The gold and white Oakland City Hall chamber was filled with a sea of green. Chants of “sell the team,” echoed throughout the concrete walls as Oakland Athletics fans gathered on Tuesday to protest the team’s move to Las Vegas.
The Oakland City Council passed a resolution stating that the A’s belong in Oakland and opposed the Major League Baseball’s vote to move the team to Las Vegas.
A’s fans were joined by the Oakland 68s — an Oakland sports fan group — as well as Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao and the Alameda County Labor Council.
“Baseball belongs here in the city of Oakland,” Thao said. “We are not a part of one billionaire’s portfolio. We are urging the voters and the owners who are voting to do the basic thing and say ‘No.’ ”
The A’s announced they had reached a binding agreement on April 21 to move the team from Oakland, where they have played since 1968, to Las Vegas, according to a press release from the team.
At that time, the A’s and the city of Oakland were working to build a waterfront stadium at the Howard Terminal, according to an April San Francisco Chronicle article.
Howard Terminal is a port in Oakland that is used for docking trucks and storage on the east side of the San Francisco Bay.
The stadium would seat 35,000 and have different attractions such as hotels, restaurants and affordable housing. But the deal fell through over the building of affordable housing around the stadium.
A’s owner John Fisher has taken a lot of criticism over the years for his lack of spending on the field as well as the refusal to invest in renovating the Oakland Coliseum. The son of The Gap Inc. founders Doris and Donald Fisher, John Fisher purchased the A’s in 2005 using the investment funds set up by the Gap.
During Tuesday’s protest, speakers were vocal about their disdain at Fisher and A’s President David Kaval’s decision to leave Oakland for Las Vegas.
“In 2018, A’s leadership sent us a letter saying that they would definitely stay in Oakland, either by building at Howard Terminal, or if that didn't work out by building up the coliseum,” said Oakland City Councilmember Rebecca Kaplan. “They have thus far chosen to do neither.”
A Nevada judge threw out a proposed ballot referendum that would give the voters a say in whether or not the A’s would receive public money to build their stadium, according to a Tuesday article from CBS News Bay Area.
The state of Nevada held a special session in June to vote on if the A’s were to get public funding to build a new stadium. The legislature voted to give the A’s up to $380 million in taxpayer dollars.
The A’s were allocated 50 acres of land to build a ballpark that included housing, businesses and more, according to the Port of Oakland website.
Fisher and the A’s already switched sites multiple times in Las Vegas, but have recently settled on building on the plot of land where the Tropicana Hotel currently sits, according to an ABC 7 article. However, the proposed Tropicana site is only nine acres.
Keith D. Brown, Executive Secretary-Treasurer for the Alameda County Labor Council, said the move will be a big blow to the Oakland community as thousands of residents work at the Oakland Coliseum.
“Jobs are on the line,” Brown said. “Our workforce at the coliseum are people of color and many are African Americans. We heard case management promising the Las Vegas legislature that they will create thousands of new jobs and union operation jobs in their town of Las Vegas, but these are not new jobs, they’re our jobs.”
Aside from the logistics and economics at play, A’s fans fear that the soul of the city is being torn apart.
The Oakland Raiders jetted to Las Vegas in 2020, in part because the A’s blocked the Raiders from rebuilding the Oakland Coliseum, according to a 2014 SFGATE article.
The Golden State Warriors left their home in East Oakland at Oracle Arena when the team moved to San Francisco in 2019, which left the A’s as the only professional sports team in Oakland for the past three years.
Tyler Hogan, an East Bay native who showed up to Tuesday’s protest with his son, said he has been watching the A’s since they played the Los Angeles Dodgers in the 1988 World Series.
Hogan said the A’s moving to Las Vegas would be removing an intricate part of the East Bay community.
“There’s just so much back and forth and we really just want this thing to get done,” Hogan said. “Getting Howard Terminal is the best solution for the A’s and the community.”
The A’s lease with the Oakland Coliseum ends after the 2024 season. Oakland mayor Sheng Thao said Tuesday that if the team plans to move and wants to continue using the coliseum, there will be a price to pay.
“I’m not allowing a lease extension for free,” Thao said. “There will have to be some assurances including an expansion team and keeping the team name in Oakland.”
Jorge Leon, Oakland 68s lead organizer, said the fight to keep the A’s in Oakland will continue until shovels are put in the ground in Las Vegas.
“The city of Oakland has great people and we’re not going to let this tradition die,” Leon said. “We're not gonna let a billionaire dictate the end of professional baseball in Oakland. Not if I have something to do about it.”
