![]() pitchman David Beckham, that he was pledging $500 million toward the construction of a $1.4 billion, 65,000-seat domed stadium near the Las Vegas Strip. ![]() Raiders: On April 28, 2016, Davis announced in a meeting of the Southern Nevada Tourism Infrastructure Committee, which boasted the star power of international soccer star and Las Vegas Sands Corp. While the project to build a waterfront stadium at the Howard Terminal site in Oakland had more momentum than past efforts, a confluence of factors - chief among them, the success of the Golden Knights and Raiders in Las Vegas and MLB commissioner Rob Manfred waiving a $1 billion relocation fee for the A's - made a move their primary path. A's owner John Fisher and team president Dave Kaval focused on Las Vegas, and while A's officials spoke publicly about "parallel paths" - one in Vegas, one in Oakland - the decades of botched efforts to remain in the Bay, where they'd been since 1968, suggested that perhaps they weren't so parallel after all. That changed in May 2021, when Major League Baseball allowed the A's to pursue potential relocation outside of the Bay Area. Whether it was flirtations with Fremont or all the different sites in the Oakland area, whatever the A's considered, they always wound up in the same place: limbo. Then they wanted to build a new stadium in Oakland, and between organizational blundering and governmental intransigence, that failed, too. First, they wanted to go to San Jose and were blocked by the San Francisco Giants, who invoked their territorial rights. Paul GutierrezĪ's: For more than 20 years, the A's have been trying to extricate themselves from the same dingy, plumbing-challenged, possum-infested Oakland Coliseum from which the Raiders ran. The Raiders - who had already put together a pair of stadium proposals in two years - then focused on Las Vegas, all the more prepared to put together their plans. Raiders owner Mark Davis said his team finished third in a three-team race. Louis to Inglewood, California, with the Chargers joining the Rams in L.A. Though it was originally backed by an NFL owners committee, the plan was scuttled in favor of the Rams' move from St. Then the Raiders' eyes turned to Los Angeles, in a joint plan to share a stadium with the Chargers in Carson. The team initially hoped to be part of a plan in which the Oakland Coliseum was demolished, replaced by a baseball stadium for the A's in the northeast parking lot, a Raiders football stadium in the southwest lot and a hotel with restaurants, shops and bars in the middle. Raiders: The Raiders, who moved back to Oakland in 1995 after a 13-year sojourn in Los Angeles, had long been hoping for never-to-come-to-fruition improvements to the Oakland Coliseum, but by the mid-2010s had mostly given up hope. Comparing and contrasting the two offers a fascinating study in a city's embrace of an MLB team next to one in the NFL and reminds that no matter how much politicians try to squeeze sports franchises and restrict the use of public tax dollars, in the end, the allure of having a new team always outweighs the alternative. However, the A's path to the desert hasn't had the twists and turns like the route of the Raiders. They are the second team to move to Vegas from Oakland since the NHL's Golden Knights became the city's first major sports franchise. With a pair of rubber stamps from the Nevada Assembly and Senate on Wednesday, all that is needed to make the Las Vegas A's a reality are approval from the governor of Nevada and the owners of the other 29 Major League Baseball teams, both at this point formalities. The Oakland Athletics are a charter member of the American League, a franchise that dates to 1901, and in their nomadic century-plus of existence they've bounced from Philadelphia to Kansas City to Oakland. MLB, NFL, Oakland Athletics, Las Vegas Raiders again: Comparing the Raiders and A's relocations You have reached a degraded version of because you're using an unsupported version of Internet Explorer.įor a complete experience, please upgrade or use a supported browser
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