Last night the Oakland Athletics baseball franchise issued a statement that saddened many a baseball fan, because it felt inevitable: They are leaving the Bay Area and moving the team to Las Vegas, Nev., following the footsteps of the Oakland (and now Las Vegas) Raiders.
A professional sports franchise moving from one city to another is nothing new. The simultaneous relocation to California of the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants in 1958 was such a shock to the New York media that it has been imprinted in our cultural memory as the emblematic example. Teams have been upping stakes and chasing better financial opportunities for as long as the population has been expanding westward. (For example: Washington baseball teams have twice been deported, first to Minneapolis and then to the Dallas–Fort Worth area, while in the NFL the Arizona Cardinals used to play in St. Louis, and the Los Angeles Rams have traveled quite literally from hell to back again.)
This one hurts, though. For those with a bent towards baseball history, or with birthdays before the 1960s, the idea of the Athletics moving around the country is a hardy chestnut. Once Connie Mack’s famed Philadelphia team ran into financial trouble in the early 20th century, the franchise was sold to infamous businessman Charlie Finley, who first took it to Kansas City — while effectively allowing it to become a New York Yankees farm team by cheaply selling off all its homegrown talent — and then to Oakland in 1968. It was at that point that the Athletics ceased being a joke and became the most formidable team of the early Seventies, led by stars such as Reggie Jackson and Catfish Hunter, and winning three consecutive World Series between 1972 and 1974.
When I was growing up, the story was the Bash Brothers — Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire — and, steroid revelations notwithstanding, the Athletics gave us a stunningly entertaining show that culminated in the Dodgers’ underdog victory against them in the 1988 World Series and the unforgettable “Earthquake Series” of 1989. In the late ’90s, strapped for cash but gifted with a truly creative general manager named Billy Beane, the Athletics changed the game forever, creating a perennial contender on a shoestring budget by incorporating data-intensive analytical approaches to complement traditional scouting: the “moneyball” revolution. In the span of my own life, the Oakland Athletics have always been an important part of the story of Major League Baseball.
And now, they’ll be playing amidst the rocks and sands of Nevada because of a combination of fan indifference, crumbling infrastructure, intractable local politics, and the financial bottom line. More than anything else, the departure of the Athletics emphasizes Las Vegas’s status as an up-and-coming city. Until 2017, the city had zero professional sports franchises; now it has three, including NHL’s Golden Knights, an improbable hockey success story in the middle of a desert. In the Fifties and Sixties, California was seen as the golden state: unspoiled territory that represented the future of professional sports. Now, at least in Oakland, it is seen as the past.