OAKLAND — What is lost when a sports team jilts a city, leaving a large, empty stadium behind?
A’s fans know that if the once-#RootedInOakland team completes a new deal to buy land and build a stadium in Las Vegas, it won’t change a thing about Oakland’s cultural diversity, food offerings, artistic contributions, progressive values and overall coolness.
They also know better than most the nuances of loving something that doesn’t love you back.
“The important part of all this was Oakland pride,” said Tony Duncan, owner of the 2101 Club in East Oakland, a top local spot to watch A’s games. “Having the team here and the fans who watch them, it feels like family.”
A’s President Dave Kaval has stressed that the planned move isn’t final, and the team doesn’t intend to leave East Oakland at least until its lease at the Coliseum ends in 2024.
But city leaders appear ready to move on and Mayor Sheng Thao made clear Thursday that negotiations for a new waterfront ballpark and housing at Howard Terminal are dead.
“If somehow the Las Vegas deal falls through, I won’t want them back,” said Jorge Leon, a lifelong Oakland native who once ran a booster club to keep the team in town. “They’ve caused so much damage; there’s no way it could be fixed.”
Leon’s memories of the team stretch back decades. When former A’s pitcher Dallas Braden threw a perfect game in 2010, Leon was sitting with then-owner Lew Wolff in his Coliseum suite, trying to persuade Wolff not to move the team to San Jose.
But he’s never met the current owner, billionaire John J. Fisher, one of the many wealthy men who have now passed through Oakland’s fraught sports history and made the town feel uncomfortably like it lives in the shadow of San Francisco and other major cities.
If the A’s do relocate to Las Vegas, the team will once again be neighbors with the Raiders, whose owner Mark Davis isn’t fond of the A’s after the two franchises butted heads while sharing the Coliseum.
Those skeptical toward major sports teams and their monied interests would roll their eyes at how Davis talks about stadiums: “‘They create jobs, civic involvement — all these things that go way beyond the argument that you’re giving money to a billionaire,” he said in an interview.
“The difference between what I see in Nevada and California is that the first word in Nevada is not ‘No,’” Davis said. “It’s very easy to get things done in a win-win situation.”
With the Warriors and Raiders gone, and the A’s apparently so, Oakland’s major sports landscape is now barren, and the true future of the Coliseum site — awkwardly shared by the A’s and an upstart community group — is hard to predict.
Meanwhile, the city is still paying off nearly 30-year-old upgrades to the stadium and neighboring arena, debts that need to be covered even after the A’s lease expires in 2024.
“That money could have gone to fire services, upgrading our streets, building a hospital, dealing with homelessness,” said Henry Gardner, who heads a joint authority between the city and Alameda County overseeing the Coliseum site.
“None of these franchises — not the Raiders, the Warriors, nor the A’s — have produced net revenues to the city and county since 1995,” Gardner added. “Not a single one.”
Oakland’s culture, known for its hip, racially diverse, socially progressive and often gritty aesthetics, doesn’t readily mesh with green-and-gold A’s baseball. By reputation, the team’s fans hail from around the Bay Area more than from the city itself.
But at the same time, the A’s also color the town’s spirit, with the ubiquitous logo and scrappy underdog spirit paralleling that of the city.
It may also help that baseball is just different from other sports — there are dozens more home games, nostalgia for the hot summer afternoons and an undeniable community spirit that emanates from the Coliseum.
“That charm that you feel at home games is the energy you think about,” said Bryan Johansen, who helps run an A’s merchandise vendor called Last Dive Bar, in reference to the stadium’s janky spirit.
“There’s a line that needs to be drawn between the A’s and the people that make up the organization,” Johansen added. “A lot of the employees are great people and lifelong fans of the A’s.”
Oakland will deal with the A’s for at least another season and a half. Fans online had been planning a “reverse boycott” in June, hoping to pack the stands to prove it’s the ownership’s lack of investment and not the attendance, that’s keeping them away.
The whole, never-ending ordeal has been exhausting for Oaklanders. It didn’t always feel so hollow, said Dave Newhouse, a lifelong Bay Area resident and author of Goodbye Oakland, a book about the city’s fraught relationship with major sports.
“What’s sad for me is the kid who got into Stanford football games for free because I was under 12,” said Newhouse, recalling his youth. “I’m now in my 80s, and it’s like sports have just unraveled. I didn’t want it to be like this going out the door.”
Source: www.mercurynews.com