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Reggie Jackson Blames City of Oakland for A’s Intended Move to Vegas

With the A’s apparently ready to move from Oakland to Las Vegas, Reggie Jackson said there’s no one to blame except the city government in Oakland.

“You’re going to lose the team,” Jackson said when reached by phone Thursday. “The city, I thought, really needed to do something. Save the A’s. You lost the Warriors. You lost the Raiders. What the hell’s wrong with you? You can’t see that coming? The fans don’t deserve that.

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“I blame the people running the deal. You’ve got to keep the team for the benefit of the city. They lost all three of them.”

Jackson was Mr. Oakland before he was Mr. October, winning three consecutive World Series titles there from 1972-74. He left Oakland for Baltimore in a trade in 1976, later signing with the New York Yankees in 1977 as a free agent, where he won two more titles.

His three homers on successive pitches in Game 6’s 1977 World Series clincher over the Los Angeles Dodgers earned him the nickname, Mr. October.

Though he went into the National Baseball Hall of Fame on the first ballot in 1993 as a Yankee, Jackson, now a top advisor to Houston Astros owner Jim Crane, is never too far away from the A’s situation. He hit 269 of his 563 career homers wearing the gold and green A’s colors.

Jackson said he tried to buy the team in 2005 when Steve Schott and Ken Hoffman sold it to John Fisher and Lew Wolff for $180 million. According to Sportico’s latest valuations, the team is now worth $1.31 billion.

“I was the higher bidder, but we didn’t get the team,” Jackson said.

Neither did Warriors owner Joe Lacob, whose bid was also shunned in lieu of Fisher and Wolff, the latter an old frat buddy of then-commissioner Bud Selig during their days at University of Wisconsin. Wolff left the franchise as a minority owner in 2016 after stadium initiatives in Belmont and San Jose collapsed.

He was replaced as president by Dave Kaval, who failed to get a stadium built at Laney College and the Howard Terminal. The A’s have now committed to purchase 49 acres of land in Vegas to build a new $1.5 billion, 30,000 seat ballpark with a partial dome, located just north of Allegiant Stadium, where the NFL’s Raiders play. The Raiders left Oakland in 2020, the Warriors to San Francisco in 2019.

“Bud didn’t give me the team, and I think we could’ve gotten something done in Oakland,” Jackson said. “In the same sentence, I think the Fishers did their best trying to get something done. At the same time, no matter how wealthy you are, you can’t continue to lose money every year. So, you have to go whether you want to stay or not. I always thought they bought the team to try to keep it there.”

The A’s have said they spent $175 million over the course of six years through the process of acquiring a myriad number of permits, filing environmental reports and obtaining approval of local agencies, but did not come to terms on a deal with the Oakland City Council.

Jackson said the $12 billion ballpark and village project at Howard Terminal was fraught with problems. Oakland could not find the money to meet infrastructure demands in the neighborhood surrounding the Howard Terminal without harming local taxpayers. The A’s, who own 50% of the Coliseum, determined that site was a non-starter.

Jackson doesn’t agree and said the outcome is not surprising.

“I’d put it right where it is,” Jackson said. “Downtown is not going to work. Downtown is never going to get done. There’s no ingress or egress. You can’t get in or out of there. If that creates an impasse, now you’re at where you are at.

“But [moving] has just been a matter of time. And it’s way overdue, way overdue.”

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