rewrite this title ‘Incalculable Loss’: Oakland Fights to Save Last Professional Sports Team | Baseball

rewrite this content and create paragraphs Oakland, USA – When Hall of Fame sportswriter Frank Deford traveled to Oakland, California in 1968, he didn’t seem to appreciate the hard-scrub city, but at least there was sports in the city. acknowledged to exist. The NFL’s Raiders, NBA’s Golden State Warriors and Major League Baseball’s Oakland Athletics all recently made their homes in the city. “The franchise fills Oakland with self-respect and, with a fresh, regal look, Oakland sees itself in a brighter light,” Deford wrote. The Athletics, Warriors and Raiders have won four World Series titles, four NBA championships and two Super Bowls in Oakland, a city of nearly 400,000 people. With figures like illustrious Imperial Raiders owner Al Davis, Moneyball A’s Billy Beane and NBA great Steph Curry, the nimble ballet prodigy, the Oakland team is pushing beyond the United States. achieved celebrity status. But in recent years, the city’s sports teams have suffered one loss after another. In 2019, the Warriors moved across the bay to a new arena in San Francisco, and the next year the Raiders left Oakland for Las Vegas. The current billionaire majority owner of the Athletics, John Fisher, is looking to follow in the footsteps of the Raiders. On May 15, Nevada media reported that Fisher had reached an agreement with gaming company Bally’s Corp to build a baseball stadium on the grounds of the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas. Mr. Fisher and his chief of staff, Dave Kaval, are working to pass a funding plan to pass through the state legislature before the session ends in June. The Oakland A’s could become the Las Vegas A’s as early as 2025, pending a vote in Congress and the approval of 29 other Major League Baseball owners. Owner relocation of sports clubs is nothing new in the United States. Everyone came to Oakland from Kansas City in 1968 after the Athletics, but the move is always a pain for fans. But Oakland has become the only major sports city in the United States to lose an entire team, and Athletics fans claim the losses extend far beyond sports. April Kenton, a third-generation season ticket holder from Auckland, told Al Jazeera it was “shocking.” “We’re all heartbroken.” Oakland’s crumbling Coliseum Some wealthy people buy professional sports teams for honor, others sell them out of pure interest or fandom. Some buy sports teams. However, many people buy Pro Teams because they have proven to be a solid investment asset. Currently, all 30 MLB franchises are worth more than his $1 billion. In 2009 there were only two. Many team owners, especially through new stadiums, use their teams as a means to obtain what they call ‘corporate benefits’ (public funds, tax breaks and other support), which they can turn into public good. rice field. Last year, lawmakers in New York reached a deal with the Buffalo Bills to commit $850 million in public funds to help build a new stadium built by NFL billionaire owners. “As soon as a team gets a new stadium, you see the valuation go up,” said Victor Matheson, an economics professor at Holy Cross College. Almost immediately after Mr. Fisher bought a majority stake in the Athletics in 2016, he began lobbying Oakland politicians to provide hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds to build a new stadium near downtown Oakland. I got it. Fischer was never a fan favourite, though a fan base weary of struggles at the decades-old stadium largely supported a move within Auckland. As the heir to a Gap fortune, the 61-year-old has a net worth of more than $2 billion, but fans say he has never invested enough in the club. Some fans have accused him of spending years degrading the team, so he could weaponize declining interest in the team as justification for a move. He also allowed the team’s facilities to fall into disrepair, with the Oakland Coliseum, where the A-Team still playing games, increasingly collapsed and was handed over to a community of possums and small feral cats. He currently spends less on the Athletics’ entire roster than some teams spend on just one player, and some fans believe that his failure to invest in his players made the team uncompetitive. It is said that he became a laughing stock. So far this season, the A’s rank among the worst teams in the history of the sport. Adding to the injury, he doubled the price of season tickets at the start of the 2022 season. Fisher blamed frugality on not having a new stadium, and said the Oakland Coliseum was outdated and located in the industrial part of town, making it difficult to squeeze in revenue. “This is why we need a new stadium,” Kaval told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2022. “To sustain talent and earn higher salaries, we need higher income. It comes with new fan-friendly facilities.” In the bottom of the eighth inning against the Texas Rangers on May 12, Fans hold autographs for owner John Fisher as relief pitcher Sam Moll warms up [Darren Yamashita/USA TODAY Sports via Reuters]Fischer pledged to build the stadium itself with private funding, and shaped the A’s marketing strategy around what their presence in Auckland represented to the city. But the project was not viable without much seismic infrastructure improvement in the area surrounding the stadium, and the A’s had asked the city for at least $500 million in funding. Negotiations between Fisher and Auckland City Council over the terms of the development agreement began in late 2018. Negotiations stalled in 2021 when Auckland was only able to come up with a portion of the subsidies Fisher was demanding. In response, Fisher announced that he would work with MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred to begin “developing other markets” while Fisher continued negotiations with Oakland. And last month, it was reported that Mr. Fisher signed a “binding” agreement to buy and develop land on the Las Vegas Strip, effectively behind the city of Oakland. Kaval said it was “disappointing” that the move within Oakland didn’t materialize, but that overinvestment and timing failed, so he pushed ahead with the Las Vegas land purchase. “As an organization, we have been working for almost 20 years to find a permanent home for the Athletics,” Kaval told NBC News Bay Area. “We are really at a point where we need to find a way to achieve success on that timeline.” Oakland Mayor Shen Tao was unaware that the A’s were seeking a Las Vegas land deal. He apparently believed that negotiations were underway. “Oakland has no interest in being used as a bargaining chip with Las Vegas and it would be disrespectful to residents and fans to tie the city down in this way,” she told reporters. Meanwhile, fans claim they have been ignored by Fisher and Caval since the Las Vegas news broke. “Fisher’s disregard for A’s fans is appalling,” Alex Espinoza, a lifelong A’s fan, podcast host and writer for local radio station 95.7 The Game, told Al Jazeera. “He’s so bad at his job, so incompetent, he doesn’t owe anything. [Watching him move the A’s] It’s like being helpless when your house is robbed by the Han Robbers. “Ruined my love for the game.” Since then, most fans have rebelled and stopped coming to the game. Some protested in the stands with banners reading “Fischer is trash”, “Kaval = Liar” and “Get out Fisher!” Calls Fisher “Sell the team!” It echoes throughout the park. On May 12, the fan group Last Dive Bar held a rally in the Coliseum parking lot, where fans were invited to view photos of Fisher and Kaval and hack tomatoes. “Fisher and Caval ruined the love of baseball for so many fans here,” said AB7 News Bay Area reporter Casey Pratt, who has covered the story for many years. Jorge Leon, a lifelong A’s fan and chairman of supporters group Auckland 68s, told Al Jazeera that “the decline of a once-proud franchise at the hands of trust fund lads” is sad, angry and disgusting. said he was holding “I don’t like that in the US, relocation is seen as ‘business as usual,'” Leon said. Oakland Athletics fans display shirts addressed to management at the Oakland Alameda County Coliseum on May 12. [Darren Yamashita/USA TODAY Sports via Reuters]When a city like Auckland loses professional sports, it loses more than just a piece of its…