A’s Escape From California, but for All the Wrong Reasons

New in PJ Media:

I want to see people escape from California as much as the next guy, but this is ridiculous.

Gov. Gavin Newsom and his henchmen have been busy making the state unlivable for quite some time now, and their efforts have borne fruit as the California Socialist Republic is experiencing an unprecedented decline in population. Against that backdrop, I assumed for a long time that when the Oakland Athletics (which is nominally a major league baseball team) were making rumblings about moving to Las Vegas, it was because woke bureaucrats in Oakland were entangling the team’s efforts to build a new stadium in a forest of bureaucratic red tape, thus demonstrating their contempt for something so bourgeois as professional sports. I was wrong.

Perhaps in a last-ditch effort to do something, anything, to save a city that is dying by their own hand, Oakland officials have made a good-faith attempt to keep the A’s. A’s ownership and management, on the other hand, have made secret deals, broken their word, and demonstrated a consistent scorn for their fan base.

The story of the A’s move to Las Vegas is one of corporate contempt for ordinary Americans, with the A’s management behaving more like the tyrants of the Biden regime or Big Tech than like patriots yearning to get out of the once-Golden State just so they could breathe free. Athletics owner John Fisher and president Dave Kaval have behaved so badly in all this that they make Oakland’s left-of-Stalin mayor, Sheng Thao, into the hero of the story.

ESPN told the whole nauseating story Tuesday in a massive, nearly 7,000-word article that goes into immense detail about how the A’s management, while cynically adopting “Rooted In Oakland” as a slogan and putting up a pretense of negotiating with the city of Oakland for a new ballpark, secretly entered into a binding agreement with Las Vegas to move the team there. The article opens with Thao getting a call from Kaval, who cavalierly told her at a time when she thought that the team and the city were still in negotiations, “Hey, just a heads-up. Somebody leaked to the press that we have a binding deal with Vegas.”

This completely blindsided Thao, who had engaged in exhaustive negotiations with the A’s and had even told her chief of staff, shortly before Kaval’s call came in, “I really think we’re going to get this over the finish line.” What’s more, says ESPN, Kaval’s call “came after no breakdown in talks, no stalled process, no contentious back and forth.” Fisher and Kaval were keeping up negotiations with Oakland just to avoid a media firestorm while taking concrete steps to seal the deal with Las Vegas as quickly as possible.

There is more. Read the rest here.