The Athletics want their next home to be a $1.5 billion dome on the Las Vegas Strip built with five interlocking arches reminiscent of a baseball pennant. One arch will house a jumbotron the size of four basketball courts. The other is mostly glass, revealing the glow of the casino 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 Oakland Coliseum, the current home of the Athletics, has been called a “giant concrete toilet bowl.”
Indeed, it is a gigantic block of concrete, and there is nothing comparable left in professional sports. There is exposed rebar, barbed wire, tangled cables, and a toilet bowl. The chairs are coming off. The light is malfunctioning. Nearly 100 stray cats moved in. Broadcast booths were also sometimes abandoned due to possums living inside the walls.
Still, an argument could be made that the A’s leaving their dilapidated home base for the wealthy in Las Vegas is a big part of the problem with American professional sports today.
Sushi, breweries, pools, art galleries, cigar bars, leather recliners, Ferris wheels, carousels, Build-A-Bear workshops and more attract fans across the country. Stadiums became a kind of theme park, and fans were willing to pay more. According to the Consumer Price Index, airline ticket prices have increased by about 130% over the past 25 years, far outpacing the rate of inflation.
As a result, the Coliseum was one of the last sports stadiums in the country designed solely for people to watch sports. Dirty, unassuming, and cheap. And it fostered one of the grittiest, most irreverent fan bases in baseball.
And by Thursday afternoon, it’s all over. The Athletics played their final game at the park, ending a 57-year history at the park, all at the whim of a billionaire.
John Fisher, the billionaire owner of the Gap clothing empire, bought A’s in 2005. Since then, he has given his team the lowest salary in the league. The organization traded away excellent players. I left it to rot in my home park. He repeatedly asked taxpayers to fund the construction of a new stadium. When he didn’t get the contract he wanted, he announced he was moving to Las Vegas.
That history made him perhaps the most despised man in Oakland, and also highlighted the dark peculiarities of American professional sports. A billionaire can seize one of the most important cultural centers of a community and move it to another city. Money is right.
For overseas sports fans, this may be a little unthinkable. In the US, it’s just business.
“For the owners, these are their toys and they can do whatever they want with them,” said Eric Reruya, 36, a pizza chef with a frayed A hat. said this week as he climbed the concrete ramp to the Coliseum. “And it’s the fans who suffer.”
Nowhere is this trend more evident than in Auckland. Despite being located in one of the most economically prosperous regions in the world, the city has lost all three of its major professional sports franchises in five years.
In 2019, the NBA’s Golden State Warriors moved across the bay to open a sophisticated $1.4 billion arena in San Francisco’s tech-worker district. The Warriors were capitalizing on their on-court success and targeting more affluent fans. The new arena had 1,500 fewer seats, but nearly double the number of private boxes.
A year later, Oakland lost the NFL’s Raiders in a story very similar to the drama surrounding the A’s departure.
For decades, the Athletics and Raiders shared the Coliseum, where Raiders fans developed a reputation as one of the most infamous teams in sports. They created a black hole, a snarling pit in which men and women, dressed all in black and decorated with spikes and skulls, screamed obscenities at their astonished opponents.
But Mark Davis, who inherited the Raiders from his father, ultimately decided he could make more money elsewhere. So in 2020, he moved his team to a $2 billion stadium in Las Vegas. Nevada taxpayers paid $750 million of that bill.
This move was a big hit. The Raiders are now one of the most sought-after tickets in the NFL, with the team’s price more than doubling over the past decade to become the league’s highest. One of the team’s new luxury suites can cost as much as $75,000 per game.
According to Forbes magazine’s annual valuation, the Raiders’ current valuation has increased from $1.4 billion in 2015, the year before relocation negotiations began, to $6.7 billion.
However, what they gained in money, they lost in their hearts. The new Raiders Stadium isn’t known for the intensity of the team’s fans, but for the sheer number of people who gather inside the building to watch the opposing team. Much of the team’s economic benefits come from selling tickets to tourists who travel from their hometowns to follow their favorite teams in Las Vegas on weekends.
Mr. Fisher seems to have noticed. This week he said he started exploring Las Vegas a year after the Raiders arrived there. At the time, he was pursuing a new waterfront ballpark in Oakland. He accused the Oakland mayor of actually having his sights set on Vegas all along and using Oakland as leverage. Mr. Fisher denied that.
The do-or-die game finally ended last year when Mr Fisher announced he was abandoning plans to build a stadium in Oakland. He then quickly secured $380 million in public funding to build in Las Vegas.
From 1966 to 2008, the average cost of a stadium in the United States was about $325 million, adjusted for inflation, according to a database compiled by sports economist J.C. Bradberry of Kennesaw State University in Georgia. Over the past 15 years, the average cost has ballooned to approximately $1.25 billion.
Mr Bradbury said taxpayer subsidies were part of the reason for the jump. “When I go out to dinner and other people are paying, I order steak instead of chicken,” Bradbury said. โEach new stadium is like an owner trying to one-up the last one.โ
Advocates of the Coliseum, myself included, agree that the stadium in its current form is not possible. Fisher has been reluctant to spend enough money to build a winning team that will attract baseball fans, and for teams that can’t compete, the new model is to build a ballpark large enough for casual fans to come regardless. It’s about creating amenities.
But Oakland officials and fans still want the team, and it’s hard to find anyone in baseball who seems genuinely excited about Las Vegas. So while baseball loses, Mr. Fisher gains.
Baseball in Las Vegas “makes no sense at all,” said Dave Raymond, a television broadcaster for the Texas Rangers, the Athletics’ opponent in this week’s Coliseum final series. “Can we think more parallelly between what baseball is and where baseball sometimes feels like it’s going?”
Raymond travels around the country calling baseball games, but “sometimes you don’t feel connected to baseball because it’s such a social hangout,” he said. In Oakland, “they come here to play baseball,” he added. “Anyone who’s been here understands what this team means to the community.”