fisher, and every other owner, wants those expansion fees. If history has shown us anything, it's that he also wants to invest as little capital to make money as possible.
Expansion fees for a new owner would be right around $2 billion, if not higher. With two teams being added, that would be $4 billion to split between the current 30 ownership groups, or $133 million per existing team for basically doing nothing. With Las Vegas being a little cheaper place to build a ballpark than in the Bay Area, the cost of building the A's next home would save him a few bucks too.
At that point, once he's made just a little bit extra, he could end up selling the team. And that would be why someone could look at those images from the Raiders game on Sunday and not care about how it will impact their own potential move--because it won't be John Fisher's problem to solve.
Update: Oakland City Councilmember At-Large Rebecca Kaplan wrote recently that it would actually be quicker and cheaper to build in Oakland since the ballpark wouldn't need a dome or a retractable roof due to the nice weather in the Bay Area.