What does baseball lose when the A’s leave Oakland?

The Oakland Athletics play the New York Yankees at the Oakland Coliseum in Oakland, Calif., Sept. 22, 2024. The argument could be made that the A’s departure from their run-down home for the riches of Las Vegas is a large part of what’s wrong with American professional sports today. (Jim Wilson/The New York Times)

By Jack Nicas

The Athletics want their next home to be a $1.5 billion dome on the Las Vegas Strip built from five interlocking arches meant to evoke baseball pennants. One arch would carry a Jumbotron the size of four basketball courts. Another would be mostly glass, revealing the sparkle of the casinos beyond.

The award-winning architect behind the design calls it a “spherical armadillo.” Others have compared it to the elegant layered architecture of the Sydney Opera House.

By comparison, the Athletics’ current home, the Oakland Coliseum in California, has been called “a giant concrete toilet bowl.”

It is, indeed, a hulking mass of concrete, and there is nothing like it left in professional sports. There is exposed rebar, barbed wire, tangled cables and trough urinals. Chairs are coming loose. The lights are failing. Nearly 100 feral cats have moved in. And a broadcast booth has at times been abandoned because a possum was living in the walls.

And yet the argument could be made that the A’s departure from their run-down home for the riches of Las Vegas is a large part of what’s wrong with American professional sports today.

In the hunt for profits, billionaire sports owners have built a steady stream of palacelike stadiums, with a widening array of over-the-top distractions from the game.

The goal — the only goal, it can seem — is to attract casual fans into far pricier seats.

It has all added up to a broad commercialization, and sterilization, of the fan experience.

Across the country, fans are wooed by sushi, breweries, swimming pools, art galleries, cigar bars, leather recliners, Ferris wheels, carousels and Build-A-Bear workshops. Stadiums have become theme parks of sorts, and fans, in turn, have become willing to pay more. Ticket prices have risen about 130% over the past 25 years, far outpacing inflation, according to the consumer price index.

That has left the Coliseum as one of the nation’s final examples of a sports stadium designed for people to simply watch sports in. It is grungy, unpretentious and cheap. And that has fostered one of baseball’s grittiest and most irreverent fan bases. They bang drums, ring cowbells and blow vuvuzelas. They hang pun-heavy banners, mosh to players’ metal entrance songs and have adopted the resident possum as an unofficial mascot. It was at the Coliseum where a raucous fan invented the Wave, which has become a staple across sports.

And last Thursday afternoon, all that ended. The A’s played their final game at the park (a 3-2 win over the reigning World Series champion Texas Rangers) closing a storied run of 57 years there — all on the whim of a single billionaire.

John Fisher — the billionaire heir to the Gap clothing empire — bought the A’s in 2005. He has since given the team one of the lowest payrolls in the league; systematically traded away its best players; allowed its home park to decay; repeatedly asked taxpayers to help fund a new stadium; and, when he didn’t get the deal he wanted, announced the move to Vegas.

“To owners, these are their toys, and they can do what they want with them,” Eric Lelja, 36, a pizza cook in a fraying A’s cap, said as he walked up a concrete ramp into the Coliseum this week. “And it’s the fans who suffer.”

There is no clearer illustration of this trend than in Oakland. Despite being in the middle of one of the world’s most economically prosperous regions, the city has now lost all three of its major professional sports franchises in a span of five years.

In 2019, the NBA’s Golden State Warriors crossed the bay to open a sleek $1.4 billion arena in a neighborhood full of tech workers in San Francisco. The Warriors were cashing in on their success on the court and targeting richer fans. The new arena had 1,500 fewer seats but nearly twice as many private boxes.

A year later, Oakland lost the NFL’s Raiders in a saga that closely resembled the drama surrounding the A’s exit.

For decades, the A’s and the Raiders had shared the Coliseum, and it was there that Raiders fans had developed a reputation of being among the most notorious in sports. They created the Black Hole, a growling pit of unhinged men and women dressed in black and adorned with spikes and skulls who would shout obscenities and taunts at startled opponents.

But Mark Davis, who inherited the Raiders from his father, eventually decided there was more money to be made elsewhere. So in 2020, he moved the team to a $2 billion stadium in Las Vegas. Nevada taxpayers paid for $750 million of that bill.

The move was a jackpot. The Raiders are now one of the hottest tickets in the NFL — and the team’s prices have more than doubled over the past decade, to the highest in the league. One of the team’s new luxury suites can cost as much as $75,000 a game.

The valuation of the Raiders franchise has increased to $6.7 billion today from $1.4 billion in 2015, the year before relocation talks began, according to Forbes’ annual valuations.

Yet what they have gained in money, they’ve lost in heart. The new Raiders stadium is not known for the intensity of the team’s fans, but for the sheer number of people in the building who are there to see the opposing team. Much of the financial boon for the team has come from selling tickets to tourists who follow their favorite team to Vegas as part of a weekend away from home.

Fisher appeared to take notice. This week, he said he began exploring Las Vegas a year after the Raiders arrived there. At the time, he had been pursuing a new waterfront ballpark in Oakland. Oakland’s mayor has accused him of actually having his sights set on Vegas the whole time — and using Oakland as leverage. Fisher has denied that.

Last year, the will-they-or-won’t-they game finally ended, with Fisher announcing that he had abandoned plans for a stadium in Oakland. He then quickly secured $380 million in public subsidies to build in Vegas.

The Coliseum, which opened in 1966 as a multisport facility in search of teams to call it home, had been targeted by MLB as an unfit stadium for years. It was in poor condition, yet had endured as nearly every stadium around it was replaced: As of Thursday, only six active major professional sports stadiums in the United States were older. Teams in all the major sports had rushed to replace their stadiums in recent decades, with an average of three a year for the past 30 years. And in that process, they have gotten far pricier — and gaudier.

From 1966 to 2008, the average cost of a U.S. stadium was about $325 million, adjusted for inflation, according to a database compiled by J.C. Bradbury, a sports economist at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. Over the past 15 years, the average cost has ballooned to roughly $1.25 billion.

Bradbury said the taxpayer subsidies were part of the reason for the rapid climb.

The defenders of the Coliseum — and that includes me — admit that the stadium in its current form is unfeasible. Fisher has been unwilling to spend enough to create a consistently winning team that can draw baseball fans, and for teams that cannot compete, the new model is to create enough ballpark amenities that casual fans come regardless.

But Oakland officials and fans still want a team, and it’s hard to find anyone around baseball who seems genuinely excited about Vegas. So baseball stands to lose, while Fisher gains.

Baseball in Las Vegas “just doesn’t make sense,” said Dave Raymond, the television broadcaster for the Rangers, the A’s opponent in the Coliseum’s final series last week. “Can you even imagine a greater juxtaposition between what baseball is and where baseball, at times, feels like it’s headed?”

Raymond travels around the country calling baseball games, “and sometimes you’re in a place where it’s a social hangout, where it doesn’t feel connected to the game,” he said. In Oakland, “they’re here for the baseball,” he added, “and anybody who’s been around here understands what this team means to the community.”