The Oakland Athletics stand for the national anthem during a 2023 spring training game in suburban Las Vegas. The team's planned move to Nevada figures to keep it in the headlines this year.
Miranda Alam/Special to The Chronicle
You can feel it, can’t you?
Twenty-twenty-four is going to be a sensational year in Bay Area sports, and the biggest story is going to be the OakVegas Athletics.
Oh, there will be other big stories.
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The San Francisco Giants are slogging through a quagmire of their creation, and 2024 will be either Farhan Zaidi’s last stand or the dawn of a glorious new era, or both.
The San Francisco 49ers are a team of destiny, and Brock Purdy will make the MVP award he won’t win look like a participation trophy in a pie-eating contest.
The Golden State Warriors are either going to take off like a moon rocket or explode like a burrito when you accidentally set the microwave for 20 minutes instead of 20 seconds.
This year has an air of exciting uncertainty. The only solid guarantee for 2024 is that the A’s will entertain us.
On the field, the A’s will be baseball’s charming and lovable losers, sacrificial lambs to the greed and apathy of team owner John Fisher and team President Dave Kaval. To avoid the embarrassment of acres of empty seats at the Coliseum, the A’s simply will throw a tarp over all the grandstands. They’ll then charge admission to their opossum-petting zoo.
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Hey, we kid, Fisher and Kaval, but this feels like the year they will do something right. Unveil semi-realistic plans for a ballpark? Obtain financing for a ballpark? Paint over the “Rooted in Oakland” signs?
Seriously, if the A’s do something right, just one thing, where you go, “Hmm, that makes sense,” it will be like your lazy kid’s last-minute science project winning a Nobel Prize.
It could happen. Fisher has had some recent success as a sports team owner, as his Texas Rattlers bull-riding team won last year’s Pro Bull Riders championship. A reminder that when Fisher is involved, you don’t know which end of the bull is the most troublesome.
Even when the A’s go completely silent, as they have over the past month or so, they can’t avoid making news. The latest fun character to emerge in this soap opera is a fellow named Scott Hammond. Hammond was a Nevada state senator last year, voting to approve the $380 million gift to the A’s.
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Hammond now heads up the governor’s Office of Workforce Innovation, so he’s obviously a brilliant dude. When a rumor surfaced last week that the A’s might abandon their proposed Tropicana site for a site farther from the Strip, even though that seemingly would violate terms of the state’s gift to the A’s, a tweeter on X tweeted, “I’d watch for (Hammond, the mayor of Las Vegas, and the state assembly speaker) to quietly, and once again corruptively, enact the change into law.”
Hammond leapt at the bait, telling the tweeter (@letsgooak7, with 77 followers), “Get off your mom’s couch, leave the basement and learn to live.” When another tweeting A’s fan joined the fray, Hammond called that fan “an idiot,” and insulted his/her mother.
Your tax dollars at work, Nevadans. Your allies in full tizzy, Fisher.
Back in Oakland, for the A’s, it’s business as unusual. Like every MLB team, the A’s will hold a Fanfest this winter. Except the A’s Fanfest will be put on by the fans, because team management is too busy figuring out how to jack up ticket and parking prices.
Fans planning a team’s Fanfest is like you planning your own surprise birthday party. It might be just the start of Oakland fans taking over some traditional team roles. Like, the fans might start a canned-food drive to help feed A’s minor leaguers. Or hold a bake sale to buy bats and jocks for A’s players.
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Speaking of funding, Fisher has yet to reveal how he will fund his portion of a stadium in Vegas. The delay could be a result of the laborious process of sorting through stacks of offers from lending institutions eager to hand a billion bucks to a man with a proven track record for business/sports success. Hey, they’ve seen Fisher’s Rattlers championship jacket.
Let’s not forget that though much of the fun news is coming out of Las Vegas, the A’s are still rooted in Oakland, like a spongy in-law wearing out your refrigerator. Fisher is still in the process of buying a 50% interest in the Coliseum site, thus delaying or destroying development of that potential community asset.
That made-in-haste sale, by the way, is further complicated by an ongoing lawsuit that prevents the county from spending a single cent of the money from the A’s. That’s a reminder that if the A’s happen to strike out in Vegas and come back to Oakland, begging for public assistance, local politicians will have yet another opportunity to carelessly lavish taxpayer money on a rich guy who couldn’t locate Oakland on a map.
We can’t wait for the next big A’s story! Tick … tick … tick.
Reach Scott Ostler: sostler@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @scottostler
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