Mark Davis isn’t a fan of the A’s moving to Las Vegas
Oakland wasn’t big enough for the Raiders and the A’s. The owner of the football team thinks Las Vegas isn’t, either.
Mark Davis doesn’t like the fact that the A’s plan to join the Raiders in Sin City. And Davis isn’t bashful about saying so.
Via John Katsilometes of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Davis sounded off on the plan to bring the A’s to the town the Raiders now call home.
Davis holds a grudge regarding the way the A’s handled things when the two teams shared a venue in Oakland.
“I won’t forget what they did to us in Oakland,” Davis told Katsilometes on Thursday. “They squatted on a lease for 10 years and made it impossible for us to build on that stadium. . . They were looking for a stadium. We were looking for a stadium. They didn’t want to build a stadium, and then went ahead and signed a 10-year lease with the city of Oakland and said, ‘We’re the base team.’”
That move, in Davis’s mind, killed the Raiders’ chances of remaining in Oakland.
“They marketed the team as ‘Rooted in Oakland,’ that’s been their mantra through the whole thing,” Davis said. “The slogans they’ve been using have been a slap to the face of the Raiders, and they were trying to win over that type of mentality in the Bay Area. Well all they did was fuck the Bay Area.”
Davis got what he wanted, a sweetheart deal for a taxpayer stadium in an arguably better market. But he still blames the A’s for the relocation of the Raiders.
“For them to leave Oakland without anything is pretty [screwed] up,” Davis said. “Because that site that the stadium was on was a good site. . . . We ended up in Las Vegas, which is absolutely fantastic and couldn’t be better. But the A’s never gave us a real good chance to stay up in Oakland.”
If/when the A’s come to town, Davis has no interest in cooperating with the baseball team.
“Not with that management group,” Davis said. “I just have, again, a lot of personal animosity toward the front office. But with a new management group? Absolutely.”
Hey, at least the Raiders and the A’s won’t have to pretend to support each other, like every other football team does when the local baseball team is playing, and vice-versa. They act like they get along because they have to, but they’re ultimately competing for the same hearts, minds, and wallets in their shared market. For the citizens who have limited discretionary dollars, local teams in different sports necessarily are trying to get a bigger percentage of it for tickets and merchandise, even if they will never admit it publicly.
Davis and the Raiders clearly won’t have that problem once the A’s come to town. It could make things interesting in the coming years, if/when the A’s officially join the Raiders as both former residents of Oakland — and current residents of Las Vegas.
Mark Davis isn’t a fan of the A’s moving to Las Vegas originally appeared on Pro Football Talk
