Baseball Has Been Moving Teams Since 1903
The Oakland Athletics are not the first Major League Baseball franchise to change cities. They are not even the first franchise to change cities twice. The history of MLB relocation is a long, complicated, often painful record of economic forces, stadium politics, ownership decisions, and the collision between a sport's mythological attachment to place and the mundane financial realities of running a professional sports franchise. The A's move to Las Vegas sits in that history, and understanding where it fits requires knowing what came before it.
The Wholesale Moves of 1953 to 1958
The most concentrated period of franchise relocation in baseball history occurred in the late 1950s, when the geography of Major League Baseball was fundamentally redrawn. Before 1953, all sixteen MLB teams were concentrated in the northeastern and midwestern United States. Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Chicago, Cincinnati, Detroit, St. Louis. The west coast did not exist on baseball's map.
The Boston Braves moved to Milwaukee in 1953, becoming the first franchise to relocate since 1903. The Philadelphia Athletics -- the same franchise now in Las Vegas -- moved to Kansas City in 1955, responding to competition from the Phillies and the deteriorating financial position of owner Connie Mack's family. The Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles and the New York Giants moved to San Francisco in 1958, the most seismic pair of moves in the sport's history and still the most emotionally resonant franchise relocation story in American sports.
The Brooklyn Dodgers comparison is the one that hangs most heavily over the Oakland situation. Brooklyn fans in 1958 felt the same betrayal that Oakland fans felt in 2023: a team that was woven into the identity of a community, owned by a man who prioritized profit over history, departing for a larger market with no genuine effort made to stay. Owner Walter O'Malley has been the villain in the Brooklyn story for more than sixty years. John Fisher will likely occupy a similar role in the Oakland story for a similar period.
The Kansas City and Milwaukee Chapters
The Kansas City Athletics, after arriving from Philadelphia in 1955, spent thirteen years in Missouri before moving to Oakland in 1968. During their Kansas City years, the franchise was widely acknowledged as a de facto farm team for the New York Yankees, regularly trading promising players to New York for cash and veterans. Charlie Finley bought the team in 1960 and eventually orchestrated the Oakland move, which proved to be the right decision for the franchise even if it created another set of abandoned fans.
Milwaukee's Braves moved to Atlanta in 1966, just thirteen years after arriving from Boston. The pattern -- team arrives, wins early, attendance declines, ownership seeks better terms elsewhere -- repeated itself on a shorter timeline than it had in Brooklyn. Atlanta became a viable baseball market as the American South urbanized. Milwaukee eventually got another franchise, the expansion Brewers, in 1969.
The Expansion Era and the Washington Story
The 1960s expansion brought new franchises to new markets and also produced another relocation: the original Washington Senators moved to Dallas-Fort Worth in 1972 and became the Texas Rangers. Washington was immediately given a replacement team, the expansion Senators, which was itself a historical oddity -- a city losing its team and receiving an inferior replacement while the original franchise profited elsewhere.
Washington did not get genuine major league baseball back until 2005, when the Montreal Expos relocated to become the Washington Nationals. The Expos' story is one of the most tragic in the sport: a franchise that was genuinely beloved in Montreal, capable of competing for championships in the early 1990s, systematically dismantled through shared ownership by MLB itself after private ownership collapsed, then moved out of Canada entirely. The Washington Nationals have been successful on the field, winning a World Series in 2019. The Montreal market has never recovered.
Where the A's Move Fits in This History
The Athletics' relocation to Las Vegas has several characteristics that make it distinct from most historical precedents. First, the Las Vegas destination is genuinely unprecedented -- no MLB franchise has previously been placed in a market this small by traditional broadcast metrics, this dependent on tourism, and this far from the franchise's historical footprint. Second, the Sacramento interim arrangement has no real historical parallel. Teams have played in temporary venues before, but a three-year residency in a Triple-A stadium while waiting for a Strip stadium to be built is genuinely new.
The comparison that most analysts reach for is the Raiders' move from Oakland to Las Vegas in 2020, also approved by the league over the objections of a community that had supported the franchise for decades. That comparison is imperfect -- football and baseball have different relationships with their cities -- but the political and emotional dynamics are similar.
What History Suggests About the Las Vegas Future
The historical record on franchise relocations is clear on one point: new cities eventually build new fan bases. The Dodgers are beloved in Los Angeles in a way that is not diminished by what happened in Brooklyn. The Nationals have genuine Washington fans who have no connection to Montreal. The Athletics will have genuine Las Vegas fans who will be defined entirely by what happens on the Strip, not by anything that happened at the Oakland Coliseum.
The Oakland fans who feel abandoned are expressing a legitimate grief, and that grief is real and permanent for many of them. But the Las Vegas chapter of Athletics history is beginning. The relocation is done. What comes next is the work of building something new.
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