Q and A On Athletics’ Vegas Stadium: Deeper Dive On A’s Seeking Approval From Las Vegas Stadium Board To Play Seven Neutral Site ‘Home’ Games
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Shop at Jay’s Market at 190 East Flamingo Road at the Koval Lane intersection east of the Strip (especially after F1 and Clark County install a temporary bridge in front of his story in mid-October.)
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By Alan Snel, LVSportsBiz.com Publisher-Writer
Jeremy Koo thought something was off.
The A’s fan was surprised to hear that the Athletics were looking to get the Las Vegas Stadium Authority Board to sign off on a non-relocation agreement to allow the A’s to play as many as seven annual Las Vegas “home” games at other MLB neutral sites. Typically, a team might play a special one-off game or two overseas games a year. And example would be a marketing matchup like the Field of Dreams game that drew the Yankees and White Sox to a Iowa cornfield in August 2021. The Mets and Phillies, for example, are playing in London this weekend.
But as many as seven neutral “home” games for the A’s after they moved into the Vegas stadium in 2028? That does seem high.
So, Koo, a 36-year-old lawyer in Sacramento, wrote the Las Vegas stadium board about his concerns eight days ago, especially about the potential loss of revenues to pay back public stadium bonds if the A’s home games were played in a non-Vegas setting.
LVSportsBiz.com caught up with Koo to dive into this issue even more. Here is our Q and A:
LVSportsBiz.com: What is motivating yourself to take such a close interest in the A’s stadium story in Vegas?
Jeremy Koo: I’ve been thinking about that lately because I’m someone that accepts the A’s are gone from Oakland now that they’re going to West Sacramento next year, so there shouldn’t be a reason for me to care about what happens in Vegas in terms of keeping the team in Oakland. But I think there are three main reasons for me staying so closely interested.
First, I, along with many other Oakland A’s fans, feel betrayed by Fisher and Kaval now that they’ve abandoned the “Rooted in Oakland” message that Dave Kaval preached when he came on board before the 2017 season. Seven years ago, when I was still writing at athleticsnation.com, I wrote this after a Q&A session Kaval did with fan site bloggers because Kaval was such a refreshing change of pace from Lew Wolff:
https://www.athleticsnation.
Six years and one pandemic later, Fisher and Kaval made me and my fellow Oakland A’s fans deeply unhappy, and so there is an element of schadenfreude in wanting to make Fisher and Kaval feel even a fraction of that unhappiness.
The second reason is a personal quirk—I enjoy visiting Las Vegas anyway, have enjoyed it since I got into the poker boom before the FBI shut down the online poker rooms in the US in 2011. I’m usually looking for an event to bring me there nowadays. In the last few years, I’ve become a fan of the Philadelphia Flyers and Vancouver Canucks, and I’ve enjoyed several games against the Golden Knights at T-Mobile Arena. So why not visit for Nevada Supreme Court arguments or Stadium Authority Board meetings?
But the third, and most important, reason is that this new stadium deal in Vegas, and the one in Tampa, will establish what will be the standard deal between MLB teams and local governments building new stadiums. This is the first MLB team that’s moved in 20 years—the first in the social media era and the second since the Internet came into wide use. It comes at a time when a lot of local municipalities already hosting major sports teams are facing lease renewals, stadium renovation or construction demands, and threats of relocation.
The basic stadium taxpayer deal has always been that to protect the taxpayer investment, the team promises to play all their games at the stadium the taxpayer builds, with some allowances for one-off special events. When localities begin giving away what is the central point of a non-relocation agreement, it makes it easier for the next team to point at that agreement and say, “What makes you better than Vegas?” Vegas should be asking why it’s being offered terms worse than Atlanta and Miami and not being compensated for it.
Other A’s fans are better suited than I am to organize fan-run events like last year’s Reverse Boycott and this year’s Fans Fest. I’m better suited, as someone who watched and attended the proceedings in Carson City last year, to make sure that the A’s are at minimum held to what the A’s and their representatives told the Nevada Legislature.
What motivates me is that if I didn’t bring my particular set of skills as a practicing attorney to bear on the civil discourse around the Vegas stadium, I would always wonder if I could have done anything to stop John Fisher from running over the people representing Nevadans, my neighbors, in these negotiations.
LVSB: Why do you think the A’s fans still in the Bay area and In California seem to be much more expressive about the stadium in Vegas than even the Vegas people?
JK: Being a fan of the A’s despite their owners informs a lot of this generation’s Bay Area A’s fan culture. Bay Area A’s fans have been dealing with stadium issues and cheap owners for 30 years, since the Raiders returned to Oakland and ruined the beautiful view of the East Bay Hills for extra seating that went largely unused anyway, and then since the Haas family sold the A’s to Steve Schott and Ken Hofmann in 1995. Michael Lewis didn’t call his book Moneyball because Billy Beane had money to spend.
Before SB1 passed, the involvement of A’s fans in this Vegas stadium process was in some part about making sure the epitaph of the Oakland A’s isn’t, “The fans never showed up.” I think people recognize now that Fisher and Kaval betrayed Oakland’s fans.
When John Fisher took over management from Lew Wolff and appointed Dave Kaval the A’s president, they instilled a lot of hope that the fan experience was going to improve and that they were going to present realistic proposals to build a new stadium, either near Laney College in Oakland, at the Coliseum itself, or at Howard Terminal. The team that had been flirting with Fremont and San Jose was now going to be “Rooted in Oakland.” After trying and failing at Laney College in Oakland, after getting the Raiders out of the picture, and after coming to the precipice of a mediated agreement at Howard Terminal, Fisher and Kaval walked away. And they told Nevada news outlets about it before they told the Mayor of Oakland. Those choices betrayed the good faith of all the people in Oakland that Fisher and Kaval had called upon to bring a new Oakland stadium to reality.
But now I think Oakland A’s fans are inspired by how they have changed the narrative about themselves by shining a spotlight on John Fisher and Dave Kaval’s actions. I think A’s fans will continue to do so until Fisher sells the A’s.
LVSB: What is your background — where did you grow up and how long have you been an A’s fan? How did you become an A’s fan and how old are you?
JK: I’m 36 years old and I reside in Sacramento, California. I grew up in Alameda, Calif., just a 15-minute drive from the Oakland Coliseum. I’ve been an Oakland A’s fan at least as long as I can remember, 32 years or so. I unfortunately don’t remember the Oakland A’s winning a World Series when I was two years old. I guess I never will.
I’ve been a practicing attorney for nearly a decade as a litigator. I’d like to think my experiences help me pick up on internal contradictions like the A’s telling one branch of government in one year that A’s games will bring tax revenue and economic activity to a city, especially during the slower summer season, and then tell another branch of government the next year that actually whether the A’s play games or not doesn’t matter for tax revenue and economic activity. That skill certainly helps in my day job when impeaching someone’s credibility.
LVSB: Do you think your attention to details as a lawyer also was evident in you wanting to clarify the A’s out-of-Vegas games?
JK: I’d like to think that anybody who testifies as to factual information to a government body and later learns they made an honest mistake as to a fact would send a correction promptly after learning of it. In my case, the difference between 6-7 games and 7-8 games doesn’t materially affect my view that the A’s should account for what it told the Legislature about how playing 75-76 MLB games instead of 82 MLB games (1 preseason and 81 regular season) it was bringing to Las Vegas would bring hundreds of thousands of new visitors and hundreds of millions of new economic activity every year that would not exist but for the Athletics.
I also know that not being from Nevada, I start out in a deficit when it comes to trust. That’s why, even though I acknowledge that I have a bias and I am advocating for the Board to take certain steps, I was careful to cite my sources in my comment letter and urge a course of action that falls within what the Legislature envisioned the Board was going to do in negotiating a non-relocation agreement when it insisted on writing a specific annual donation number into the statutory requirements of the community benefits plan.
When the A’s start chipping away at the concrete benefits they themselves said would come from those games in the name of building the A’s brand elsewhere, then the people of Nevada, the officials they’ll be electing in November, and the officials on the stadium authority board appointed by some of those elected officials should ask themselves this: Is this the deal they signed up for or is it yet another Fisher-Kaval bait-and-switch Oakland A’s fans like myself warned Vegas to beware?
