Jorge Leon: I’ve never been able to relax before 1998, knowing that they could just leave any given day. And so here we are now, and still the same old shit.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Today, I talk with A’s superfan and KQED producer Nina Thorsen about the latest.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: So, Nina, the A’s are leaving Oakland, but not to Las Vegas yet. Can you remind us where are the A’s at right now in their planned move to Las Vegas? It’s still a few years out, it sounds like.
Nina Thorsen: Right, right. The A’s have approval from Major League Baseball to relocate. They have a site. They’ve unveiled a design for a domed stadium with a big window. The architect called it a spherical armadillo. The A’s don’t have the funding for this ballpark completely worked out. In fact, we really don’t know very much about where the funding is, except that we know they don’t have either a loan or a outside funder that we know of.
Nina Thorsen: A’s owner, John Fisher, says he and his family are going to put up as much of the funding as they have to. If everything goes the way they’ve planned. The new ballpark will open in 2028. But you know, in projects of this magnitude, things often don’t go as they plan.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Right right. So still a few years out and we’re kind of in this interim period with the A’s, right, where we know that they have this plan. But there’s still a lot that needs to be done. But they recently announced a plan to temporarily move to a minor league park in Sacramento until their new stadium in Vegas is built. Why did they have to leave the Coliseum in the first place?
Nina Thorsen: They’re actually in the last year of a ten year lease agreement that they signed, and it was very much a, you know, most favored tenant kind of lease. So it was a very low rate. They had the option of renewing it, and they were discussing with the city of Oakland and with Alameda County and the Joint Powers Authority, which manages the Coliseum.
Nina Thorsen: They were discussing renewals, but the city of Oakland, understandably, nobody wanted to give them the same great deal that they had before because they were no longer committed to the city. And in fact, the city and county had a bit of a disincentive in that on a per event basis, they could make more money with other tenants. They couldn’t come to a number. That was enough of a step up to satisfy the city and county, and enough of a discount to satisfy the A’s.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: What were their options exactly? And why did the team’s owner ultimately pick Sacramento?
Nina Thorsen: So the options that we knew about that they were talking about publicly were staying at the Coliseum for the interim period or moving to minor league ballparks in Las Vegas, in Sacramento, or in Salt Lake City. Staying at the Colosseum would be their easiest option, and the team could keep all of its lucrative cable TV contract, which is based on their being in the Bay area, which is a very large market compared to any of these other places.
Nina Thorsen: But the Coliseum holds about five times as many people as the minor league parks, so there’d be a lot of empty seats. And also, the fans who have been protesting would continue to be very visible if they play at the Coliseum. It still seemed like Oakland had the edge. And then the owner of the Sacramento minor league team, the River cats, offered the A’s free rent, and that seems to have been too good a deal for them to pass up.
Dave Kaval: And we felt that this was just a great interim home for the A’s. We have a lot of fans.
Nina Thorsen: So Dave Kaval is the president of the A’s, and he has said that this is a very attractive deal for them. They’re very excited about moving to Sacramento. And they think that the intimacy of the park, because it’s only 10,000 plus seats. It’ll be an interesting change from being at the Coliseum, which is 56,000.
Dave Kaval: Seats in a minute. It’s like the spring training experience, but the games matter. And so I think people are going to have a fun time. People are going to travel in to see these games. It’s going to be a great location for baseball. And as someone who’s traveled to all 30 ballparks, seeing a baseball game, a major League Baseball game, in this type of setting, it’s going to be world class and it’s going to be a lot of fun.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Nina, you are a huge A’s fan as we’ve talked with you on this show plenty of times before. For those who don’t know, Nina is one of the iconic drummers in remind me which section?
Nina Thorsen: Right field section 149.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I mean, how are fans like you, I guess, responding to this news?
Nina Thorsen: Yeah, I was going to say something about it’s, you know, is it adding insult to injury? There have been so many insults and so many injuries to this fan base in the last few years. For me personally, this is the first year since 2009, except for the pandemic year, that I haven’t had at least a partial season ticket plan or a full season ticket plan this year.
Jorge Leon: So, I mean, to me, it’s a disappointment.
Nina Thorsen: Jorge Leon is the president of the Oakland 68, which is a fan group that got its start in the right field bleachers. And full disclosure, I’m a member of the Oakland 68.
Jorge Leon: You know, I wrote an essay in 1998 to try and keep Dave in Oakland. That was in 1998. So them staying in Oakland had always been in the back of my head, though in a way I’ve never been able to relax since 1998, knowing that they could just leave any given day.
Nina Thorsen: The idea that the A’s would be leaving the Coliseum is something that fans have been hearing for so many years, that it almost seemed like it was never going to happen. And Jorje Leon talked to one of our KQED reporters about what it feels like to be told, you know, not just that they are leaving eventually, but that there there is a day when there is the last game coming up.
Jorge Leon: We’re not supporting the team at all. Not in Sacramento, not in Vegas, not in a thousand. Not in Fremont. Not anywhere. We support the team in Oakland.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Is fans have been very active and very loud about their feelings about the team and plans to leave Oakland, organizing and staging protests, really rallying around this call to force the owner, John Fisher, to sell the team. Can you talk a little bit more about how fans have been organizing and protesting in the months leading up to this announcement?
Nina Thorsen: So last year was the summer of sell. This year it’s going to be more of a boycott situation for the home opener this year, which was, you know, just a couple of weeks ago at the end of March. These two HS fan groups that have been leading the protests organized a boycott where people did not buy tickets to the game.
Nina Thorsen: But we all went into the Coliseum parking lots and set up a big party and partied throughout the game. Okay, this is the parking lot about 6 p.m. you know, Oakland has always been known for its tailgating experience. The Coliseum parking lots of a magical place of celebration, both for the A’s and for the Raiders. But this was really next level opening.
Nina Thorsen: And there were live bands and there were free tacos. And the first 5000 people got free flags that set sail on them. And it was just a surreal experience to be standing in the parking lot, looking through the little gap in the Colosseum upper deck so that we could see the scoreboard. There were more fans outside the stadium than there were fans inside, that’s for sure.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: The actions you are describing, it’s like fans saying, we’re here, we exist in the thousands, but we’re not going to give you our money.
Nina Thorsen: Yes, it’s definitely that. It’s definitely the idea that nobody wants to give John Fisher any more money than is absolutely necessary if you want to go to a couple of games. A lot of people are trying to only buy tickets on the secondary market, so they’ve already been sold. I think the other thing about the protests is that they are not negative. Yes, the message is sell the team and get John Fisher out, change the ownership. But there’s also a tremendous amount of positivity, a tremendous amount of festivity.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: As fans have also been pretty active around what’s happening in Nevada, right where they’ve been preparing for in a move. How have fans been getting involved in that front?
Nina Thorsen: Another way that A’s fans have been active in the last year is by supporting efforts in Nevada, specifically by the Nevada Teachers Union, to organize opposition to the public funding that the state voted for. The A’s ballpark and the Nevada Teachers Union has two different legal strategies going on. One of them involves a referendum that they want to put on the ballot in November.
Nina Thorsen: That would essentially allow the voters of Nevada to weigh in on whether they want to give the A’s money for their stadium. And A’s fans have been very instrumental in donating a lot of money to that effort. And there’s a lot of A’s fans who are planning to go to Nevada to go to Reno in Vegas and other parts of Nevada and, you know, be the ones who will go around collecting signatures to put this thing on the ballot.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Oakland is, of course, preparing to contend with an empty stadium. And this is a real solid plan for the A’s to officially leave Oakland. What is this going to mean for the Coliseum?
Nina Thorsen: Well, in the short term, say, next season, 2025, the plan is that the Coliseum is going to be the home field for the Oakland Roots and the Oakland Soul soccer clubs. There may be a few games for the Oakland Ballers. They wanted to do an exhibition game this year, but the A’s said no. There could be outdoor concerts, which used to happen a lot at the Coliseum in the old days on the green. In the longer term, I mean, the Coliseum is a it’s an old stadium. It’s been there since 1968. It will probably be demolished. And what happens next in that site is something that has been the subject of discussions for years and years.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: And in, in the short term as well. Nina, what’ll happen to the workers at the Coliseum?
Nina Thorsen: I think it’s going to be really tough for a lot of the Coliseum workers who are game day workers. A lot of those folks live in East Oakland. They live or they live, you know, within easy commuting distance of the Coliseum. And it it may be really tough for them. It’ll be a big change for them. Now, a lot of those folks will probably end up working at whatever else goes on at the Coliseum, the roots and whatever else happens there.
Nina Thorsen: It just may not be as many games, so it won’t be as much money for people who are paid on a game by game basis. And then because of the way that the A’s are relocating to Sacramento temporarily, they are moving into a stadium in Sacramento that already has a team that’s there, the River cats.
Nina Thorsen: And that team has ticket takers and ticket sellers and grounds crew and all of the rest of the of the people who work at a ballpark. So the A’s are planning to to lay off most of those people. Only a very few people in the front office will relocate to Sacramento and then ultimately to Las Vegas, assuming that that all goes forward.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: What about the fans, Nina, who’ve been, as we’ve been talking about, really making big statements on where they stand on how the A’s owner, John Fisher, has been handling things. How could the move to Sacramento change fans ability to protest or gather in the ways that they have been?
Nina Thorsen: It’s going to change. It’s not going to be the same. It is as it is at the Coliseum. But I don’t think that his fans are going to be quiet. I think there is a change in feeling at some levels of Major League Baseball, whether it’s really an official policy or not. I think there is a change in feeling about the fan relationship and what it means to be a fan of Major League Baseball. The ideal were fans who were loyal to one team and were maybe loyal to one team over generations.
Nina Thorsen: You know, your parents took you to games and then you took your children’s games. And the feeling that the sports team represented the city and represented the region and had some meaningful connections to that community. And in the past few years in the A’s are the most extreme example. But they’re not. They’re far from the only one. There seems to be a new philosophy that you buy a ticket to a ballgame, and that’s all you’re buying.
Nina Thorsen: You’re not making a commitment to the team, and the team’s not making a commitment to you. Major League Baseball seems to perhaps want to move away from the idea that you’re a fan of a team so much is that you’re a fan of MLB The Brand. This is not an Oakland phenomenon. This is not something to do with the particular situation at the Oakland Coliseum.
Nina Thorsen: This is something that other teams are going to do. It has much more to do with. Baseball teams and sports teams in general, wanting public funding for their facilities, and. Being willing to use the threat of relocation as leverage to get more money.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Well, Nina, our unofficial ace correspondent. Thank you so much again for joining us. I really appreciate it.
Nina Thorsen: Well, it’s always great to talk to you and, let’s go Oakland. As long as we can say that, we will be saying that. Let’s go Oakland.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: That was Nina Thorsen, a producer for KQED. Thanks as well to KQED intern Daniel Eduardo Hernandez, who did the interview that you heard in this episode with Jorge Leon. This hourlong conversation with Nina was cut down and edited by our intern, Ellie Prickett-Morgan. Maria Esquinca is our producer. She scored this episode and edited the tape. Music courtesy of the Audio Network. Additional production support by me.
