If a Team Is Moving to Las Vegas, It Won’t Be the Oakland Athletics

Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred made statements regarding certain teams, including the Oakland Athletics, in a meeting with a group of sports editors at the league’s headquarters on Thursday.

Those statements, that referenced both the Oakland Athletics and the Tampa Bay Rays, were reported by the Chicago Tribune and were vastly misinterpreted by both the Chicago Tribune and the rest of the mainstream media. The commissioner told the group of editors that,

"“If we were looking at relocation, Las Vegas would be on the list.”"

Manfred also said, according to the Chicago Tribune, that an expansion franchise would not be an option for Las Vegas, at least not yet, saying,

"“until the Tampa Bay and Oakland situations are settled, I can’t see talking about expansion.”"

It’s no secret that both the Rays and the Athletics need new stadiums. It is also not a secret that the National Football League and the National Hockey League will soon have teams in the city of Las Vegas.

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It certainly makes sense that Major League Baseball may at some point want to relocate one of the teams seeking a new stadium or potentially look at creating a new franchise there as well.

Manfred made it clear that expansion beyond the current 30 MLB franchises would not be explored until both the Tampa Bay Rays and the A’s each had new stadiums.

He did not actually confirm that either team would be relocated, simply that expansion was not yet on the table.

As this news broke, it appeared that everyone immediately assumed that the Oakland Athletics would be following the NFL’s Oakland Raiders to Sin City.

However, all indications coming from the Athletics’ camp say otherwise. Actually, just this past August the commissioner himself said as much to the members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America. Per the Mercury News:

"“I am committed to Oakland as a major league site,” he said. “I think that if we were to leave Oakland, I think 10 years from now we would be more likely than not looking backwards saying we made a mistake. I think that Oakland is more likely than not to be a better market five years from now than it is today.”"

In October of last year, Manfred talked about having discussed the situation in Oakland with the city’s mayor, Libby Schaff, who had “made it clear” to him that keeping baseball in Oakland “was her priority” over football.

At that same time, Manfred said he had been working with the A’s majority owner John Fisher and confirmed that Fisher was taking a “strong lead” on getting a new stadium built in Oakland.

Fisher quickly replaced former A’s team president Mike Crowley with new team president Dave Kaval by the end of the month.

Since then Kaval has been focused on re-engaging the Athletics’ skeptical (some may say angry) fan base with his grassroots #RootedInOakland campaign that began with moving the team’s annual Fan Fest from the Coliseum to Jack London Square.

A’s Fan Fest was held there on the waterfront, free of charge for the first time in years, on January 28. It was at Fan Fest that Kaval made the announcement that not only had he already narrowed the stadium site search down to four places, but that an official new stadium site and timetable for its completion would be made by the end of 2017.

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Kaval did, in approximately six months, what former managing owner Lew Wolff (who sold most of his stake in the team last November) could not do in a decade.

Since then, Kaval has made an extra effort to personally engage with fans and with the team.

He goes to most, if not all, of the games as you can tell simply by taking a look at his Twitter account.

The A’s and Kaval both responded almost immediately to the rather vague comments made by commissioner Manfred on Thursday.

That same day, Kaval held an AMA (“ask me anything”) session on the social media platform Reddit. The transcript from Kaval’s question-and-answer session with fans can be found here.

By Friday, the team had responded to the interpretation of the commissioner’s comments via Twitter:

The commissioner’s indistinct, unclear comments regarding one day having an MLB franchise in Las Vegas are far outweighed by the evidence provided to the public from other statements made by the commissioner himself, the Mayor of Oakland, the team’s ownership and the team’s president, that the A’s are going to remain in Oakland.

It doesn’t appear that the A’s are leaving Oakland anytime in the near future. In fact, it seems that their roots in Oakland run deep and will continue to, for perhaps another half century. The team will celebrate it’s 50th season in Oakland in 2018.

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The A’s need a new stadium, but will it be in Oakland?