The A’s have a new 10-year lease. Unless they don’t.
A week after the team and Major League Baseball proclaimed that the A’s would play at O.co Coliseum for the next decade, Oakland officals are poised to vote against the deal, which would kill it. And that could make the Raiders happy.
Via the San Francisco Chronicle, the four city representatives to the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Authority are expected to vote against the proposed lease on Thursday.
“The [city] council directed us to vote against it,” said Larry Reid, one of the representatives to the Authority. “This process has been extremely frustrating for me. I just hope Major League Baseball and the A’s can have a little more patience with this council.”
A’s co-owner Lew Wolff doesn’t seem to be inclined to renegotiate the terms of a deal that he personally has declared to be done.
“We believe in our dealings with the [Joint Powers Authority that] we are 100 percent finished,” Wolff said. “We have a 14-month negotiation finished and approved by Major League Baseball and the JPA. If someone wants to do something else, we have no interest in that. . . . If we don’t get a positive vote, we’ll be very sad after 14 months of negotiations.”
It’s sad that he’d use a word like “sad” to express his frustrations regarding the city’s reluctance to finalize what could be a bad deal for the city. No deal is done until it’s done, and it’s now obvious that Wolff prematurely announced that the lease deal was done to pressure Oakland into agreeing to it.
The current least expires after the 2015 season. If the A’s move, it could become easier to keep the Raiders — since the Raiders really don’t like the dirt infield that comes from sharing the stadium.
Lost in the talk regarding new leases for the current stadium is that both the A’s and Raiders want new venues.
