After three years of battling in federal court with Major League Baseball, San Jose struck out from getting the Oakland A’s to move to the South Bay.
The Supreme Court refused to hear San Jose’s appeal of antitrust against Major League Baseball (MLB) to allow the city to build a stadium in the South Bay for the Athletics, according to the San Jose Mercury News.
San Jose filed the lawsuit three years ago against the MLB when the approval for the new ballpark was stalled. When the A’s ownership announced plans to move to San Jose, the San Francisco Giants blocked the city from building the ballpark. When the Giants built AT&T park in 2000, it also reserved the territorial rights in the South Bay. As a result, San Jose filed an antitrust lawsuit against the MLB for hindering its approval for the new ballpark for the A’s.
Oakland A’s owners, Lewis Wolff and John Fisher, have been looking to get their baseball team a new stadium for a while. Built in 1968 by the Oakland-Alameda County, the Coliseum Stadium has been notorious for broken pipes and flooding in the dugouts. Due to the run-down conditions both the Raiders and the A’s, who share the stadium, have been in recent talks to move out.
Since both Wolff and Fisher are also owners of the San Jose Earthquakes soccer team, moving the A’s to the South Bay would have been ideal for them. Now with the Earthquakes settled in the newly built Avaya Stadium, the prospective downtown ballpark for the A’s would have been the city’s gem in downtown. San Jose would have become home to three professional sports teams.
The team’s owners are currently looking to make negotiations with the city of Oakland for a new ballpark. The A’s are in a 10-year lease contract with the city. According to the San Jose Mercury News, the A’s have already had meetings with Oakland city officials and architects to draft designs for a new stadium.
Oakland is at risk of losing its professional sports teams: the Golden State Warriors’ are to move to San Francisco’s Mission Bay and the Oakland Raiders are in talks to move back to Los Angeles. As of now, the A’s could be the only sports team to remain in Oakland.
In September 2015, Oakland developers were in talks of building “Coliseum City” in East Oakland as an effort to keep the city’s sports teams in the East Bay. According to head developer Floyd Kephart, the 120-acre development would have three new facilities that would be owned by the teams. As claimed by Bay City News, the reality for Coliseum City is at 50-50 odds of being built from taxes from commercial development, which will cost $4 billion dollars over the next 10 to 15 years under its development. The plan’s fate will be decided this month by Oakland and Alameda county officials.
The A’s have brought four World Series Champions back home to Oakland Coliseum Stadium. No matter where the team moves, its fans will follow and sport the yellow and green, hoping that their East Bay team will bring back another World Series title.
