There have been few greater challenges to baseball’s resurgence in Northern California than Madison Bumgarner’s broken hand. But then the A’s come in and offer to buy the Coliseum from the City of Oakland and Alameda County, and we’re off and running again.
These two things are essentially unrelated, at least on its face. The Giants’ issues are the Giants’ issues – when to start the teardown/rebuild while holding on to the season ticket base is the real story of the Bumgarner injury – but as the A’s have been in a seemingly perpetual rebuild, they are seemingly doubling down on this rebuild thing.
Of course, the hitch in the A’s new grand plan is that they are offering to pay off the city and county debt on the stadium at a pretty generous price – for the A’s. The club’s history under John Fisher’s ownership has been to declare done deals before they’ve been done (see Fremont/San Jose/Peralta), and making the $135 million let-us-be-our-own-landlord offer public smacks of using public pressure to influence local government rather than negotiating square-up.
With our All Access Daily newsletter, stay in the game with the latest updates on your beloved Bay Area and California sports teams!
SIGN UP HERE Not that there is anything necessarily wrong with the A’s as the only remaining tenant operating as their own landlord, mind you. It is another clear indication that Fisher through president Dave Kaval doesn’t want any parts of a Howard Terminal plan, and will do anything to avoid it.
But $135 million is a low valuation for that land, and one can safely assume further that if the A’s wanted to truly engage on a discussable price that they’d be doing this on the QT. There is also nothing in the letter that says it won't try to go back to the city and county for money to construct a new stadium or remodel the old one.
And yes, that matters, because the devil and the details have a long and well-established relationship. The money matters because that is money that would go to the services that make Oakland run, so Mayor Libby Schaaf would be remiss if she didn’t try to strike the very best deal for the city and its citizens.
And $135 million seems to work a lot better for the baseball team than the city, especially if there is no written guarantee that the city and county won't be pressured to offer hundreds of millions more down the road.
Keep in mind here that the A’s don’t have the leverage the Raiders did to just up and leave. Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred has said repeatedly that Oakland is the place for the A’s, which is code for “you don’t have the votes to move and you never ever will.” It didn't help that the A's were one of four teams to vote against Manfred to succeed Bud Selig as commissioner, and grudges are held tightly at this level of corporate America.
So if this deal is going to happen, the A’s will have to negotiate straight up, and almost certainly at a higher price than what they have offered publicly. If they are serious, they will make this happen because it does make a considerable level of sense.
It’s just that their negotiating history doesn’t fill objective viewers with a warm feeling that this is going to be done without a good deal more pain and arguing than a letter belies.