Mark Davis, the owner of the Las Vegas Raiders, thought he had rid himself of the Oakland A’s. But it appears the MLB team is following their former “roommates” to Sin City.
That’s how Davis refers to the A’s. The two teams used to share a stadium — the Oakland Coliseum — in Northern California, so therefore they roomed together. Mark Davis still blames the A’s for the Raiders leaving Oakland. And NFL fans still are getting used to the idea that black and silver Raider Nation now resides in Vegas after spending nearly a half century in Oakland. The team moved to spiffy, state-of-the-art Allegiant Stadium in 2020. The venue cost nearly $2 billion and will be the site of next year’s Super Bowl.
But Mark Davis, who inherited the Raiders from his father, “Just Win, Baby” Al Davis, still feels bitter towards the A’s.
“I won’t forget what they did to us in Oakland,” Davis told the Las Vegas Review Journal “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.’”
Mark Davis Blames A’s for Raiders Leaving Oakland
That move, in Davis’s mind, killed the Raiders’ chances of remaining in Oakland. Because of the A’s lease, the football team couldn’t renovate the aging coliseum, which opened in 1966. So Mark Davis started looking elsewhere to move his Raiders.
“They marketed the team as ‘Rooted in Oakland,’ that’s been their mantra through the whole thing,” Davis told the Review-Journal. “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 fxxk the Bay Area.”
News broke earlier this week that the A’s bought a 49-acre parcel of land west of the Vegas strip with the intent of building a new stadium. The site is the current home of the Wild Wild West hotel and casino. The proposed stadium features a retractable roof and would seat 30,000 fans. The initial cost is projected at $1.5 billion.
And Mark Davis continued to blast the A’s because of all those residual feelings back when the Raiders resided in Oakland.
“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.”
And Davis has no plans of working with the A’s if they do end up in Vegas. Maybe the bitterness goes away. Davis said he doesn’t dislike the A’s, just the management group.
“I just have, again, a lot of personal animosity toward the front office,” Davis said. “But with a new management group? Absolutely.”
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