Reports surfaced in February that the new collective bargaining agreement would see the Athletics once again become a recipient of revenue-sharing funds, and indeed, that proved to be the case once the CBA was (at long last) finalized between the league and the MLB Players Association. Susan Slusser and Matt Kawahara of The San Francisco Chronicle reported on the details of the Oakland revenue-sharing situation on Thursday, and The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal had some more specifics in his recent notes column.
For one, it will take four years (of the five-year span of the collective bargaining agreement) for the A’s to receive a full share of revenue-sharing monies, as Rosenthal notes that the team will be phased in via 25 percent increments. For instance, Oakland will get 25 percent of a full share in the first year, 50 percent in the second year, etc.
It is also possible that the A’s won’t even get to that full share unless they make significant progress on their long-desired new ballpark. As per the terms of the CBA, if the Athletics don’t have “a binding deal” for a new ballpark in place by January 15, 2024, they will no longer receive any revenue-sharing funds. If an agreement for a new stadium has been arranged by this date, the A’s will retain their revenue-sharing recipient status until they move into that ballpark.
Of particular note to Bay Area fans, the agreement specifies that the 1/15/24 deadline applies to a new deal for a ballpark in any city, not just Oakland. The A’s have been exploring the possibility of a move to Las Vegas, and yet most recently, it seems there has been renewed momentum to a stadium in Oakland at the Howard Terminal site. Back in May, the league publicly supported the Athletics’ plans to look outside of their home city for potential new stadium sites, so it makes sense that the CBA wouldn’t put any limit on where the A’s might direct their search over the next 22 months. The club’s lease at the RingCentral Coliseum is up following the 2024 season.
Difficult to depend on politicians to carry through on agreements. Ask Mark Davis what the Oakland City Council did to him and his father.
IMO the A’s situation in Oakland has been going on for far too long.
They didn’t do anything to Mark Davis. Dude wanted someone to build him a stadium and he never truly tried to get anything done in the bay area. The A’s will get the binding vote in April to build at Howard Terminal in Oakland
“They didn’t do anything to Mark Davis. Dude wanted someone to build him a stadium…”
Las Vegas did……
and they’ll do that for the A’s.
While I agree that it has been going on for too long, I’m sincerely confused by you’re sympathy for the Davis family. I’ve actually never heard anyone propose anything close to a need for it, and I know a lot of Oakland fans.
Have you heard of “Mount Davis”? Check out pics of what that place looked like before the Raiders made their changes. I grew up loving that park.
The Davis’s are the reason that stadium was turned from a beautiful baseball only venue, into the the literal toilet it is now.
I hope the A’s get their new park, but I can’t share your sympathy for the Davis family, and absolutely none for the A’s owners.
*your
Damn it
Oakland and the County bent over backwards with AL. AL fleeced the Public and never seriously tried to build here. They needed that 750 million from LV
Ohhhh, that must be why they’re big spenders this year in FA & extensions – the first 25% of the money coming in from the revenue shares! Makes sense now, mhm, m’kay.
Of course giving the A’s money is tied to the A’s getting a new ballpark though. Public pays for stadium, teams pay the A’s – yeah, right on! Goooo MLB, n’ stuff.
Guess you aren’t keen at looking up the ballpark proposal. Public will front some infrastructure, along with increased new property taxes AND the stadium is privately financed. This is a huge project that will bring many benefits to the area
You missed the $855M in public funds they requested for the area outside the stadium, but whatever you want to believe, man, whatever helps you sleep at night. “Some infrastructure” is one way to put it….
It’s time for the Las Vegas Athletics. Get the hell out of CA. Thousands of other fleeing businesses can’t be wrong.
Thousands of other businesses can be wrong, depending your perspective (e.g., one of the scores of employees in good standing often told to either uproot themselves and their families for another state or be “laid off” aka fired so management and investors can get a price-per-share or company valuation bump).
California will be fine without your support.
Although I’d love to see your proof of “thousands of fleeing businesses”, hahaha, what!? Come on guy! Reality, try it.
these folks can’t really name them, and besides, the main people leaving are liberals anyways, not enough of them to affect cali voting, but enough of them to affect other states (hence why horseface and her goof troop pals are whining about these people being banned from voting for a few years. if it was cons moving like they claim, the squad and company wouldn’t be whining about voters).
My home area of KS is DELUGED with conservative California ex-pats. A couple of years ago DFW saw an influx of 150,000 California’s in a single year. Liberals go to the NW, not so much Texas outside of Austin.
Besides the Oakland A’s…. The San Francisco Giants, the Los Angeles Dodgers, the Los Angeles Angels (of Anaheim), and the San Diego Padres all seem to be doing well off while doing business in CA, “ldoggnation”. Like it or not, the A’s are staying. The league pretty much started these Las Vegas rumors of course, but the team would be absolutely out of their minds to go from staying in the 5th overall largest TV market in the league to the smallest.
CA, by itself, is the fifth largest economy in the world.
Learn to not get confused by anecdotes.
Even loud ones.
yes More economic blackmail… instead of the 30 Billionaires who own the MLB and their massive wealth funding new stadiums.. they will once again bilk the public with their lies of economic development.. and blackmail them with the “if you don’t subsidize us we’ll take your team away… ” please read all about it.. econreview.berkeley.edu/the-economics-of-sports-st…
Totally agree, but the thing is it pretty much usually works for them. Part of what makes them rich is finding ways to get their hands on other people’s money, and they’ll continue to play this card until it fails. At this point they’re mostly just hoping that the Oakland burghers don’t read the Atlanta papers for news on how these deals can turn out.
Except the A’s only asked for funding for off-site infrastructure for Howard Terminal.
True, though the off=site infrastructure funding that the A’s have requested will total approximately $855MM.
$855M? That’s it? Why you guys crying about that? Dang, man. Not like it’s your money. Well, come to think of it, now that I wrote this out loud, it actually would be your money – carry on.
The coliseum is an absolute dump.
I’ve heard from fellow agents the following cities.
Las Vegas
Nashville
Vancouver (dome)
Albuquerque
Montreal
Good luck to all who move forward with the project.
Nashville!!! But they would need a new name. Trash Pandas is still one of my faves for TN.
Vegas would be neat.
I don’t see how ABQ could support an MLB team. I think Austin is viable.
Austin would be a viable market, but I can’t see the Astros and Rangers allowing another team in Texas, especially what would be a THIRD AL West team.
How about the MLB lift the stranglegold the Giants have on Silicon Valley. Let the A’s move to San Jose, a much more viable home than Oakland, a mere 30 miles down the road from Oakland and yet more than 50 miles from San Francisco. Why does nobody address this injustice?
It’s a beyond-exhausted argument.
It will never happen so to continue to bring it up does zero good. That’s exactly why the A’s have been pushing Oakland to do something for the last 20 years and sniffing around Las Vegas.
Yeah, the stadium is the pits, but it’s been the pits for over 25 years and it’s the same thing over and over again. I’ve said it on this site multiple times – Oakland will never build them a stadium.
On another note – The A’s owners are the worst. They suck revenue from the other teams instead of investing in their own team, cry poor, and do nothing for the fans. John Fisher is worth almost $3 billion.
Seriously, it’s your owner that’s killing that team!
Blaming it on others isn’t gonna help you.
How much money an owner in any business is worth is irrelevant.
Plenty of MLB fans living in the Oakland area have assets – particularly in home equity. Why don’t you ask them to liquidate some assets or take a loan out to buy tickets? That’s what you’re asking the owner to do to cover loses. Last year the A’s were competitive and wound up second to last in attendance – and they’ve been in the bottom 3 in attendance for over 10 years. The combined wealth of those people is many times greater than that of the A’s owner.
I read a couple of books on the Charlie Finley years. Charlie had major problems each year drawing fans to see the A’s. That area has never supported the A’s other than the championship years. That’s a fact. The Giants own the hearts of Bay Area fans.
As for building them a new park in Oakland to cure all the problems……I heard the same thing about a new park in Miami. The Marlins got it and the fans still don’t come. A bad market is a bad market. The owner of the Rays says that 2 markets sharing a team will be the way to go in the future. He may have something there. MLB has over-expanded. The cost of running an MLB franchise is more than most markets will generate in revenue. Worse yet – they want to expand yet again, meaning taking away fans that are in the new markets from existing teams. Baltimore used to be a mid-market team. DC got the Nationals. Baltimore is now a small market team.
This issue is far more complicated than telling us all owners are billionaires – which they are not – and demanding they lose money on their investments as well as the time they put in to run them.
The future of MLB may well be small market franchises playing half their games in their market, and half in large cities from outside of the US.
In addition to Montreal – San Juan, Puerto Rico and Mexico City come to mind. The Caribbean area and Latin America are hotbeds of baseball as well as Japan and Korea. Fans in those areas PLAY the game ON A FIELD – not on a computer or looking at statistics on a spreadsheet as well as arguing about how much money an owner is worth; meanwhile they don’t understand what a cut-off man is and why that’s important.
The issue is logistics of course. That makes Japan and Korea a bit difficult as potential share markets. But flights to Mexico and Caribbean countries aren’t much longer than many flights players now take around America.
The altitude of Mexico City is probably not doable for a full season, but a team in Mexico could work.
I don’t see it that way. League revenues and salaries keep going. Somebody is making money and attendance is doing fine. The team that won the World Series last year had a low payroll. The Dodgers and Yankees massive payrolls have bought 2 championships in 20 years. Seems like a healthy sport to me.
I hope the sport goes to 32 teams with 4 divisions of 8 teams in the next CBA.
The players are making big money. The agents are making big money. The owners are making some money – mostly paying themselves and their family members to work for the franchise…..but they do have to work. Mostly the owners are making financial killings with the ever-increasing equity they have in their franchises.
As for more franchises in the US – as I mentioned, MLB only winds up cannibalizing existing markets and watering down a product that is already poor. The giveaway about the future is in the new CBA where MLB will be playing more games out of the country. That is the first step.
astros_fan_84 — And Mexico City has some of the most polluted air in the world. Even with a domed stadium, Mexico City would be a mistake. A shame because it is a cultural center.
Redstitch108* 2 — This was the agreement made decades ago. Get over it. A’s aren’t moving to San Jose, but they sure as hell deserve a better stadium. I hope it’s in Oakland, but the city fathers have bee dicking around with it for too long.
If it doesn’t get resolved soon, let the A’s find a city that welcomes them.
That Oakland project will need two decades, not two years.
It’ll be fun catching baseball in Vegas on a fight weekend.
The Oakland A’s are in the fifth largest metropolitan market, and pioneered the idea of claiming to be poor to maximize team profits through welfare for billionaires.
“ welfare for billionaires.”
Sir, I am 99% sure they don’t refer to it this way, but I could be mistaken.
Socialism for the rich, capitalism for the rest of us…how else to describe “revenue-sharing”?
My comment was sarcastic. It’s obvious they don’t refer to it that way. It’s also obvious it shouldn’t be done. Furthermore, it’s borderline criminal that revenue sharing is pocketed by billionaire owners for profit when it’s sole intended purpose is to provide for “competitive balance” within an industry under an umbrella of a Congressionally protected monopoly………………. but, I digress. Whatever.
“If socialist CA won’t fork over the taxpayers’ money for a new stadium, just move the A’s to capitalist NV, where they will!!!”
How inept will the city government of Oakland be if they lose the Athletics, after losing the Raiders and the Warriors. Losing all three major professional teams in a span of ten years is unfathomable. And to all the naysayers out there – Sports teams are one of the few unifying forces which cities have, they are a source of pride, identity and employment (just ask any of the people who work for sports teams and/or in related industries that operate near stadiums). Think of New York. What comes to mind right away ? Broadway, the Empire State Building, The Yankees . Like it or not, sports matter. They are passed on from one generation to the next and losing a team can be devastating (check the history of Brooklyn from the 1950’s through the end of the century). So Oakland. Wake up and build the stadium.