Come November, seemingly, baseball's owners may have the chance to vote on whether or not to let Athletics owner John Fisher finish what he started, namely hijacking the A's to Las Vegas. Seemingly.
Getting it to their vote is a three-layered process. It should end with the A's told to stay put, with Fisher told to sell the team, and with new owners tasked for good faith work with Oakland that will keep the A's there without one taxpayer's dime to pay for it.
Right now, the best news for abused A's fans is that the team isn't going to equal the 1962 Mets for season-long futility. As of Sunday morning, the A's sat at 48-107 with ten games left to play. They're 9-12 in September including a freshly-snapped 7-game losing streak, but even if they lose their final regular-season games they won't overthrow the Original Mets. Swell.
Because the worse news, according to an in-depth examination by ESPN's Tim Keown, is that Fisher and his trained seal David Kaval "blindsided" Oakland with their plan to move the A's to Las Vegas. It's also that Fisher running the so-called "parallel track" between staying in Oakland and moving to Las Vegas might well have been a one-way track in disguise.
Bottom line: Oakland was had. Fisher's failed attempt to strong-arm the city into all but handing him a $12 billion Howard Terminal development project that seems to have included a by-the-way new ballpark for the A's turned into Fisher picking up his badly-abused baseball toy and carting it off to Vegas in due course.
On April 19, according to Keown's examination, Oakland mayor Sheng Thao was driving home from a local business opening, comfortable that the gap in keeping the A's in Oakland was down to a mere $36 million once the city learned of $64 million in federal grants coming toward Howard Terminal.
That'd teach her. Because as she drove, Keown said, Kaval called. Oops. "Hey, just a heads up. Somebody leaked to the press that we have a binding deal with Las Vegas."
"Thao had scheduled a week of intensive talks with the A's and a team of mediators to bring the deal home," Keown wtote. "Hotel rooms were booked. Flights were reserved. Thao even gave it a name: The Negotiation Summit. At the event the evening of Kaval's phone call, Thao told Leigh Hanson, her chief of staff, 'I really think we're going to get this over the finish line'."
Not quite. After one call leading to another leading to another, Fisher himself called Thao. She told Keown Fisher said, quote, "I feel really bad. I really like you and I like working with you, but we're going to focus all our energy on Las Vegas." "In the very beginning," she said she replied, "I literally asked you, 'Are you serious about Oakland?' and you said yes. But if your focus is on Vegas, good luck."
The leaked story appeared in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Thao's chief of staff Leigh Hanson told Keown, "Not sure it's a leak when you're quoted in the story. Pretty sure that's not how leaks work. If you're going to be strategic, try not to be so sloppy."
Sloppy? That doesn't begin to describe this disaster. Neither does it begin describing Fisher and Kaval not only pronouncing the $12 billion Howard Terminal plan dead, but also trading Fisher's so-called "legacy" project in Las Vegas — 55 acres off the Strip, and a community park atop a ballpark — for nine acres where the Tropicana Hotel now sits.
Except that Keown says further that the A's relocation application to MLB now doesn't even include a ballpark proposal. Sketches were produced and published back last spring, of course, but there's not only no park proposal in the application — a ballpark which would have to be domed or retractably-roofed thanks to Las Vegas's notoriously hot summers — there's no financing plan noted and no architect designated.
All that after Nevada lawmakers approved and Gov. Joseph Lombardo signed a bill authorizing $380 million public dollars to build a ballpark on the Tropicana site, and sports economists began tabulating how much higher prospective cost overruns would run the taxpayer price tag no matter how much the A's would kick in to help cover them.
Nevada fell hook, line, and stinker after Fisher and Kaval essentially tried and failed to game Oakland. "Fisher wanted to build a new, state-of-the-art ballpark at Howard Terminal because he had a vision of changing those 55 acres around the Terminal," writes Cup of Coffee's Craig Calcaterra, interpreting the damning Keown report.
Fisher wanted to be a hero; he didn't want to build a new stadium because it would be good for the fans, or it was simply something the team needed after playing in a decrepit ballpark for so long. He wanted the plaudits. When Fisher didn't get exactly what he wanted exactly when he wanted it from Oakland, he wasted no time in taking the next-best deal in Vegas.
Hilariously, the Fisher and Kaval's rush to Vegas has been largely disorganized. Keown notes that in the Athletics' revenue projections, they assumed an annual attendance of 2.5 million fans, but their proposed new ballpark in Vegas would only seat 30,000. Multiply 30,000 by 81 home games and you get 2.43 million — a mathematical impossibility, even if they sold out every single home game. Furthermore, the Athletics don't have an actual ballpark design, a financing plan, an interim home for the team until they open the new digs, nor do they even have an architect.
After Lombardo signed the aforesaid bill, I wrote this: "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!'"
But who will yell? Especially with the Rays reaching a deal for their own new $1.3 billion ballpark in St. Petersburg, for which the Rays reportedly will only have to pay half, with the other half coming from city and Pinellas County governments, which means from taxpayers living in or visiting that area.
Will it be the preliminary three-owner review panel of Mark Attanasio (Brewers), John Middleton (Phillies), and John Sherman (Royals), not exactly the Three Stooges but three of the smartest owners among a group not exactly renowned for brains?
Will it be commissioner Rob Manfred (whose hands are anything but clean in the entire A's mess) and an eight-member executive board, knowing Manfred is too willing to grant Fisher and the A's a bye on the usual required nine-figure-plus relocation fee?
Will it be enough among the remaining 30 owners if and when it gets far enough for their vote? Will they be willing to a Fisher who more or less abused the living daylights out of Oakland and its baseball team before deciding he and it have a future in Las Vegas, long-enough-suffering A's fans in Oakland be damned?
The Attanasio-Middleton-Sherman panel should be brainy enough to do what they can to recommend against rewarding Fisher-Kaval's bad faith playing and convince enough of their peers to vote no. "This whole process" Calcaterra writes, "has been even more of a circus than we thought." In the Fisher-Koval circus, it seems the clowns and the animals trade off on holding the keys.
But at least the A's won't meet or beat the Original Mets for season-long futility. Isn't that just peachy?
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