How Rep. Barbara Lee tried to save the Oakland Athletics

Rep. Barbara Lee, wearing an A's shirt and cap, waves her arms on the baseball field

Staff Writer

Sept. 24, 2024 7:14 AM PT

After 57 years, the Athletics’ time in Oakland is down to three days. The final home series starts Tuesday.

The A’s are moving: to Sacramento for the short term, then to Las Vegas. Thursday’s sold-out finale is a definitive retort to the plaintive cry among Oakland fans: Is there anyone that can stop this move?

No, but Rep. Barbara Lee tried.

Fifteen months ago, on the day before Nevada legislators approved $380 million in public funding toward a new Las Vegas ballpark, Lee introduced a bill in Congress designed to stop the A’s from moving — or, at the least, impose an exit fee substantial enough that they might want to think twice before leaving.

Lee, the longtime Democratic congresswoman from Oakland, even included a knowing nod to A’s history in her effort. She dubbed her bill the “Moneyball Act.”

It was a news story for one day. Nothing ever happened with the bill after that. On Monday, I spoke with Lee about why.

When someone in Congress is unhappy with Major League Baseball, the reaction is predictable: Summon the media, issue a very public threat to repeal the sport’s cherished antitrust exemption, challenge Rob Manfred. I mean, who gets upset at painting Manfred, the commissioner, as the bad guy? Taking one for the owners is basically in Manfred’s job description.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is about as liberal as you get in Congress, threatened the exemption over the league killing what turned out to be 43 minor league teams. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who is about as conservative as you get in Congress, threatened the exemption over the league moving the All-Star Game out of Atlanta after Georgia adopted laws that critics said amounted to voter suppression.

Nothing happened either way. If anything ever gets too serious, the league deploys its lobbyists. Since 1950, according to Indiana University professor Nathaniel Grow, Congress has held more than 60 hearings to debate Major League Baseball’s antitrust exemption, never repealing it.

So Lee proposed this: MLB teams love to talk up the economic impact they deliver to their communities, many of which have contributed taxpayer dollars to ballpark construction. Therefore, any team moving out of town would have to repay its community, in an amount equal to the state and local taxes it had paid over the previous 10 years.

If a team did not pay, then the league would lose its antitrust exemption.

“That’s only fair,” Lee said. “That’s the only fair way to do it. You’ve got to compensate the community, because the community has invested a heck of a lot.”

Lee said she had no idea how much the A’s might have been forced to pay. She said the concept was to legalize a framework rather than a formula, since state and local taxation varies among communities.

A city of Oakland flag flies at Oakland Alameda Coliseum before a game between the Athletics and the Rockies.

“We didn’t have any actual idea of what the money would look like,” she said. “We didn’t get that far. It would have to be determined by the local jurisdictions.”

Lee was optimistic about lining up support in Washington, even if she could not tell a fellow legislator what the financial impact of her bill might be. After all, a community could lose a team whether its representative was a Democrat or a Republican, and teams besides the A’s were making noises about potential moves.

The first step for her bill would have been a hearing in the House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan, the Ohio Republican.

Ohio has two small-market MLB teams — the Cincinnati Reds and Cleveland Guardians — and Cleveland’s NFL team once moved to Baltimore. Yet Jordan neither co-sponsored Lee’s bill nor permitted the committee hearing required for the bill to move forward.

I asked a Jordan spokeswoman whether he would support the bill; the spokeswoman said she would check but did not get back to me. But, of the 434 other members of the House, Lee could find only four to co-sponsor the bill. The more co-sponsors you have, the more likely your bill can advance.

“Getting co-sponsors also requires you have an outside strategy, with outside activists or people with money to push things forward, or an organized effort,” Lee said. “There was no organized effort for this on the outside at all. We would have had to build that kind of support.”

That kind of support generally requires an established organization for experience, logistics and financing.

Still, why could Lee not have mobilized an A’s fan base that donated to a Nevada teachers union trying to stop public funding for the Las Vegas ballpark, organized creative and crowded protests in Oakland, and inundated Lee’s office with telephone calls?

“When people learn about it, at the grassroots level, at the community level, they like it, but that takes a heck of a lot of organizing,” Lee said. “I don’t think they were organized for a national effort.”

To be clear, amid the partisan dysfunction of Washington, the result might not have been any different even with a well-organized, well-funded national effort.

Lee tried. The A’s are goners anyway.

Does one of the most powerful Americans, a 26-year congressional representative, feel powerless here?

“No, no, no,” Lee said. “I’ve lost a lot. But I’ve won a lot also. I don’t feel powerless, nor do I feel hopeless. We put up a good fight. The city put up a good fight, the county, everyone.

“Unfortunately, we are losing a team that really, in the day, exemplified Black excellence in Oakland. It’s more than just the team leaving. It’s a part of Oakland’s history, and our culture.”

Thursday is the end. I asked Lee how she was feeling about it, and she recited the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. So I asked her which stage she was experiencing.

“Nowhere near acceptance,” she said, “that’s for darn sure.”