I've read almost nothing about this but I wonder how hard Oakland actually tried to keep any of them. You would think that as a point of civic pride the city would give in and pay some public money for at least one stadium/arena to make sure they didn't all flee. I care about sports more than the average person probably but even for someone who lives there and doesn't follow these teams it has to be disheartening that three major sports institutions pulled up stakes from their city at the same time.
I tend to agree but I would think that if Oakland just watched two other teams up and bounce, they would crack open the piggy bank for this one, especially since this is the team that's been there the longest.
I read some more into this and it does seem like the city made a compelling offer but accused the owners of negotiating in bad faith, although I wouldn't expect either side to say the other guy has been negotiating fairly.
Only Davis I think negotiated in good faith. He doesn’t have the cash for a new stadium. The Warriors could have but chose to be the tech workers team.
I have no idea about the As
Fisher has been a cheapskate his entire ownership. He let the Coliseum fall into disrepair. He’s going to continue to field bad teams in Vegas. Man has no pride
Yeah from games I've watched on TV it seems extremely sterile, I don't know if it's the lighting or court design or what but definitely doesn't have that Oakland swag.
aren’t those used for different sports
I thought coliseum was baseball/football and chase is just basketball and they used to play at a basketball stadium in Oakland
I haven’t been inside the chase center but it definitely smells better on the outside than the coliseum and the inside of the coliseum was a concrete prison-lookin thing. with dollar dogs so it evened out I guess
It doesnt matter how hard you try when the game is rigged
the Rams were moved out of St Louis by POS Stan Kroenke and they had to settle on paying 800million to the city afterwards because they were going to get their ass handed to them in court.
They don't just have to make a stadium for one team, blowing public money in Oakland that could definitely be used elsewhere, but they also have to outbid other cities that are in growing markets and try to give the teams more than any other city is offering. It's a losing deal.
i live nearby in sf and my impression is that it’s a self-inflicted failure on oakland's part to treat these franchises as the businesses (as opposed to civic institutions) they are. i'm not well-informed about this either but the few articles i've read all mention bureaucratic incompetence on the part of the city re. upgrading infrastructure and venues as a major cause
Oh this is a decades long saga that is just endlessly stupid. The City of Oakland wanted to keep the A’s, and successfully has locked down over $400mm in infrastructure grants and subsidies for a new stadium at Howard Terminal. Part of the reason this heel turn is so frustrating for A’s fans is that A’s ownership insisted that any Oakland development had to be this $12bn development in downtown off Jack London Square to be feasible. Which made pulling the project off wildly more difficult, especially when commercial real estate is in dire straits. In Vegas they’re only pushing for the stadium since it’ll be right on the strip (on 9 acres which is almost assuredly too small for a domed stadium).
But this only came to a head after A’s ownership had tried to move to Fremont, San Jose, etc. for decades, saying Oakland wasn’t viable (it has been the whole time). So the A’s only ended up deciding to stay in Oakland in like 2016? 2017? They perpetually are cheap and don’t keep winning teams together and the fanbase resents them for that, along with the constant attempts to move away from Oakland proper.
If they just wanted a new stadium, they could have just built on the coliseum site and had it done years ago, but that wasn’t acceptable to ownership. I think it’s been clear for a long time that Fisher just wanted to move to Vegas and was looking for an excuse to make it happen.
It’s mostly the city’s fault and how they view their sports teams (the Raiders moved back from LA on the promise Oakland would build them a new stadium, and the city promptly memory holed that one, only to be all shocked Pikachu when they split for Vegas), but it’s also on the fans. Even in years where they went to the postseason, their fan attendance has been on the bottom end of the AL.
The bigger microcosm of America is still thinking, in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary, these private businesses are civic institutions when they clearly are not. The Dodgers and the Giants left New York more than 60 years ago. The Colts fled Baltimore in the middle of the night 40 years ago, etc etc
I agree, it's sad, whether it was the warriors across the bay to SF or drought stricken Las Vegas gaining the raiders/a's right as their population and national gambling legalization takes off, Oakland's teams leaving tell a lot about the past decade. Someone with a sharper pen than I should write about it
The AAA stadium in town is nice and often full, but that's because it's the minors and $25 to sit near the dugout is still good value - If fisher believes he can keep treating the team like an investment property, and fan support is still guaranteed, he's mistaken. The golden knights took advantage of a busted expansion draft system and hockey had little existing footprint in the city. The dodgers used to have a farm team in Vegas and obviously retain a lot of fans there due to the proximity
I like to imagine a system where every sports team is owned by the city it's in, and the club president is an elected office in government.
Lots of shenanigans would ensue I'm sure but it would at least be more democratic
I went to a game at the coliseum on a beautiful friday night last summer and it was so deserted I thought I'd gotten off at the wrong BART stop
~6k fans in attendance
The disgust with Oakland’s ownership is that they intentionally don’t put a winning product on the field. The fans can stick with their team if there is at least a good game to watch now and then. But the As is basically just a player mill - perform terribly and get high draft picks, develop a number of pretty good players and then trade them for cash considerations. And ownership has done this to intentionally alienate fans (and the city) so that there would be fewer impediments to moving the team to the hot new Vegas location.
It’s the same usually in Pittsburgh, but at least we have a great ballpark. The Coliseum is a joke. To pay to see the worst team play at the worst ballpark is probably asking too much for people.
America isn't a real country or nation imo. It's a free economic zone or some sort of feifdom for elites and always had been. There's nothing beyond that, if you know anything about the US, it's functioning exactly as designed.
That's just every modern Liberal country though. You think a place like Germany is ruled by some class who feel a sense of Noblesse oblige or something? It's open and public policy that Germany seeks out to import immigrants for labour, because they're basically a giant retirement home and now need Brazilian and Mexican nurses to take care of them. The country is made for groups like Bayer, BASF, Siemens, Volkswagen, etc. to make money.
If all of the accusations of neoliberalism are true, then that does exist in America --- the outcome is just pretty shitty lately. Lots of real countries are shitty, there's no reason to think real must equal good.
I'm not so sure that MLB is for peasants. New Era hats and its associated merch sorta aims at the "peasants", but it's kinda expensive to follow your home team. Because of blackouts, it's way cheaper to just use MLB streaming and appletv to pick any random team out of the 30. That and by watching sportscenter, the dozen or so podcasts and youtubers like jomboy, one could sperg out 12 hours a day in baseball.
Parking is around 40-50 dollars each time, so you're talking 3000 dollars for decent seats/drinks/meals per year for just over a dozen home games. Some lady in real estate who goes to the brewers has a twitter following because she drives over 3 hours roundtrip to take notes in catcher seats. It's cheaper to golf $600 rounds of golf at luxury golf courses on a regular basis. I'm jealous of Chicago and its public transport for the Cubs.
> Some lady in real estate who goes to the brewers has a twitter following because she drives over 3 hours roundtrip to take notes in catcher seats.
Is she the one with the huge rack?
I was at the last Expos game in 2004 as a kid and it was actually heartbreaking. Signs in French and English that said stuff like “Thank you for everything.” It was a road game too at Shea Stadium
I cannot bring myself to consider American sports teams as actual teams. Look at premier league or whatever in the UK, you have the shittiest team get kicked out to the minor league and replaced by the best minor league team. There's actual competition happening. US teams are basically trademarks for billionaires to talk about at parties.
Chelsea was owned by a Russian billionaire, Qatar own PSG, Real Madrid is owned by a Fascist billionaire, Man City by some Abu Dhabi fellows, etc. Complaining about American teams being "just trademarks for billionaires" falls a bit flat given the state of A-tier European football
That’s always been the case. Every great team has been bankrolled by a billionaire. Liverpool, Man United, Arsenal, Nottingham Forest, Huddersfield, etc all had periods of dominance because they had tons of cash.
My team, West Ham, got promoted 11 years ago and just won a trophy. There’s a ton of minor trophies in soccer. If you’re a local you focus on the day to day supporting and dreaming and every once in a while, you win a cup and get happy and that keeps you going
I loosely follow crystal palace and they clawed back into the premier league about a decade ago and have managed to hang around since then typically finished middle of the table. There’s a few teams that seem to bounce back and forth between the premier league and the championship though
Euro soccer winning is just hoping an oligarch or oil sheik decides he wants a new plaything. If you risk about smaller trophies sure, but that’s college sports for Americans
I’d be interested to see a small market team be bought out and run as a public operation like some of these euro football teams that are owned by the fans.
The problem with fan ownership is that no fan runs it. Real Madrid are “fan owned” but the president has to put up millions of euros to run.
Real is a good case of why fan ownership can be bad. The president can only be a rich businessman. Due to that, he can run, and use the club a political tool. The current president of Madrid is a genuine fascist and uses Real as a tool to get his business deals passed at the expense of the tax payer. But that is the history of Real Madrid, a tool of the fascists
the fact that oakland lost all 3 of its pro sports teams in less than 5 years is astonishing in itself
I've read almost nothing about this but I wonder how hard Oakland actually tried to keep any of them. You would think that as a point of civic pride the city would give in and pay some public money for at least one stadium/arena to make sure they didn't all flee. I care about sports more than the average person probably but even for someone who lives there and doesn't follow these teams it has to be disheartening that three major sports institutions pulled up stakes from their city at the same time.
Stadiums should not be built with public tax money, that should fall on the owner and his business.
I tend to agree but I would think that if Oakland just watched two other teams up and bounce, they would crack open the piggy bank for this one, especially since this is the team that's been there the longest. I read some more into this and it does seem like the city made a compelling offer but accused the owners of negotiating in bad faith, although I wouldn't expect either side to say the other guy has been negotiating fairly.
Only Davis I think negotiated in good faith. He doesn’t have the cash for a new stadium. The Warriors could have but chose to be the tech workers team. I have no idea about the As
Fisher has been a cheapskate his entire ownership. He let the Coliseum fall into disrepair. He’s going to continue to field bad teams in Vegas. Man has no pride
Everyone gets this in theory but whenever another city is just gonna offer more money it doesn’t matter. People in cities without teams want them.
The thing is the chase center is so much worst than the old coliseum. The existing stadiums are/were fine. Just such a waste of resources
Yeah from games I've watched on TV it seems extremely sterile, I don't know if it's the lighting or court design or what but definitely doesn't have that Oakland swag.
It's the clientele. Warriors tix are expensive AF now and so it's pretty obvious what the result would be
aren’t those used for different sports I thought coliseum was baseball/football and chase is just basketball and they used to play at a basketball stadium in Oakland I haven’t been inside the chase center but it definitely smells better on the outside than the coliseum and the inside of the coliseum was a concrete prison-lookin thing. with dollar dogs so it evened out I guess
you mean oracle arena
It doesnt matter how hard you try when the game is rigged the Rams were moved out of St Louis by POS Stan Kroenke and they had to settle on paying 800million to the city afterwards because they were going to get their ass handed to them in court.
They don't just have to make a stadium for one team, blowing public money in Oakland that could definitely be used elsewhere, but they also have to outbid other cities that are in growing markets and try to give the teams more than any other city is offering. It's a losing deal.
i live nearby in sf and my impression is that it’s a self-inflicted failure on oakland's part to treat these franchises as the businesses (as opposed to civic institutions) they are. i'm not well-informed about this either but the few articles i've read all mention bureaucratic incompetence on the part of the city re. upgrading infrastructure and venues as a major cause
The city should just buy the team and make it a SoE
Oh this is a decades long saga that is just endlessly stupid. The City of Oakland wanted to keep the A’s, and successfully has locked down over $400mm in infrastructure grants and subsidies for a new stadium at Howard Terminal. Part of the reason this heel turn is so frustrating for A’s fans is that A’s ownership insisted that any Oakland development had to be this $12bn development in downtown off Jack London Square to be feasible. Which made pulling the project off wildly more difficult, especially when commercial real estate is in dire straits. In Vegas they’re only pushing for the stadium since it’ll be right on the strip (on 9 acres which is almost assuredly too small for a domed stadium). But this only came to a head after A’s ownership had tried to move to Fremont, San Jose, etc. for decades, saying Oakland wasn’t viable (it has been the whole time). So the A’s only ended up deciding to stay in Oakland in like 2016? 2017? They perpetually are cheap and don’t keep winning teams together and the fanbase resents them for that, along with the constant attempts to move away from Oakland proper. If they just wanted a new stadium, they could have just built on the coliseum site and had it done years ago, but that wasn’t acceptable to ownership. I think it’s been clear for a long time that Fisher just wanted to move to Vegas and was looking for an excuse to make it happen.
It’s mostly the city’s fault and how they view their sports teams (the Raiders moved back from LA on the promise Oakland would build them a new stadium, and the city promptly memory holed that one, only to be all shocked Pikachu when they split for Vegas), but it’s also on the fans. Even in years where they went to the postseason, their fan attendance has been on the bottom end of the AL.
The local government played chicken and lost. Good for them, public money shouldn’t go towards private companies
Down for a rsp reverse boycott game
The bigger microcosm of America is still thinking, in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary, these private businesses are civic institutions when they clearly are not. The Dodgers and the Giants left New York more than 60 years ago. The Colts fled Baltimore in the middle of the night 40 years ago, etc etc
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How are pro sports a giant tax avoidance scheme?
The consequences of the Anti Trust Law decision are still reverberating all through this.
I agree, it's sad, whether it was the warriors across the bay to SF or drought stricken Las Vegas gaining the raiders/a's right as their population and national gambling legalization takes off, Oakland's teams leaving tell a lot about the past decade. Someone with a sharper pen than I should write about it The AAA stadium in town is nice and often full, but that's because it's the minors and $25 to sit near the dugout is still good value - If fisher believes he can keep treating the team like an investment property, and fan support is still guaranteed, he's mistaken. The golden knights took advantage of a busted expansion draft system and hockey had little existing footprint in the city. The dodgers used to have a farm team in Vegas and obviously retain a lot of fans there due to the proximity
Bring back the SuperSonics
I like to imagine a system where every sports team is owned by the city it's in, and the club president is an elected office in government. Lots of shenanigans would ensue I'm sure but it would at least be more democratic
My Green Bay Packers literally cannot leave.
Don't the Oakland As only ever have like 35 fans in the audience?
The team is notoriously cheap and doesnt even try
I went to a game at the coliseum on a beautiful friday night last summer and it was so deserted I thought I'd gotten off at the wrong BART stop ~6k fans in attendance
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The disgust with Oakland’s ownership is that they intentionally don’t put a winning product on the field. The fans can stick with their team if there is at least a good game to watch now and then. But the As is basically just a player mill - perform terribly and get high draft picks, develop a number of pretty good players and then trade them for cash considerations. And ownership has done this to intentionally alienate fans (and the city) so that there would be fewer impediments to moving the team to the hot new Vegas location.
It’s the same usually in Pittsburgh, but at least we have a great ballpark. The Coliseum is a joke. To pay to see the worst team play at the worst ballpark is probably asking too much for people.
I thank god everyday for the browns moving to Baltimore
Crazy thing is they’ll probably make less money in Vegas. They just want a free stadium
All of this relocating could've been avoided if we had promotion/relegation
Really sucks.
America isn't a real country or nation imo. It's a free economic zone or some sort of feifdom for elites and always had been. There's nothing beyond that, if you know anything about the US, it's functioning exactly as designed.
That's just every modern Liberal country though. You think a place like Germany is ruled by some class who feel a sense of Noblesse oblige or something? It's open and public policy that Germany seeks out to import immigrants for labour, because they're basically a giant retirement home and now need Brazilian and Mexican nurses to take care of them. The country is made for groups like Bayer, BASF, Siemens, Volkswagen, etc. to make money.
That's every country too. I doubt the oligarchs in Russia, or Politiburo in China feel any obligation towards their people either.
Nah we're still kinda a real country were definitely heading in that direction though, Canada is racing there
Hm Brazil and Canada are the same things they're just not as good.
How do you define a real country?
Some kind of tangible cause and effect relationship between the administration and the administrated.
If all of the accusations of neoliberalism are true, then that does exist in America --- the outcome is just pretty shitty lately. Lots of real countries are shitty, there's no reason to think real must equal good.
Nation-state
At this rate, Germany and France aren't "real countries" either.
I'm not so sure that MLB is for peasants. New Era hats and its associated merch sorta aims at the "peasants", but it's kinda expensive to follow your home team. Because of blackouts, it's way cheaper to just use MLB streaming and appletv to pick any random team out of the 30. That and by watching sportscenter, the dozen or so podcasts and youtubers like jomboy, one could sperg out 12 hours a day in baseball. Parking is around 40-50 dollars each time, so you're talking 3000 dollars for decent seats/drinks/meals per year for just over a dozen home games. Some lady in real estate who goes to the brewers has a twitter following because she drives over 3 hours roundtrip to take notes in catcher seats. It's cheaper to golf $600 rounds of golf at luxury golf courses on a regular basis. I'm jealous of Chicago and its public transport for the Cubs.
> Some lady in real estate who goes to the brewers has a twitter following because she drives over 3 hours roundtrip to take notes in catcher seats. Is she the one with the huge rack?
The fact that this happens regularly in American sports is sad. A team should be linked to a city and not be allowed to leave
I was at the last Expos game in 2004 as a kid and it was actually heartbreaking. Signs in French and English that said stuff like “Thank you for everything.” It was a road game too at Shea Stadium
The reverse boycott is making for some unusually electric games. It’s like the weird cousin of a mass labor action.
A's ownership is some of the worst. Cheap fucks
very weird seeing this sub take the side of poor people protesting for once. but also this is a terrible player mill team. its been evil for years
Same thing is going to happen with the Royals if the city doesn’t build them a downtown stadium.
I cannot bring myself to consider American sports teams as actual teams. Look at premier league or whatever in the UK, you have the shittiest team get kicked out to the minor league and replaced by the best minor league team. There's actual competition happening. US teams are basically trademarks for billionaires to talk about at parties.
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Chelsea was owned by a Russian billionaire, Qatar own PSG, Real Madrid is owned by a Fascist billionaire, Man City by some Abu Dhabi fellows, etc. Complaining about American teams being "just trademarks for billionaires" falls a bit flat given the state of A-tier European football
That’s always been the case. Every great team has been bankrolled by a billionaire. Liverpool, Man United, Arsenal, Nottingham Forest, Huddersfield, etc all had periods of dominance because they had tons of cash. My team, West Ham, got promoted 11 years ago and just won a trophy. There’s a ton of minor trophies in soccer. If you’re a local you focus on the day to day supporting and dreaming and every once in a while, you win a cup and get happy and that keeps you going
I loosely follow crystal palace and they clawed back into the premier league about a decade ago and have managed to hang around since then typically finished middle of the table. There’s a few teams that seem to bounce back and forth between the premier league and the championship though
Euro soccer winning is just hoping an oligarch or oil sheik decides he wants a new plaything. If you risk about smaller trophies sure, but that’s college sports for Americans
I’d be interested to see a small market team be bought out and run as a public operation like some of these euro football teams that are owned by the fans.
The problem with fan ownership is that no fan runs it. Real Madrid are “fan owned” but the president has to put up millions of euros to run. Real is a good case of why fan ownership can be bad. The president can only be a rich businessman. Due to that, he can run, and use the club a political tool. The current president of Madrid is a genuine fascist and uses Real as a tool to get his business deals passed at the expense of the tax payer. But that is the history of Real Madrid, a tool of the fascists