Group hug for Oakland
Oakland has lost all three major sports teams. Could anything have prevented it?
You can't force someone to like you and you really can't force someone to love you.
That’s true with humans, and it’s even more true with the owners of professional sports teams and the city their team resides.
If we’re looking for a reason why the city of Oakland has lost all three of its professional teams in the last five years, it starts and ends right there.
The sad reality is the only owner who ever loved Oakland was Walter Haas, who bought the A’s in 1980, saving them from a move to Denver, and operated the team like a civic treasure until he passed away in 1995.
All the other East Bay pro sports owners had moments when they liked Oakland, but mostly they just tolerated Oakland. They were at the Prom with Oakland because they didn't want to be home alone, but even when they danced, they were just scanning the room thinking about who they'd rather be dancing with instead.
The Warriors are in San Francisco, the Raiders are in Las Vegas, and the A’s are moving to Las Vegas, and it’s primarily because they just didn’t want to be in Oakland. When you love someone, you find a way to make it work. When you just like someone, you find excuses to leave.
It's actually remarkable it took this long for the whole thing to fall apart. If the owners had better political skill, they'd have left a long time ago.
I don’t write this callously or with spite. It pains me that all my favorite teams have left Oakland or will be leaving soon.
Besides my home, I spent more time at the Oakland Coliseum Complex than any other location in my life – as a wide-eyed kid, as a teenage paying customer, and as a credentialed newspaper reporter. I got autographs as a kid and quotes as an adult.
I saw A’s games with a few thousand fans and surrounded by 50,000 others chanting “Sweeeeeeeeep” as they waved brooms. I watched the Warriors from the stands and even played a junior high basketball game on the floor. I saw the Raiders and the Invaders, Bruce Springsteen and Andre the Giant, Krazy George and the Banjo Man.
Before Steph Curry arrived, the most successful stretch of any of the East Bay’s three teams was the A’s of the late 1980 and early 1990s. It’s not a coincidence that’s when Haas owned the team.
Those A’s were the most successful under every measure: attendance, the ballpark experience, community engagement, on-field success, and the opportunity for anyone from any socio-economic class to experience it all.
It’s also one of the few times when the owner was not constantly complaining about the stadium or trying to move.
The Haas family started a Community Affairs department before any other team in Major League Baseball. The Haas family cared about the fans, cared about Oakland, cared about the entire region, and the fans responded because they knew the owner cared about them.
A quick story: a group of dedicated fans in the left-field bleachers once wrote a letter to Haas on the eve of the 1988 playoffs. They attended every A’s game, buying tickets on game day, but weren’t technically season-ticket holders and thus not eligible to secure their seats for the playoffs. Haas read the letter and ensured they’d not only have access to tickets, but their exact seats for each playoff game.
From 1989-92, the A’s ranked in the top five in the majors in attendance every year. The peak was 1990. They drew 2.9 million fans, more than the Red Sox and Cubs and Yankees, trailing just the Dodgers and Blue Jays.
“What I liked about our crowds back then, from the people who worked at the stadium to those who came to watch, was I felt like they were me,” Oakland native and former star A’s pitcher Dave Stewart told the San Francisco Chronicle in an interview a few weeks ago. “There wasn’t anybody in the crowd I couldn’t identify with … going to the bullpen before starts, it was just different, man. I looked into the crowd and saw people just like me.”
To be clear, the Coliseum was outdated two decades ago and a new stadium was desperately needed by everyone. All the owners tried to make a new stadium work. They really did. But they didn’t try hard enough – and most importantly – didn’t want to try with enough of their own money.
The blame is not squarely on the shoulders of the owners. Politicians and other bureaucrats from the city, county and state levels couldn’t work together, couldn’t figure out how to work through conflicts when helping one team hurt another team, and didn’t have the foresight to make changes as the sports world evolved.
To be fair, it’s not easy. The Bay Area is a complicated place with five counties with differing agendas. Politicians leave office. New politicians have different approaches. Environmental groups successfully delay or halt projects. Land is scarce.
When I think “how did this happen?” or “what could have prevented this?” I know that my very simplistic “love conquers all” is a cheap Pollyanna perspective. But I can’t stop thinking about this question, both pragmatically and emotionally.
Before I go any further, let me address the Warriors. They’re not completely innocent, but their hands are the cleanest in this sordid mess.
The Warriors left Oakland, but at least they stayed in the Bay Area. They didn’t flirt with other cities and threaten to leave. They worked with the tech elites of the Silicone Valley to finance a billion-dollar arena across the Bay in San Francisco. They built a powerhouse basketball team, behind a once-in-a-lifetime talent like Steph Curry, and continue to spend money to keep chasing more championships, even if it means higher and higher penalties for going over the salary cap.
So, really, truly – outside of the A’s and Raiders owners building a new stadium with their own money and loans, just like the Warriors and Giants did – what could have stopped the Raiders and A’s leaving for Las Vegas?
The Raiders and 49ers working together on a stadium
I’ll never understand why this didn’t happen, other than ego and greed.
I don’t mean the Raiders becoming a tenant of the 49ers after they built their stadium in Santa Clara. I mean the Raiders and 49ers working together to build a stadium from the very beginning that would house both teams.
It’s such an easier selling point to investors and politicians if you’re spending over a billion dollars on a stadium for 16 football games instead of eight.
The blueprint is the Meadowlands Sports Complex in East Rutherford, New Jersey. The NFL’s Jets and Giants went into a joint venture together, sharing the facility and sharing the profits as equal partners.
They both still call themselves New York. The interior lights of the stadium switch from green for the Jets, to blue for the Giants, so it always looks like a home field for either team. They built four locker rooms – one each for the home tenants, and two for the visiting teams, so even when neither team is playing, their home locker rooms are left alone.
If the Raiders and 49ers became partners on a new stadium, they still could have called themselves Oakland and San Francisco.
If the Raiders don’t move to Las Vegas, the A’s never even think about moving to Las Vegas. My crystal ball can’t automatically guarantee that keeps the A’s in Oakland, but I know they’re not moving to Portland or Salt Lake City.
The Giants territorial rights to the South Bay
I’ll always understand this from a business standpoint, but I’ll never get over this from an ethical standpoint.
The Cliff Notes version: the A’s originally owned the territorial rights to the South Bay. The benevolent Walter Haas gave the rights to the Giants as a goodwill gesture in the 1980s when they were trying to build a new ballpark in the South Bay.
Haas didn’t want the Giants to leave the region. He believed the Bay was big enough for two teams and the region was better with two baseball teams. Haas didn’t ask then-Giants owner Bob Lurie for a penny at the time or any future considerations.
The Giants failed, twice, at securing ballparks in the South Bay. The A’s, under Haas and then new owners Steve Schott and Ken Hofmann, never thought to re-establish the territorial rights as their own. It wasn’t a big deal. It only became a big deal when the A’s thought about trying to move to San Jose and the Giants, under a different ownership group, blocked them.
Major League Baseball was cowardice in allowing this charade to occur. Owner A gave something to Owner B for free, but Owner C wouldn’t give it back (or sell it back) to Owner D, and the Commissioner’s Office allowed it to happen.
I’ll never understand why the A’s didn’t go scorched earth, taking the Giants and MLB to court to build a new ballpark in San Jose. Actually, I do understand why. Because then-Commissioner Bud Selig hand-delivered his old fraternity brother Lew Wolff to the A’s ownership group, specifically because Wolff wouldn’t rock the boat.
You better believe Al Davis would have rocked the boat, fought them all in court, and/or just moved there anyway.
Thinking city, not region
I know, I know, many A’s fans right now are screaming, “Josh, the A’s belong in Oakland, not San Jose!” See my paragraph about the Warriors. At least they’re still in the Bay.
It’s not like building a ballpark in San Jose was ever a done deal. The point is, the Giants and MLB painted the A’s into the corner of Alameda County or nothing. Locations and financing were limited.
Once the Giants opened their new ballpark in downtown San Francisco in 2000, financed almost completely privately, it appeared to be a race for the other teams in the Bay to get their own new facilities. It turned into a crawl.
The Raiders and 49ers didn’t want to work together.
The Raiders and A’s were always frenemies, working on their own stadium agendas, or trying to get municipalities to pay for their new stadiums, while passive-aggressively sabotaging each other.
With all the money and technological brainpower in the Bay Area, it makes no sense it came to this. The Bay Area is not better with one football and one baseball team, instead of two each. The region is far worse.
New York figured out how to make two football teams happy, two baseball teams happy, two basketball teams happy, and two hockey teams happy. They’re in different boroughs and different states, but they made it happen.
I came across a quote the other day that sums up stadium situations perfectly.
“I still don’t have a good understanding on why the team ever left. I’ve heard all the thoughts — my daughter works in the legislature, and she tells me what happened there, and I hear what the league office says, and it just doesn’t seem like it should have happened. It seemed like it was just a couple angry people who said, ‘Screw it, we’re moving on.' ”
For the record, the quote was by George Karl, former coach of the Seattle Supersonics, on why that team moved to Oklahoma City.
Read it again. It applies to Oakland. It applies to San Diego and St. Louis and every other city that ever lost a pro sports team.
A couple angry people just said, “screw it, we’re moving on.”
Because, again, you can’t force someone to like you, and you really can’t force someone to love you.
Great newsletter, Josh. I keep telling myself, don’t be sad it’s gone, be happy that it happened. I spent a lot of time at the coliseum. A lot. Great memories.
It all seems so sad. It never should have been this way... but it was. And now it’s over.