Oakland, California, is going to lose its last major pro sports team. The team confirmed Wednesday night that it has signed an agreement to buy land for a new stadium site in Las Vegas and it hopes to complete the move by 2027, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. This will be the third move for the A's, who started out as the Philadelphia Athletics in 1901. They moved to Kansas City in 1955 and Oakland in 1968. Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao said the city is ending negotiations on building a new waterfront ballpark. She said she is "deeply disappointed" that the team has chosen not to negotiate with the city as a "true partner."
The city "has gone above and beyond in our attempts to arrive at mutually beneficial terms to keep the A’s in Oakland," the mayor said in a statement to the Chronicle. "In the last three months, we’ve made significant strides to close the deal. Yet, it is clear to me that the A’s have no intention of staying in Oakland and have simply been using this process to try to extract a better deal out of Las Vegas." The team issued its own statement, saying it had "invested unprecedented time and resources for the past six years to build a ballpark in Oakland" but it had "made little forward progress for some time," reports NBC Sports.
The team called it "a difficult day for our Oakland fans and community," acknowledging that news of the Vegas move will be "very hard to hear for some." In December, Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred said "any reasonable timeline for the situation in Oakland to be resolved" had passed and the team would not have to pay a relocation fee if it moved to Las Vegas, the AP reports. The team currently has the lowest attendance and payroll in the league. The move, which will be the first MLB relocation since the Montreal Expos became the Washington Nationals in 2005, follows the move of the NFL's Raiders from Oakland to Las Vegas in 2020. In 2019, the Warriors moved from Oakland to San Francisco. (More Oakland A's stories.)
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