Not long ago, a single strip of land beside a freeway in Oakland, Calif., was the epicenter of innovation in American sports.
The Moneyball A’s ushered in the data revolution that forever changed baseball and even inspired a hit movie starring Brad Pitt. The Golden State Warriors completely broke basketball and reinvented how the game is played with a barrage of 3-pointers from previously uncharted regions of the court.
These two paradigm-busting teams once played steps apart from one another, their respective venues separated only by a short walk.
way.
But now Oakland is fighting just to keep its status as a sports town at all. When the Warriors continue their pursuit of their fourth NBA championship in eight years in Monday night's Finals Game 5 against the Boston Celtics, they will be playing at the Chase Center—their sparkling new arena located not in Oakland, the city they called home for nearly half a century, but across the Bay Bridge in San Francisco. The Oakland Arena, which lost its naming-rights deal with Oracle Corporation after the Warriors decamped, has no full-time tenants anymore, though Disney on Ice is coming through in the fall.
The Warriors led the exodus out of Oakland. Almost one year after the Warriors christened their $1.4 billion Mission Bay palace in October 2019, Oakland’s beloved football team played its first game as the Las Vegas Raiders. The Raiders left Oakland and then returned once before. There will almost certainly be no comeback this time.
That leaves the A’s as the last team standing in a city that has celebrated four World Series titles, four NBA championships, and two Super Bowl victories over the past 50 years. And considering how things are going this season, it’s safe to say that their future is unsettled.
The A, s are averaging an MLB-low 8,283 fans per game at RingCentral Coliseum, about 3,000 fewer than the next lowest-ranked team, the Miami Marlins. Excluding the 2020 and 2021 seasons, which were disrupted by pandemic-related restrictions, no team has averaged fewer than 10,000 fans a game since the 2004 Montreal Expos, who relocated to Washington immediately afterward. That squad drew roughly 1,000 more than the 2022 A’s so far.
There is little reason to believe the situation will improve anytime soon. On the field, the A’s are a mess. They entered Sunday with the worst record in the American League. Their payroll has been estimated at less than $50 million, or roughly a fifth of the budgets of competitors like the Los Angeles Dodgers, New York Mets, and New York Yankees. Fans have responded by not showing up to the Coliseum, which opened in 1966 and is widely seen as being below major-league standards.
"It shows more than anything that the current situation is just not tenable," the A’s president, Dave Naval, said. We can’t continue on in this state. For so long, the can has been kicked down the road, and it just can’t really continue.
In spite of their troubles, the A’s insist they want to stay in Oakland, where they have played ever since the franchise moved from Kansas City, Mo., in 1968. But for that to happen, they say, they need the one thing they have been trying—and failing—to get for a long time: a new stadium on the waterfront located near downtown. Naval says building a new stadium on the site of the Coliseum isn’t a viable option.
The A, s want to build a ballpark and make it the centerpiece of a $12 billion development at the Port of Oakland’s Howard Terminal. Turning that dream into a reality has proven difficult, as the A’s continue to vie for the necessary public approval to proceed. At the end of this month, the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission is scheduled to vote on whether to free up the teams' proposed site for development. A "no" would mark the end of the project and effectively end the team’s tenure in Oakland.
Even with a "yes," there is still a lot more that needs to happen, including a development agreement with the city. The A, s had wanted that vote to happen this summer. Now, they are hoping it happens before Oakland Mayor Libby chaff, a proponent of the project, leaves office at the end of the year.
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