Why can’t Oakland hang onto a professional sports franchise?

Oakland should be a haven for the big three sports. The 45th largest city in the United States, Oakland is the blue-collar version of its more swanky cross-bay cousin San Francisco. A west coast reflection of America’s heartland. NFL, MLB, and NBA thrive in just such cities.

But Oakland is struggling to hang onto any of them.

As much as it hurt to lose the Golden State Warriors, there was some salve in the thought that they were simply crossing the bay to their previous home in San Francisco. And the Raiders move to Las Vegas was perhaps more bitter, but they had moved to LA forty years previous and the draw of the fans brought the franchise home again.

But the Athletics are a different story.

Confirming that they have signed a binding agreement to purchase land on the Las Vegas strip, the A’s will build a 35,000 seat, $1.5 billion ballpark with a retractable roof over the next four years and then wave goodbye to Oakland as they join the Raiders in Vegas.

Much of the blame for this move is aimed at Oakland mayor Sheng Thao, who has presided over negotiations to keep the A’s in Oakland through development at the Howard Terminal former cargo shipping site. Repeatedly handing down new demands and deadlines is a heavy-handed approach to negotiations and the A’s stressed that they “made a strong and sincere effort to stay here [in Oakland]. We recognize that this is very hard to hear. We are disappointed that we have been unable to achieve our shared vision of a waterfront ballpark.”

Mayor Thao however, has doubled down in her criticism of the franchise, saying, “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. I am not interested in continuing to play that game - the fans and our residents deserve better.”

While tax incentives and public-private partnership may have lured the A’s to Las Vegas, the problem that Oakland has is a larger one. The heart of their inability to keep a team is precisely the blue-collar aspect of Oakland. It is often criticised for being poor or crime-ridden or dirty, but it is no more so than Miami or Atlanta or New Orleans.

The issue is that all of those other cities of comparable size, crime, and income are stand-alone markets. Oakland is wedded to a much larger, and far more affluent neighbor in San Francisco. And Oakland suffers by the comparison.

Children come in two basic types: adventurous and timorous. Warning labels, generally speaking, are aimed at the adventurous children, leaving the timorous in a state of perpetual terror. Much the same applies for taxation. California is a state that notoriously calibrates its taxation for the wildly affluent. And in such a situation, the profitability for a sports franchise is simply not there in a city like Oakland.

The A’s baseball fans have largely stayed away from the Coliseum in recent seasons, showing solidarity, if not exactly with the mayor, at least against the Athletics ownership. Some few might drift over to the Giants. Most will look for another team that fits their image of what they want in a baseball team. And some few, while they won’t say it out loud, will follow the A’s to Vegas.