Former MLB owner claims ‘despicable’ San Francisco Giants are the reason the A’s left Oakland
We are just two years away from the team formerly known as the Oakland Athletics officially moving to Las Vegas.
After decades in Oakland, this was a frustrating, heartbreaking outcome for the franchise’s remaining die-hard fans, brought on by Major League Baseball’s worst stadium condition.
The Athletics and the city of Oakland have tried to reach an agreement on a new stadium for years, and many different locations have been floated. At one point, they even came close to bringing the mega beach area deal to fruition. The A’s even tried to move south to the San Jose area in hopes of tapping into the Bay Area’s growing and generally wealthy Silicon Valley subset.
But none of it worked, and the Athletics will play three years at the minor league facility in Sacramento before moving to Vegas. There’s plenty of blame to go around, but one of the team’s former owners has an obvious culprit: the San Francisco Giants?
A general view of the Oakland Coliseum during the Oakland Athletics’ final game last month. (Eakin Howard/Getty Images)
Former Athletics owner Lew Wolff blames Giants for A’s move
Wolff came out with a new book called “Moments” and drew widespread criticism after the Giants organization forced the Athletics to leave.
In the book, per AthleticHe said the move was “100 percent disgusting, shameful, and due to continued opposition from the Giants.” From where? Because the Giants blocked the A’s from moving anywhere close on the grounds that it would encroach on MLB-defined local broadcast territories.
That area included San Jose because at one point, decades ago, the Giants explored moving there themselves. At one point, the city of San Jose sued the Giants over their ability to prevent the A’s from moving there, but lost and the A’s deal fell through.
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“John Fisher is being accused of things he doesn’t deserve to be accused of,” he said. “We tried everything we could think of, but the bottom line was that we had no clout. The Giants’ position really, really screwed us up, even trying to negotiate with Oakland.”
There’s some truth to that, but at the same time, most of the problems that arise from stadium deals stem from owners wanting to spend as little of their own money as possible on construction. Las Vegas and the state of Nevada gave the Athletics hundreds of millions of dollars to build their new stadium on The Strip; It’s help Oakland can’t possibly afford. This raises the question: If these stadiums are such good investments, why shouldn’t the stadium owners arrange the financing themselves?
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House Speaker Steve Yeager, U.S. Rep. Dina Titus, Athletics Chairman Marc Badain, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred, Athletics owner John Fisher, Gov. Joe Lombardo, LVCVA President Steve Hill and Clark County Commission Chairman Jim Gibson attend the groundbreaking ceremony for the $1.75 billion, 33,000-seat domed stadium for MLB Athletics on June 23, 2025, in Las Vegas. Vegas, Nev. (Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
The answer, of course, is that they don’t want to do that, because it’s much more beneficial to have taxpayers fund a significant percentage of it for them. Of course, the Giants didn’t help, and the Athletics probably should have been able to get to San Jose without any interference. Of course, MLB’s latent antitrust exemption and territorial rights intervened. Yet they had decades to do something in Oakland and failed.
The new Vegas stadium will be a massive development, and the city has already shown support for the Golden Knights and Raiders. But none of this will make Oakland fans any happier.
