In the end, it was unanimous.
All 30 owners of Major League Baseball voted Thursday morning in favor of approving the Oakland A’s relocation to Las Vegas.
The owners’ approval — it required 23 votes to pass — was the final step for A’s owner John Fisher as he looks to move his club 550 miles southeast, leaving the Bay Area behind after more than 50 years in Oakland.
“Today marks a significant moment for our franchise,” Fisher said in a statement. “And it’s met with mixed emotions — sadness for this change and excitement for our future. I know this is a hard day for our fans in Oakland. We made sincere efforts to keep our team in Oakland, but unfortunately, it did not work out.”
If completed, the A’s move to Las Vegas will mark the second relocation for an MLB team in the last 52 years and the first since the Montreal Expos moved to Washington, D.C., to become the Nationals in 2005.
Las Vegas would become the fourth home for the A’s since the franchise began playing in Philadelphia in 1901. The A’s moved to Kansas City in 1955, then to Oakland to begin play in 1968. No other MLB franchise has had four different cities to call home.
“We are disappointed by the outcome of this vote,” Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao said in a statement. “But we do not see this as the end of the road. We all know there’s a long way to go before shovels in the ground and that there are a number of unresolved issues surrounding this move.
“I have also made it clear to the commissioner that the A’s branding and name should stay in Oakland and we will continue to work to pursue expansion opportunities. Baseball has a home in Oakland even if the A’s ownership relocates.”
It remains undetermined when the A’s will leave Oakland, however.
The A’s proposed ballpark in Las Vegas wouldn’t open until 2028. The club secured $380 million in public funding from the Nevada legislature in June, and it is believed the A’s were finally able to provide their own private financing plan to reach the estimated $1.5 billion cost for a new retractable-roof stadium. But the A’s have not yet explained where they will play until the stadium is ready.
There’s been talk of the A’s sharing Oracle Park with the San Francisco Giants or borrowing the A’s Triple-A stadium in Vegas, where the 10,000-seat ballpark would require renovations before it could earn the approval of the MLB Players Association.
MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said at the owners’ meetings in Arlington, Texas, on Thursday that all options are on the table. He’s hoping that a lease extension at the Coliseum could be worked out, despite Thao’s hope that the city receives an expansion team in return.
“It’s certainly possible to have a lease extension where the A’s would play in Oakland beyond 2024,” Manfred said. “My hope is we find an 81-game home for the A’s.”
It was back in 2001 that city officials first began publicly discussing efforts for a new ballpark for the A’s. Over the next decade, ideas were tossed around about new ballparks in Oakland, Fremont and San Jose, but none came to fruition. When the A’s turned their attention inward and thought about rebuilding on the Coliseum site, those efforts failed, too. They missed again when trying to build on land owned by Laney College.
Then there was the Howard Terminal project, a $12-billion plan to build a ballpark as well as both commercial and residential real estate on the waterfront.
Renderings were released, and last September an 82-page preliminary document plan was shared between the A’s and the city, according to the document released by Thao this summer.
Thao has said that the city raised more money than the A’s asked for to help fund the new stadium and off-site infrastructure. It didn’t matter. In April, the A’s announced that they were done negotiating with Oakland and had agreed on a deal to move the team to Las Vegas.
Kaval later explained to The Nevada Independent that the A’s didn’t think the Howard Terminal project would be completed for another 15 years.
“I think it’s beyond debate that the status quo in Oakland was untenable,” Manfred told reporters on Thursday. “I am absolutely convinced there was not a viable path forward.”
Without a lease extension, the A’s will have one more season in 2024 to finish their relationship with the Coliseum, their home since 1968.
Thao is hopeful Oakland could later receive an expansion franchise. It’s not unusual for a city to get a replacement team after losing its original club to relocation. Milwaukee, Seattle, Kansas City and Washington all received new teams after losing their originals. MLB has been open about its desire to add two expansion teams as soon as the A’s and the Tampa Bay Rays get new stadiums, but Manfred isn’t ready to say which cities are contenders.
“We don’t even know if we’re going to have an expansion process,” Manfred said. “So I’m not in a position to bargain about where the expansion teams are going to go.”
Manfred did confirm that the Oakland market will become an available market for a prospective owner. And while there is no known ownership group trying to lead expansion efforts in Oakland, Warriors owner Joe Lacob has stated multiple times that he is interested in buying the team, but Fisher never expressed interest in selling.
For A’s fans hoping the team is forced to rethink its departure, the only hope remaining could rest in the hands of a Nevada teachers’ union.
“Schools over Stadiums,” a political arm of the teachers’ union, is pursuing two separate paths to restrict public funding from reaching the A’s. Tuesday, the union announced it was pursuing litigation against the Nevada legislature. The teachers argue that any bill increasing taxes must be passed with a two-thirds supermajority vote, but this bill did not reach that threshold. The teachers believe the bill is unconstitutional.
The union is also pursuing a petition that could create a referendum on the ballot next November, giving taxpayers a say in whether or not they’d like to fund Fisher’s stadium. If the teachers can find a way to stop the funding, it could delay the move to Las Vegas long enough to put the A’s in a bind.
A long shot, it might be. But at this point, it’s all that’s left for local baseball fans who aren’t ready to say goodbye.
