The Las Vegas Athletics of Oakland

Now we know Nevada governor Joseph Lombardo lacks either a brain or a veto pen when he needs both. We're about to discover — or rediscover, as the case probably is — whether major league baseball owners have brains and vetoes enough to do what Nevada's legislature and governor couldn't or wouldn't do.

Lombardo signed off on the state pledge of $380 million tax dollars toward building the Las Vegas Athletics of Oakland a new playpen on the fabled Las Vegas Strip. That, as more than a few social media crawlers have snarked, makes Lombardo the rookie of the year. Not.

The only thing left to plunge the knife all the way into Oakland's back are the owners. Are the needed 75 percent willing to rubber-stamp A's owner John Fisher and baseball commissioner Rob Manfred's insistence on finishing Fisher's betrayal of Oakland and, by the way, waiving the $1 billion dollar relocation fee the A's would normally have to pay MLB to make the move?

You'd better not ask Manfred about that. All indications are that the commissioner has long surrendered Oakland as a lost cause without bothering himself to ponder that the cause wasn't lost, it was discarded witlessly. And A's fans smothered in frustration, rage, and sorrow alike have learned the hard way what Manfred thinks of them after all.

Almost 28,000 fans poured into RingCentral Coliseum last Tuesday in a "reverse boycott" aimed at letting the world know the A's atrocity wasn't their doing. That they weren't the ones who let the team and the ballpark — whose usefulness disappeared years if not decades before the A's might — turn into the city dump.

Manfred himself didn't see the game. He was occupied with dining with some of the owners after their week of meetings ended in New York. But he did see the game's coverage. And it impressed him this much: "It's great to see what is, this year, almost an average Major League Baseball crowd in the facility for one night. That's a great thing."

Was Commissioner Nero even mildly aware that Fisher reduced the A's to rubble while trying and failing to strong-arm Oakland and its home Alameda County into handing the A's a new home practically on the house? That Oakland called his bluff and compelled Fisher to think about sticking it to Las Vegas and its home Nevada?

"I think if you look at the A's record over time and the economic circumstances, including the state of the stadium that they've operated in for a very long time, they had a very good record up through the pandemic," he said.

Translation: Oakland wasn't willing to just build Fisher a delicious real-estate development in Howard Terminal with a new ballpark thrown in for good measure. Except that that wasn't the only option Fisher blew sky high. "Wasn't Fisher committed to Fremont not that long ago?" asked The Athletic's Tim Kawakami — in April. "Then to San Jose? Then to rebuilding at the Coliseum? Then to the Laney College site? Then to Howard Terminal...? This is the Death Lineup of squandered and blundering stadium efforts."

Kawakami then was perversely optimistic that Fisher would fall on his face in Las Vegas and thus be compelled to sell the A's if only because he wouldn't be able to meet Manfred's deadline of getting new digs by 2024 or else. Except that Fisher and Manfred and Fisher's parrot David Kaval picked their Nevada marks well. Nevada's cactus juice-for-brains lawmakers and governor fell for it hook, line, and stinker.

Oakland itself (the city, that is) isn't entirely innocent. They were quite prepared to make $375 million worth of commitments to a new A's stadium if only Fisher and Kaval left it at that. But no. Fisher and Kaval insisted on pushing the $12 billion Howard Terminal development project. That, said mayor Sheng Thao, turned the simple into the too-complex.

"There was a very concrete proposal under discussion," Thao's spokeswoman Julie Edwards said in a formal statement, "and Oakland had gone above and beyond to clear hurdles, including securing funding for infrastructure, providing an environmental review and working with other agencies to finalize proposals.

"The reality is the A's ownership had insisted on a multibillion-dollar, 55-acre project that included a ballpark, residential, commercial and retail space. In Las Vegas, for whatever reason, they seem satisfied with a nine-acre leased ballpark on leased land. If they had proposed a similar project in Oakland, we feel confident a new ballpark would already be under construction."

If you need me to explain why Fisher and Kaval are settling for just the ballpark in Las Vegas, remember my beach club in Antarctica? You can have it for a song now. Maybe just a short medley.

Thao's statement said, essentially, spare us the crocodile tears, Mr. Commissioner. "I feel sorry for the fans in Oakland," Manfred says.

I do not like this outcome. I understand why they feel the way they do. I think the real question is what is it that Oakland was prepared to do? There is no Oakland offer, OK? They never got to the point where they had a plan to build a stadium at any site. It's not just John Fisher . . . The community has to provide support, and at some point you come to the realization that it's just not going to happen.

"This," tweeted retired (and one-time A's) pitcher Brandon McCarthy, "is [fornicating] pathetic. How is this not disqualifying? This toad is the steward of a glorious sport, dripping with history and he feels entitled to mock fans who are making their voices heard as he sits by and caters to hiding billionaires?"

Why does Manfred think Oakland "has to support" a team reduced to pathos by its owner, in a ballpark allowed to become a dump for too many years, with its host city responsible for building a new ballpark and just handing it to the team on whatever terms the team demands — even and including a $12 billion development where the ballpark would have been oh-by-the-way?

All that was Fisher's doing. He did his level best to make things unpalatable for A's fans. Including but not limited to the abject gall of inflating prices after last year's A's finished 60-102; two years and more worth of shipping or letting walk any viable A's players who now perform well for other teams; and, ten years worth of fielding baseball's 26th highest payroll with only one postseason game win to show for it.

(For the curious, the win was Game Three of the 2000 American League division series against the Astros — when courageous Liam Hendricks was still an Athletic, and kept a late two-run lead intact pitching the final two innings to nail the game.)

"[T]he A's could have made money in Oakland," writes Mark Normandin in Baseball Prospectus, using Tuesday night's "reverse boycott" game as a classic example, "but chose not to."

They stopped trying a long time ago, and began to try even less after that. No matter how many executive fingers are pointed at the fans in Oakland for not attending games, it doesn't change that there is money to be made if you simply give the fans a reason to give it to you. Nearly 28,000 people paid an average of $29 just to show up on TV and tell John Fisher he sucks and should sell the team; do you know how much more positive energy and money could be out there for the A's if they had a team worth paying to see? This is a city that, after all the team has done to them, was still willing to give them hundreds of millions in taxpayer funds to stick around even longer!

All that stands in the way of the A's hosing Las Vegas and the entire state of Nevada now are the owners. (You think $380 million tax dollars is a fortune? Just wait until the almost-inevitable cost overruns begin to make themselves manifest. Three guesses whom the A's and MLB will try to stick with those bills.)

I say again: I'd love nothing more than major league baseball in Las Vegas. But not like that. Not by way of a taxpayer hosing. Not a team whose often colorful history was betrayed by an owner who treated the team and its fans who've loved them like nuisances. I don't want major league baseball in Vegas that badly. I'm perfectly happy having the Triple-A Aviators.

An optimist may now be described as someone who thinks enough owners will a) wake up and decide, after all, that there's something transparently stupid about billionaires unwilling to build their teams' own digs without a taxpayer soak; and, b) show enough spine, accordingly, to stand athwart Fisher (and Manfred, their hired hand, after all), yelling "Stop!"