Three sports owners have left in the last five years.
The city of Oakland is no longer a major league town. Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred, a Harvard Law School graduate, claimed he did not know what was going on with the negotiations between the Oakland Athletics owner John Fisher and city officials. Both sides were trying to figure out how to finance a stadium-village in an area called Howard Terminal on the Oakland waterfront. The negotiations fizzled out in 2023 and Fisher took his ball and bat and decided the smaller market Las Vegas was a much better bet for financial success than the San Francisco Bay Area market which includes Silicon Valley tech companies. Fisher is just the latest sports owner to vacate Oakland. He was preceded by the National Football League’s Oakland Raiders franchise owner Mark Davis and the National Basketball Association’s Golden State Warriors’ ownership.
Mark Davis had no interest in building a stadium on Oakland’s terms. Oakland’s starting position was well we can build a new facility but you, Mark Davis, had to pay down debt on the existing stadium. Davis also wanted Major League Baseball’s Athletics business evicted from the Oakland Coliseum and refused to pay the 1995 Coliseum renovation debt. Davis’s business moved operations to Nevada in 2020 into a costly new stadium with about $750 million of the tab picked up by Nevada taxpayers. At the time, it was the largest taxpayers hand out for a sports venue in American history. The Warriors ownership was able to acquire land in San Francisco and decided San Francisco would be more lucrative than Oakland. The team simply went across the bay. The National Hockey League’s Oakland Seals franchise left the Bay Area for Cleveland in 1976 as the team never generated much revenue and Seals’ ownership could not get a San Francisco arena built. Oakland has been deserted.
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It’s all over on Oakland.
