Even under baseball’s brightest spotlight over the All-Star weekend, some things can slip through undetected.
As Oakland A’s fans were making their presence felt over the last several days in Seattle, Oakland mayor Sheng Thao quietly met face-to-face with MLB commissioner Rob Manfred.
According to multiple reports, Thao and several workers from her office flew up to Seattle for a one-hour meeting with Manfred and MLB deputy commissioner Dan Halem on Sunday, where Thao detailed Oakland’s effort to build a ballpark at Howard Terminal, a large plot of land at the city’s port.
In a Q&A with The Athletic, Thao said the impetus for the meeting — her first with Manfred since taking over as mayor in January — was to bring transparency to the A’s attempted relocation to Las Vegas.
“Through the press, we have heard that Manfred has stated there was no proposal. We wanted to dispel that notion,” Thao told The Athletic. “If people were misinformed, we wanted to make sure everybody had all the real-time information of how close we were to a ballpark.”
Thao brought 31 printed packages — one for each of MLB’s 30 owners, including A’s owner John Fisher, and one personally for Manfred — with the details that would directly refute Manfred’s claim that the city hadn’t done anything.
For the A’s relocation to receive a green light, at least three-quarters of the other MLB owners would need to vote in favor of it.
No such vote took place at an owners’ meeting earlier this summer, but the league has established a committee — headed by Milwaukee Brewers chairman Mark Attanasio — to assess details of the move.
“There is no Oakland offer, OK?” Manfred said on June 15 after the meeting. “They never got to a point where they had a plan to build a stadium at any site.”
Thao had her office’s chief of staff Leigh Hanson, chief of communications Pati Navalta and Howard Terminal project manager Molly Mayburn with her in the meeting in Seattle. While it reportedly went well, Manfred would again pass the blame for the lack of a stadium deal in Oakland on to the city, rather than to Fisher, when speaking to the media two days later.
“My single biggest disappointment is because of the kind of political process in Oakland, we didn’t find a solution to keep the A’s in Oakland,” Manfred said on Tuesday. “That’s number one on the disappointment list.”
Manfred also confirmed that the A’s have begun the process of applying to move to Las Vegas, though the team hasn’t submitted the full relocation application. The A’s are seeking to build a $1.5 billion, 30,000-seat ballpark with a retractable roof on nine acres of the Tropicana hotel site of the Las Vegas Strip.
In talking to the San Francisco Chronicle, Thao reiterated past statements that the team’s plan to build just a stadium in Las Vegas is not only equally feasible at Howard Terminal, where the A’s have sought to build several ancillary buildings of mixed-use (residential, commercial and retail space), but could get started “within 18 months.”
She also asserted that, while she doesn’t want to predict what will happen–and admitted to not having any conversations recently with the A’s–she remains hopeful that the team could eventually remain in Oakland.
“I don’t believe in completely closed windows,” Thao told The Athletic. “What I believe is that it’s an option for people to open windows. And I’m going to continue to push for that window to be open if they do think it is closed.”
Still, the little daylight that remains for reconciliation between the two sides appears to be waning.
In May, the team allowed its exclusive negotiating agreement at Howard Terminal to expire, diminishing the likelihood that the franchise wants to keep the large-scale waterfront ballpark, housing and commercial real-estate development in play.
Shipping industry representatives, meanwhile, have made clear they would fight to slow any future development there — especially one involving the A’s, which did not get along with the port businesses.
And with the Nevada Legislature last month approving $380 million to aid the team’s ballpark construction, the path is clear for baseball to join other major sports in tapping the rapidly growing sports gambling industry, which remains limited by California law.
As for the Coliseum site, where the A’s lease expires after 2024, it’s unclear what the team intends to do with the half-ownership stake it acquired from Alameda County.
The other half will soon be owned by the African-American Sports and Entertainment Group, a locally owned and Black-led enterprise that isn’t keen to share its Coliseum plans with the A’s.
“It’s a situation in limbo,” Brien Dixon, one of the group’s decision-makers, said of the A’s issue. “You can’t do anything on that land with a clouded title; we need to have the ownership figured out to move forward and meet our deliverables.”
The A’s are on an even tighter deadline. A “binding agreement” deal for a new stadium needs to be inked and ready to go by January, or the team will lose out entirely on a stream of revenue that’s shared between all 30 MLB teams. Incidentally, the full schedule for the 2024 regular season was expected to be released Thursday morning.
Revenue-sharing is especially crucial for the A’s, which have drawn dismal attendance numbers this season after trading away key players over several years to boast, by a wide margin, the league’s lowest payroll.
For the city’s part, Oakland officials maintain they did enough to hold up their end of a stadium deal, between completing a lengthy environmental review — which survived a legal challenge — and securing of hundreds of millions in grant dollars for offsite infrastructure upgrades.
“There was a very concrete proposal under discussion and Oakland had gone above and beyond to clear hurdles, including securing funding for infrastructure, providing an environmental review and working with other agencies to finalize approvals,” Thao spokeswoman Julie Edwards said in a statement on June 15.
“The reality is the A’s ownership had insisted on a multibillion-dollar, 55-acre project that included a ballpark, residential, commercial and retail space. In Las Vegas, for whatever reason, they seem satisfied with a 9-acre leased ballpark on leased land,” Edwards added. “If they had proposed a similar project in Oakland, we feel confident a new ballpark would already be under construction.”
