Although the final agreements are still to come, it is now all but certain that the MLB’s Oakland A’s will shortly join the NFL’s Raiders in relocating to Las Vegas. The team has entered into an agreement to purchase land near the Strip for a new ballpark, which, if all goes to plan, will open in 2027. As reported in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Dave Kaval, the president of the A’s, said the team entered into a purchasing agreement last week on a 49-acre site near Tropicana Boulevard and Interstate 15 where the team could build a 35,000-seat stadium.

“For a long time we were on parallel paths, and right now, at this moment, and with this transaction that we just entered into, we are really focusing our efforts on Las Vegas and on bringing the 20-year saga of the A’s stadium-venue efforts to kind of a final positive conclusion,” Kaval told The Chronicle after returning from Las Vegas on Wednesday night.

This announcement came at the same time the city of Oakland halted all negotiations with the team.

By Thursday afternoon, Oakland and Alameda County leaders said they would not be used as leverage for a team seeking subsidies from another city even as it sat at the table with Oakland.

“Based on the A’s desire to achieve certainty in 2023, we laid out a detailed and specific plan to bring the project forward to a City Council vote this summer,” (Oakland Mayor Sheng) Thao said Thursday, referencing this week’s negotiations summit. “But it has become clear that we are not able to reach acceptable terms and that the A’s are not good partners in the effort.”

“We were the closest we had ever been to making a deal,” she added.

Let the finger-pointing begin.

We start with A’s owner John Fisher, a billionaire who cried poor once too often for all parties concerned. It is difficult to remember the A’s were in the postseason as recently as 2020, even with the team’s penchant for trading away any talent on the roster for prospects rather than paying players the current market rate. The team is now easily the worst in baseball. Fisher is willing to foot most of the bill for a new stadium, but his demand that local government pay for most or all of the infrastructure has derailed any hopes for the team to remain in Oakland.

Also contributing to this is the team’s refusal to build a new stadium at the existing Oakland Coliseum site, instead pursuing a pipe dream of a waterfront park à la the San Francisco Giants’ Oracle Park. The Coliseum, while not in the best of neighborhoods, before the construction of Mount Davis was an excellent, peaceful place to see a ballgame, with the Oakland tree-covered hills visible out beyond the outfield. The infrastructure was already in place. So, of course, all parties involved screwed it up.

We also have local government, city (Oakland), and county (Alameda) and their pathological inability to make decisions. Strike poses and make speeches, sure. Say a simple yes or no? Forget it. While it is understandable that no one wanted to spend public money on a ballpark, the demands that the project includes housing projects and whichever other social engineering projects any given local yokel could concoct didn’t help.

Let’s not forget MLB commissioner Rob Manfred, whose naked lust for a team in Las Vegas led him to try and bully local politicos along with waving the usual $2B transfer fee a team must pay for moving. Never mind how this will come back to haunt him the next time a team wants to use the “build us a new park or we’re leaving” tack on its current host city.

And where has Gavin Newsom been? Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo has been working hard on getting a deal done without raising taxes. This will be the second California team Nevada has spirited away from California. What, no store in Oakland sells the right follicle care brand for Governor Hair Gel to be bothered?

Finally, there are the people who are not the blame — namely, we, the A’s fans.

The A’s moved to Oakland when I was nine years old. I have attended hundreds of A’s games — no exaggeration — over the years. I’ve seen World Series games. I’ve seen great teams. I’ve seen terrible teams. I cherish the memories of A’s games I attended with my dad. I remember the last game at the Coliseum I saw with my dad.

The A’s were my team. No matter what. They were my team.

And now it will soon be over.

Right now, I don’t care about economics or politics. I care about my memories and the times spent with family and friends celebrating or commiserating over the A’s. Soon they will be gone, another entertainment diversion for sun-cooked visitors stumbling about Sin City.

Yeah, this one hurts.

I suppose I should take a “the sports gods giveth and the sports gods taketh away” attitude, given how it was but a few years ago I welcomed the Rams back from St. Louis. But the Rams should have never moved there. When the A’s first moved from Philadelphia to Kansas City, the city still had the Phillies. When the team moved from Kansas City to Oakland, the Royals quickly came into being. There will never be another major league team in Oakland, now the only city in America to lose a professional sports franchise in each of the four major sports. Three of them in five years.

Not much more to say, is there?