A’s stadium push reported to be in “bottom of 9th” for umpteenth consecutive year

Joanna Cagan and I have never gone into much detail in public about how we divvied up writing duties for the first edition of the book Field of Schemes (it was pretty much exactly 50/50), but I don’t think it’s giving too much away to reveal that Chapter 4, “The Art of the Steal,” began with a phone conversation between myself and Tiger Stadium Fan Club co-founder Frank Rashid. He’d already started thinking of a list of standard moves sports team owners used to extract public money for new stadiums, I annotated and refined it a bit, and soon enough we had a playbook that described all the tried-and-true stadium-grubbing methods:

1. The Home-Field Disadvantage: Claim that your current stadium is falling down, or at least “economically obsolete,” even if all that means is it’s not making you as much money as you’d like.
2. Faking a Move: Drum up fear that the team will leave town, if necessarily by hopping a plane to some other city that is a potential move threat target.
3. Leveling the Playing Field: But mommmmmm, all the other team’s cities are getting them new toys!
4. Playing the Numbers: Assert the economic benefits of a new building, ideally accompanied by a clear plastic binder.
5. The Two-Minute Warning: Limited time only, act now, operators are standing by! (Repeat as necessary.)
6. Moving the Goalposts: Oh, did we say a billion dollars? We meant $1.2 billion, oh well, too late to stop construction now, right?

That phone conversation was more than 25 years ago now, and it’s amazing how well it still describes the steps (in whatever order) of a standard stadium or arena campaign. There are a couple of small new twists — the state-of-the-art clause, the kitchen-sink gambit — but basically it’s the same old arguments hauled out every time.

And yet I still manage to be surprised when I click on my RSS feed and see headlines that could well be from a couple of decades ago:

Last swings for an Oakland A’s stadium

The bottom of the ninth inning is rapidly approaching for the prospect of a new East Bay ballpark for the Oakland Athletics.

Really, San Francisco Business Times? You’re going to go for not one, but two obvious baseball metaphor, even? Do you take no pride in your work?

The rest of the story is busy doing catchup to justify that two-minute-warning lede: Oakland A’s owner John Fisher wants a new stadium at Howard Terminal that would require about $1 billion in city infrastructure spending, and it had better happen now, because there are only 19 shopping days left until Christmas! The signs that time is running out are all around:

• MLB commissioner Rob Manfred has said he’s “no longer optimistic” that the A’s will remain in Oakland.
• The Oakland city council won’t vote on a stadium deal until 2023 at the earliest (that’s next month), and “it’s not yet clear how such a vote would go.”

Okay, that’s really the only two signs the article mentions, but still, things sound pretty desperate, right? Almost as desperate as all the other times over the last 15 or so years that the A’s have presented one last-ditch stadium plan or another, with everyone saying surely the team will move if this one doesn’t come to fruition.

The rest of the article pivots to the remaining obstacles to a Howard Terminal stadium deal, and there are indeed a bunch, starting with the fact that nobody has yet found the needed $1 billion in public funds, and plenty of elected officials are making leery noises about the whole thing. Still, Oakland has a new mayor who’s said an A’s stadium is a priority for her, and the federal and state governments have a ton of infrastructure money sitting around, and Las Vegas still isn’t offering a stadium for the A’s to move to, and these deals do often take years to pull off. A more honest terrible-sports-metaphor headline would seem to be something like “A’s Score First in Stadium Push, But There’s a Lot of Game Left to Play,” but that’s neither as good for clicks nor the message that Fisher and his cronies want put out there, because “Emphasize that it’s a long, slow process with lots of important decisions that shouldn’t be rushed through” is very much not a part of the stadium playbook.

And here we are, still, nearly three decades on. I don’t have much to add to that — you have any final words, San Francisco Business Times?

Then it will be time for the Council to vote to save baseball in Oakland — if, by that time, there is still baseball to be saved.

Thanks bunches. I hope John Fisher at least rewarded this reporting with a nice big subscription check, but he probably just counted on the local media being his unpaid private PR department, and he wasn’t wrong.