With the A’s moving closer and closer to moving to Las Vegas, one guy who won’t be happy about that is Raiders owner Mark Davis.
Back in April, Davis sounded off on the baseball team’s effort to leave Oakland. Davis isn’t frustrated by having to share a relatively small market with a baseball team; he’s upset because the A’s tried to commandeer Oakland -- to the detriment of the Raiders -- before leaving.
“I won’t forget what they did to us in Oakland,” Davis told the Las Vegas Review-Journal in April. “They squatted on a lease for 10 years and made it impossible for us to build on that stadium. . . They were looking for a stadium. We were looking for a stadium. They didn’t want to build a stadium, and then went ahead and signed a 10-year lease with the city of Oakland and said, ‘We’re the base team.’ . . .
“They marketed the team as ‘Rooted in Oakland,’ that’s been their mantra through the whole thing. The slogans they’ve been using have been a slap to the face of the Raiders, and they were trying to win over that type of mentality in the Bay Area. Well all they did was fuck the Bay Area.
“For them to leave Oakland without anything is pretty [screwed] up. Because that site that the stadium was on was a good site. . . . We ended up in Las Vegas, which is absolutely fantastic and couldn’t be better. But the A’s never gave us a real good chance to stay up in Oakland.”
There’s a dispute as to whether Oakland tried to keep the A’s. Oakland insists that viable offers were made. MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred claimed otherwise on Thursday, sparking widespread criticism -- both for the inaccuracy of his comment and his willingness to suggest that communities have an obligation to pay for all or part of a local sports team’s stadium.
Regardless, Davis doesn’t want the A’s around. He wasn’t bashful about saying so in April. He likely won’t be bashful about saying so in the future.