In case you missed it while trying to stuff your 10-foot Christmas tree back in its 6-foot-long box, a bulletin: Dave Kaval resurfaced this week.
The A’s president took a powder in early December after the Peralta Community College District abruptly discontinued talks with the team regarding a proposed ballpark site near Laney College. Kaval was back in the public eye Wednesday, announcing free tickets to the A’s April 17 game, on the 50th anniversary of the team’s inaugural contest in Oakland.
He made a virtual appearance Friday as well, in a news release announcing that the A’s would, on Jan. 8, be moving into a new office space — 40,000 square feet worth — in Jack London Square.
With new office space comes a new call to arms. From the release:
“As the club moves into a new chapter in Oakland, the organization has defined a clear vision for achieving goals for the future by unveiling new internal guiding pillars: innovative, dynamic and inclusive. These pillars, along with a new motto, ‘Victory for Oakland,’ will help guide the organization in everything they do.”
What jumps out at you here? Yes, those internal guiding pillars, not to be confused with Google’s eight pillars of innovation. But let’s move on to that new motto. What gives there? It was less than one year ago that the A’s debuted a new motto, “Rooted in Oakland.” You didn’t have to guess at the deeper meaning: “Trust us, we’re staying put.”
Now it’s “Victory for Oakland”? What, has “Rooted” been designated for assignment?
“Rooted in Oakland,” mused Andy Dolich, an A’s executive during the team’s glory years under owner Walter Haas and manager Tony La Russa. “It also can be ‘Uprooted in Oakland,’ aka the Las Vegas Raiders and San Francisco Warriors.”
Is that making a mountain out of a pitcher’s mound? Not if you’re an Oakland resident or an East Bay sports fan about to wave goodbye to the Raiders — for the second time. Not when one of the most entertaining teams in NBA history is about to relocate from I-880 and 66th Avenue to Mission Bay — 10 miles as the seagull flies, but a world away psychically.
Not after the A’s sniffed around stadium sites in Fremont and San Jose. Not if you’ve been rooted in Oakland long enough to remember when the A’s nearly bolted to Denver. Or 1996, when the team, annoyed by the off-putting renovation of the Coliseum during the Raiders’ return, flew the coop and played its first six games of the season in Las Vegas.
Not when Kaval has declared there is no Plan B to the Laney College site. Not when Oakland has bigger and more pressing civic concerns. And not when the biggest wallet in the A’s organization, owner John Fisher, is content to hold the A’s as a blind trust — out of sight, out of mind.
It has been just a month since the Peralta board blew up Kaval’s Plan A. But it has been a long, pregnant month. Long enough for a walk through the archives to see how it played out when Charlie Finley was preparing to leave Kansas City for Oakland in late 1967. Shockingly, Finley was accused of sabotaging his team, the better to blow town without getting any resistance from the locals.
Sound like any club owner you know, Yoenis Cespedes? Or you, Josh Donaldson?
Finley eventually got his way, leaving for Oakland in 1968. But so did Kansas City, which in 1969 welcomed the expansion Royals. A few years after that, the city completed a new stadium. Charlie who?
We live in the age of conspiracies, half-baked and otherwise. Here’s one for you: Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred has said the expansion of MLB by two teams is “inevitable.” Montreal and Portland have been suggested as potential major league cities. Dolich floated Mexico City.
It would take a bold plan and a civic wheeler-dealer who doesn’t exist in Oakland at the moment. But imagine securing a brand new team (the Oakland Oaks?) and remaking the Coliseum site into something grand. And best of all, suggesting to Fisher that he take a hike to where the internal guiding pillars are greener.
