OAKLAND - RingCentral Coliseum (63,132)

mrakbaseball said:

The Raiders to make a " capacity adjustment" at the Coliseum. Tarping Mt. Davis and several sections of the original upper deck grandstand to reduce the capacity to around 51,000.

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We have seen this coming for a while. The end of the Oakland Coliseum, aka O.co, lease and the plans for the building of Famers field in Los Angeles on a collision course. Whether the team stays in Oakland will be wholly dependent on the level of support they receive from the city of Oakland with regard to building a new stadium in the area.

The Raiders are doing what they have to do to try and keep the team in Oakland. The latest gesture is the final of many over the past couple years.

http://www.silverandblackpride.com/...ng-raiders-with-final-attempt-to-stay-oakland

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A's finalize 10-yr lease extension for O.co. Selig calls it "crucial 1st step towards keeping MLB in Oakland"

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Athletics will continue to call O.co Coliseum their home over the next decade. While some will still likely debate whether or not it was the right decision, it is still home to tradition and excellence for the last several seasons.

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-DAVIS: It’s not just what I want to do, it’s what the developers want to do as well. They feel the same way as I do that in order to do a really comprehensive building development there, you have to tear the Coliseum down to start with. You can’t be putting the stadium in a corner here–because of infrastructure and all that. And I keep bringing that word up, but it’s a key word in this process. So the stadium’s got to come down. So it does make a problem, there’s no two ways about it.

The A’s lease is up in 2015. If we could come to a deal with Colony Capital to build a football stadium there, we would like to be able to tear that Oakland Coliseum down the minute the 2015 baseball season’s over. And that would get us into a stadium by 2019, I believe. On that site. Colony Capital, if in fact they’re going to go ahead and do this deal, they need to start building as well, some of the things that they want. So it’s a tough situation. I’ve said that if the A’s were going to buy in and the A’s say yeah, we want to build on this site as well, I’m all for it. Let’s build two stadiums and let’s do it. Selfishly I would like to be the only one there, but for the good of everybody, I’m all for it. Let’s do it. But make a commitment to it if you want. But it doesn’t look like it’s going to fit. Lew’s vision and Colony Capital’s vision don’t seem to mesh. So that’s where the problem is. If Lew Wolff was going to do the development there and build a stadium and the Raiders wanted to do it as well, we’d still have to find that $500M funding gap.

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Oakland officials abruptly dropped their opposition, if only temporarily, Thursday to help approve a 10-year stadium lease for the Athletics, hours after the A's owner informed city and county leaders that Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig gave the team permission to immediately seek a new home outside Oakland.

The stunning revelation was made by A's co-owner Lew Wolff in a 10 p.m. e-mail to officials Wednesday, in which he wrote that Selig authorized an immediate move for the team because of Oakland officials' "political maneuvering" that blindsided the A's and jeopardized a lease deal the team had agreed to with the board that manages the O.co Coliseum.

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Leverage is probably the wrong word, but cities like Oakland do have it, particularly when a team wants to remain in a market.

San Francisco gave itself leverage by repeatedly saying no to the Giants, and got a much better deal as a result.

Oakland is in a huge TV market which is one of the few in the US to be adding significant wealth (both individual and corporate). Oakland also provides access to extremely lucrative TV cable deals (which act like a TV tax in support of organized professional baseball). Moving to Sacramento (or even Portland) gives none of those benefits, since this is where the real money is.

Strange as it may seem, other than San Jose, there is probably no city in the US that would provide a better deal than what they are getting now, no matter what the condition of the stadium.

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Wolff said the only step the A's have taken to look for a new home is investigating whether they could play temporarily at an under-construction soccer stadium in San Jose. The 18,000-seat stadium is being built for the San Jose Earthquakes, which Wolff co-owns.

The Montreal Expos played in 66,000-seat Olympic Stadium before leaving for Washington, D.C., following the 2004 season. Without elaborating, Wolff said he didn't think it would meet the team's needs.

San Antonio is home to the Alamodome, a 65,000-seat domed stadium used mainly for football. It has hosted exhibition baseball games, but with a right-field fence that is a mere 280 feet from home plate - closer than any outfield fence in the major leagues.

Wolff also expressed doubt that the NFL's Oakland Raiders would be ready to tear down the Coliseum next year and build a new, football-only stadium by 2018. A memo sent to Quan by planners for a city-backed sports-retail complex called Coliseum City said they hope to have a stadium deal by the end of the summer that would require demolishing the Coliseum next year.

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Because outdoor sports stadiums are often money losers and Oakland can’t afford to help pay for them, any new stadium development in the city is expected to include shops, a hotel and offices to subsidize the project. Sports economists have questioned whether the A’s and Raiders would want to work together because a second stadium would remove land that could be used for more profitable development.

“The probability of Coliseum City working financially and some team committing to it would be greater if there was only one team involved,” Stanford University Economics Professor Emeritus Roger Noll said when asked about the development in April.

In other words, it’s clearer than ever now that both owners’ business plans involve extracting as much as possible in negotiations over the Coliseum site, not just in public money, but in development rights to land, which in the suddenly hot Oakland real estate market could be more valuable than any old sports stadium. Which explains both why Davis is insisting on the A’s eviction at the earlier possible time, and why Wolff is eager to get a lease extension signed that would force the Raiders to wait (two years, anyway) on their stadium plans: The owners aren’t just negotiating with Oakland for the best possible deal, they’re competing with each other not just for sports market share, but for dibs on a mammoth piece of prime real estate.

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Infrastructure costs, plain and simple.

Ever since people have talked about building another venue on the Coliseum site, that talk has gotten shut down by the costs associated with relocating utilities, most famously the power lines that run through the complex. While such costs are a low percentage of the overall project cost, the fact is that they would have to be dealt with upfront. And since upfront costs often have to be borne by the team while the public financing piece gets squared away, it’s a budget item that no team owner wants to deal with if he can avoid it.

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And if Oakland gives the Raiders preference to the Coliseum site instead? Or rejects Wolff's idea? Or finds another way to screw up things? Then he turns to the new MLB commissioner and demands to either share AT&T Park with the Giants or finally receive approval for a San Jose move.

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mrakbaseball said:

Lipstick on a pig via https://twitter.com/KenDeCelle

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Wolff's acceptance closes a bitter divide between Oakland City Hall and the owners of a baseball team who have longed to move to a new, modern stadium in a bigger market. The agreement, however difficult, may also usher in an effort by Wolff to help develop the existing stadium site.

In a letter to City Administrator Henry Gardner last week, Wolff informed city officials of his interest in pursuing a new stadium at the O.co site, and the lease agreement says the team will "engage in good faith discussions" to stay in Oakland.

But if he were to decide to move the team outside Oakland, the lease allows the A's to leave as early as December 2017 by giving two years' notice. The team, however, would have to pay rent for any remaining years on the lease.

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