Oakland A's Interim Home Before Landing in Las Vegas?
The all-important deadline for the A's to secure a binding agreement for a new ballpark that allows them to remain on MLB's revenue-sharing program has come and gone with little new information. While it was reported a couple of weeks back that the A's would be able to stay on, there are still plenty of questions to be asked about the progress this project is making.
John Shea of the San Francisco Chronicle recently wrote an article that provided some potential hints to a couple of the questions on everyone's minds, like where will the A's play from 2025-27 and when the people of Las Vegas may be able to expect a renderings release.
According to Shea, Sacramento's Triple-A facility and home of the San Francisco Giants minor-league affiliate could be where the A's end up playing in the interim years. While Sacramento is outside of the Bay Area and wouldn't land them the $67 million per season in RSN money from Comcast Sports California, a deal can apparently be worked out for the station to continue to play A's games for a reduced price.
If the A's were to play at least half of their games at Oracle Park in San Francisco, they would be owed the full $67 million. Shea's sources also believe that there's "little chance" of the team playing at the Coliseum past 2024.
For A's fans, there's a certain sector that want the team out of Oakland as quickly as possible so that they can move on with their lives after being kicked by the franchise one last time, while others want to soak in as many sunny days at the Coliseum in the time they have left with the team that they've loved. Those fans were holding out a little hope that even if the A's are set to leave, that they'd stick around until the new ballpark was ready.
A move to Sacramento also tells you exactly how the Giants feel about the A's. Of course they want to be the only team in the Bay Area, but they don't want to use their own home park to make it happen. Why not use Sacramento, the A's former affiliate, as team's new big-league home for three seasons instead? For a franchise that has been playing second fiddle to the Giants for awhile now, that should be a huge punch to the gut. But if it gets John Fisher even a sliver of money from his RSN deal and out of Oakland, he'll take it.
Somehow fans in Las Vegas are supposed to look at this franchise that is attempting to come to their city and want to sign up to be life-long fans when they made so many enemies along the way that they were relegated to playing multiple seasons in a Triple-A ballpark. With the team coming off of back-to-back 100+ loss seasons and another one potentially on the horizon, the "Triple-A's" moniker that has been used on social media about the team when they've struggled would become literal.
As for the renderings, Shea reports that the roof will now be fixed (which has long been speculated on just a nine acre site), and that they may not be released until the A's head to Las Vegas during Spring Training for their weekend series against the Milwaukee Brewers on March 8-9.
These renderings were supposed to come out in November, and then got delayed until early December. Now, in the middle of January, they're saying it could be another two months.
It's been said plenty, but the secretive nature of this entire process is what many are having a hard time with. If ownership had come out and laid out exactly why they needed to relocate to Las Vegas (it didn't take much to stay on revenue sharing apparently, so that's not it), then fans would still be angry, but there would at least be an argument being made somewhere that this move makes sense. Maybe some fans would even understand.
Instead, everyone is left to speculate where the A's are playing, how things are going, when announcements are coming, and why they've decided to move the franchise in the first place. It's not a good look for the A's brand, and it's not a good look for Major League Baseball. If the A's do end up in Sacramento, that would be five straight years of negative publicity for the franchise, but they apparently think that everything will be great once they land in Nevada.
It's going to take a lot of work to undo the damage that Fisher and company have done by that point, and if there is one thing that Fisher hates, it's trying.