In August I went to a boxing event at Desert Diamond Arena in Glendale, AZ, the former home of the NHL Coyotes. The main event featured Mexican lightweights Emanuel Navarrete (who also fought tonight in Vegas) and Oscar Valdez. The fight lived up to billing, going the distance and being hailed as one of the fights of the year. I certainly walked out of the arena feeling that I got my money’s worth.

Before I walked out into the hot August desert night, I saw a somewhat unusual, but ultimately typical undercard fight. The fight pitted a distinctive looking, up-and-coming heavyweight, Richard Torrez of Tulare, CA, against a 40 year-old journeyman opponent named Willie Jake from Indianapolis. The older Jake was clearly overmatched from the opening bell and the ref called the fight a mere 1:22 into the first round. It was over so fast that if I looked down at my phone I would’ve missed half of it.

Richard Torrez Jr. [@RichardTorrez21] drops Willie Jake Jr. with a step-back right hook; Jake recovers, but Torrez pours it on, forcing the ref to wave it off in RD1 💥 #NavarreteValdez | #Boxingpic.twitter.com/KCXAG7NdwR

— RINGOFHIGHLIGHTS (@ringofhighlight) August 13, 2023

Instead of the usual baseball analogy hackery dispensed by many in the media, I’ll lay it out like this. Torrez is Vegas, hungry, young, and vital. Jake is Oakland, tired, weary, and just hoping he doesn’t get killed before he gets the paycheck. And Rob Manfred is the referee in this case, watching one fighter completely dominate the other, and then when the older guy is unable to defend himself, Manfred steps in to call the fight. It happens a lot in boxing as a young fighter tests himself in terms of opponents and stamina in longer and more high profile fights. Torrez won again a few weeks ago and is now 7-0 in his promising career.

The Oakland-elsewhere relocations over the past five years seem to be unique unto themselves. Yet the underlying motivations and factors are all the same. The Raiders under Al and then Mark Davis looked at SoCal, other cities in the East Bay, and even San Antonio before trying something big in Oakland with Coliseum City. The Warriors telegraphed their desire to move back to SF from the start, yet Oakland did little as the team flopped on their Piers 30/32 plan and settled on the Mission Bay site. Like the Raiders, the A’s looked everywhere else before failing at Peralta site and then going even bigger at Howard Terminal. In all cases, Oakland was always in the position to be abandoned because it couldn’t compete economically. Seat licenses were already a sore subject and not under much consideration in the market for any replacement venue in Oakland other than the Raiders’ stadium.

In all three cases, the teams recognized major limitations in Oakland the city that they were willing to endure as part of the broader, richer Bay Area market. Sometimes those constraints became too much. Consider some of the actual issues the teams and the JPA had to deal with:

1. Raiders planned stadium capacity at Coliseum City was only 50-53,000, which would’ve been too small for a future Super Bowl

2. Coliseum City buildout was $4 Billion while Howard Terminal was $8 Billion, because both teams needed to funnel a lot of real estate-derived revenue towards subsidizing the stadiums

3. Mark Davis only wanted Coliseum City with the A’s there if both venues were built simultaneously, a logistical impossibility

4. In response, Lew Wolff pushed for a 10-year lease extension, which “drove away” the Raiders

5. Other types of tax revenues (use, ticket, tax increment) were extremely limited if they were confined to Oakland

6. Alameda County’s general reluctance to entertain Oakland’s plans over the past decade led them to sell their half of the Coliseum complex

7. All three teams were involved in some form of litigation with Oakland

8. The Warriors’ reluctance to pay off the debt service at the arena after they left for SF crippled the JPA’s finances for years as it was costly to book for events

9. While all three teams were tenants at the Coliseum complex, none could make plans for developing any part of it because of the need to preserve parking and the need to get cooperation from the other two teams

10. Even with 10,000 parking spaces, the teams would run into occasional dual-use event scenarios which caused them to hit the parking limits and created gridlock

These weren’t all dealbreakers. I’m not even including Oakland City Hall’s well-earned reputation of dysfunction. Taken together, these problems helped create and reinforce the image of Oakland being difficult to work with. How willing would you be to lease from a landlord who is likely to sue you? No wonder all of them eventually wanted to leave the Coliseum. Fifty years ago, the Coliseum was a perfect model of professional and community-based cooperation. Over time, all teams became more and more stingy about retaining their revenue, which led to everyone looking for better opportunities elsewhere.

You might think that after the Raiders and Warriors left in 2019, the A’s would have free rein to do what they wanted with the complex. Au contraire. That would be too simple. I’ve never heard a proper explanation for this, but my guess is that Fisher believed that revenue would be limited (another one!) at a new Coliseum ballpark compared to Howard Terminal. The A’s certainly did presentations early on that indicated that would be the case. They still bought Alameda County’s 50% stake in the Coliseum, which they stated was a backup plan but now appears to be only as a leverage play. Regardless, the bill will come due on that $45 million in six months now that MLB approved the Vegas move. If you want a reason for the A’s to get this deal done now, the possibility of offsetting this looming cost with a revenue sharing check sounds as likely as any reason.

Taking off my A’s cap, the difficult thing for me is the knowledge that the A’s are essentially being used an example for all MLB cities, current and future. Manfred will point to the $380 million quite hastily given to the A’s and tell other cities to do the same or else risk losing your franchise. Milwaukee’s recently announced renovation deal may have been done independent of the A’s machinations, but the message was sent loud and clear. Never mind the inconceivable logistics of moving or threatening to move multiple franchises. The threat was real, acted upon, and a city is soon to be irrelevant in the pro sports world as a result. It is a shocking realization, though one that comes with the territory. If you don’t want to get your heartbroken, don’t give your heart.

City Hall isn’t off the hook. The fecklessness of several Oakland mayors helped create unrealistic expectations among A’s (and Raiders) fans, where anything was possible. Oakland could somehow compete with SF, LA, even NY. To put it bluntly, Oakland can’t punch in the true big city weight class. They have no business trying to make these types of deals, simply because they don’t have the dependable help a city would normally get from a county or state to get it done. Oakland doesn’t have any competitive economic advantages over other cities. That lack of self-awareness and inability to scale down or up as needed made Oakland unable to quickly react to Vegas’s dealmaking agility. Yes, it is entirely unfair that Vegas has a powerful county’s machinery and a state to provide support. But even as “Parallel Paths” became a competition, Oakland didn’t recognize it until it was too late. Even I fell into the complacency as I felt that every avenue would be exhausted in Oakland before completing a deal with Vegas. When I saw Nevada call a special session to revive a seemingly dead bill for the A’s, I remembered how NV and Clark County danced around Oakland/Alameda County the last time. There were questions about stadium financing then as well that went away as Bank of America stepped in the same way Goldman Sachs is getting ready to do the same for the A’s.

Oakland has many more urgent issues than the A’s. I have no advice to give the city other than: Stop pumping yourself up so much, have some humility, and come from a place you will be recognized for your results, not just your effort. Don’t look for the next savior to bail you out. The Prince of Dubai didn’t materialize for Coliseum City. Joe Lacob is not walking through the door to save the A’s for Oakland. AASEG is not getting an expansion WNBA franchise when WNBA expands at a glacial pace. Maybe if Oakland put together a fair deal for itself and the Roots/Soul, it can reestablish itself in the sports world. Most importantly, stop playing with the loyalties of a tortured fan base. They deserve more than your pandering. They deserve real talk. They can handle that. If they can’t, well, at least the weather’s nice.

As for those fans, I can’t explain how sorry I am I had to write this tonight. I wanted to write a book on a new ballpark somewhere in the Bay Area, maybe in Oakland if the stars aligned. That’s as far away from reality as the A’s winning next year’s World Series. I wanted to be wrong. I wanted things to turn around for you. I lost a lot of you along the way. I was very blunt in my assessments. I can’t change that, and I can’t change who I am. Tonight I was talking a guy who works on IPOs as part of a consultancy. I asked him about the roller coaster economy. He said that business is good after a really rough patch the during the pandemic. I asked if he had to adjust his BS detector in the wake of interest rate hikes, FTX and WeWork. He said, “Oh yeah, definitely. You really have to do your research.”

“The rich people are still going to find ways. They know how to keep it flowing.”

I’ll never know how true that actually is. It sounds right.