In a new memoir, Lew Wolff, the 90-year-old real-estate developer who owned a partial share of the Oakland Athletics for about a decade, pegs the blame for the team’s departure from Oakland not on the A’s themselves, but on the “despicable” behavior of their crosstown rivals, the San Francisco Giants.
Wolff writes in “Moments” that the A’s are no longer in the Bay Area “100 percent due to the nasty, shameful, and continuing opposition of the Giants,” who refused to relent territorial rights to Santa Clara County. That area includes San Jose, the most populous city in the Bay Area, which Wolff’s A’s coveted as a destination for their relocation.
The Giants declined comment for this story.
In the 128-page book, Wolff spends significant time on the team’s failed search for a new stadium in the Bay, creating a record of the views of a key club official from 2005 to 2015. Wolff, during that time, was the most publicly visible member of the team’s ownership group. Though he is no longer involved in the day-to-day operations of the team, Wolff said he still owns a reduced share of the club.
“My 10-year tenure with the A’s sort of disappeared. I thought we had a really good run during that period, and I wanted to really thank a lot of people,” Wolff said in a phone interview with The Athletic. “Since there’s so much activity about us leaving the state, I wanted to sort of set that record clear, whether anybody read it or not.”
But any ownership re-litigation of the team’s ugly and acrimonious move is an undertaking that will almost always fall short for those who care about the club.
For one, nothing said or written will bring the A’s back to Oakland, the franchise’s home for 57 seasons. Many of the team’s supporters are still grieving and ultimately angry at current owner John Fisher, who has held the largest share of the team since 2005. He bought out Wolff in 2016 and pulled the team out of Oakland following the 2024 season, even though a new stadium elsewhere wouldn’t be ready for years.
“I don’t think there’s anything that they can say,” said Jorge Leon, a longtime A’s season-ticket holder in Oakland and president of the sports booster group, the Oakland 68’s. “If they really cared and they really wanted to get something done here, they could assemble an ownership group, local, that can either bring the A’s back or (create an expansion franchise).”
The A’s this season are playing in a minor-league stadium in nearby Sacramento, Calif., for a second straight year, a stopover that will last at least one more season before a planned move to Las Vegas, where Fisher is building a new ballpark.
But, even if there were a retelling of the events that could satisfy A’s fans, Wolff’s likely didn’t hit that mark. He dedicated his book to two people whom Oakland fans have long blamed for the team’s departure: Fisher, “a dear and long-term friend and partner,” and former Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig, Wolff’s former fraternity brother who was in charge of the league office for much of the time the A’s searched for a new home.
“John Fisher gets blamed for things he doesn’t deserve to be blamed for,” Wolff said. “We tried everything we could think of, but the real key was we had no leverage. … The Giants’ position really, really messed us up in trying to even negotiate with Oakland.”
A’s vs. Giants
Every MLB team has a set of territorial rights that the clubs agree upon. In 1990, at a time the Giants were exploring a move out of San Francisco, the A’s, then owned by Walter Haas, granted the Giants the rights to Santa Clara County.
Wolff argues in the book that those rights were “conditional,” requiring the Giants to actually move to San Jose. If they didn’t, “Santa Clara County would revert to its prior status, and most importantly, it would not become the Giants’ exclusive domain,” Wolff writes.
The issue ended up in court. The city of San Jose sued MLB in 2013 to try to allow the A’s to move to San Jose, but lost in 2015 because of MLB’s unique antitrust exemption.
Wolff wasn’t alone in his view on territorial rights. Steve Schott — who, along with Ken Hofmann, bought the team from the Haas family in 1995 — tried to move the A’s to Santa Clara County during their 10 years of ownership.
In a recent interview with The Athletic’s Andrew Baggarly, Giants chairman Greg Johnson, whose family has been the largest shareholder in the club since 1993, said his responsibility is to protect his franchise.
“I’m a guy from the mid-Peninsula, a diehard Giants fan my whole life, and San Jose is just as close for me to drive to,” Johnson said. “We have a huge fan base there. The overlap would be large, and it would have been detrimental to the strength of this organization. And if you go back — remember when (the Giants’ Oracle Park) was built — the ownership group personally guaranteed debt on it to get it built. And a part of that was, ‘You’re not going to put a team next to us after we’re taking all the risk.’”
Wolff also directed some of his ire to a blue-ribbon panel Selig convened to study the territorial rights issue, a process that dragged on for years and that Wolff wrote was “a cruel joke.”
“What I did not realize was that the amazing individuals comprising MLB … attract, employ or have around deceitful and dangerous sycophants,” Wolff wrote. “Not all, but some. And these sycophants assassinated the A’s!”
But should Selig, whom Wolff lauds in the book, take some of the blame, considering he formed the panel?
“We were in baseball because of Bud Selig,” Wolff said. “I think Bud would admit that he might have re-looked at that situation. But he also has to balance 29 other teams and egos. But your question is right. It would have been helpful if he had understood our problem in a little more depth.”
Wolff supports the possibility of a second team returning to the Bay Area via expansion. Other cities, however, seem more probable destinations, although MLB’s process is likely years away from completion.
“Even today, for some reason, they still control the area,” Wolff said of the Giants and Santa Clara County. “So when I read about expansion — you know, Nashville and Portland and Salt Lake (City) — why isn’t the Bay Area included in that? It was a two-team market. Now it’s a one-team market.”
Johnson of the Giants told Baggarly he had no direct answer as to whether the Giants would support an expansion team in Oakland because he balances “what’s good for baseball and good for the Giants.”
Local politics
The general feeling around the Bay Area has been that Wolff was serious about moving the A’s to the South Bay. But Wolff says Santa Clara County was more of a cudgel in his negotiations with Oakland than his preferred new home for the team.
In the memoir, Wolff positioned his interest in San Jose as a possible destination for the A’s as a means of pressuring Oakland officials to finalize a new stadium for the A’s in Oakland. Wolff confirmed on the phone that this was his view.
“That is the most astute question we’ve had in 20 years. People didn’t realize I needed that (leverage),” Wolff said. “They’re nice people, but three different (Oakland) mayors basically said, ‘Yeah, well, anything you need, but what choice do you have?’ And had the Giants been more cooperative on this, we would have had a choice, in my opinion.”
Jean Quan, mayor of Oakland from 2011 to 2015, didn’t buy that outlook in an interview with The Athletic. Wolff owned property in San Jose and stood to profit if the team moved there, Quan said.
“I was offering him the (Howard Terminal waterfront) site, which we thought was the one he really wanted at one point,” Quan said. “It was very clear to me that when I was there, he was going to kill that deal no matter what, because he wanted it in San Jose, and he’d make a fortune because he owned the land all around the San Jose site.”
By email, Wolff said he “did not have any significant real estate in San Jose as I sold the majority of what I had long before I purchased the A’s. Actually, that is where I got most of my funds to make my purchase.”
Wolff wrote in the memoir that Quan was “a rather confused person in my estimation.”
“She brought in some developer offering to redo the entire Coliseum Site,” Wolff wrote, referring to the longtime home of the A’s in Oakland. “It turned out he was a waste of time — he did not perform a single thing that he had Mayor Quan believing. She likewise had no real interest in sports.”
Quan countered that she was not confused and said that while she is not a huge sports fan, she was “a pretty big booster” of the A’s. Quan felt Wolff was “arrogant” during their brief meeting.
“As a woman in politics, I’m used to arrogant men, but that’s probably one of the worst experiences I’ve ever had,” Quan said.
Spending and the future
Wolff wrote that he wound up in the A’s ownership group at the behest of Selig, who asked Wolff at a 2002 World Series game in San Francisco if he had an interest in buying a portion of the team from Hoffman and Schott.
In his own book, Schott wrote that Joe Lacob, owner of basketball’s Golden State Warriors, was close to a deal that would have given the team to him instead of Fisher and Wolff. Lacob has spoken about his interest in buying the A’s publicly, though Wolff didn’t mention Lacob’s bid in the book.
“I absolutely did not know that,” Wolff said. “There were two years before John and I actually bought the team that I was working with the team. So if that would have come up, somebody would have said something about it, but I did not know any of that.”
Wolff came to the A’s not long after the franchise gained fame for its 2002 “Moneyball” team, led by then-general manager Billy Beane. Beane’s efficiency-minded, cost-saving approach to roster building has since permeated front offices across baseball. Wolff and Fisher gave Beane an ownership stake as part of Beane’s compensation package to stay with the team in April 2005.
But while a long-term commitment was made to Beane, very rarely under Wolff’s leadership did the A’s make similar commitments to their players. The A’s, who for a time led the league in payroll under the Haas family, have often been criticized for spending too little. After Wolff left the A’s, the players’ union brought a grievance against the team (and other clubs) over their use of revenue-sharing proceeds.
In his book, Wolff wrote, “the A’s successful financial performance was not due to an MLB subsidy.”
“We tried to do as much as we could,” Wolff said by phone. “Would we have devoted 100 percent of the revenue and gone broke? I guess we could have done that.
“We were competitive. … We couldn’t fill up the stadium.”
The upper decks at the Oakland Coliseum were regularly tarped off. (Kelley L Cox / USA TODAY)
But fans have a different view of the club’s perennially poor attendance, blaming A’s ownership for not doing enough with the roster to boost attendance. Leon pointed to constant rebuilds as one of the factors that kept casual fans from attending games regularly.
“We always had to restart every other year or every four years,” Leon said.
Perhaps what’s even more stinging to A’s fans is that as the team gets set to move to Las Vegas, the organization is locking up its core players on extensions in a way it never did for the final 20 years in Oakland.
Wolff praised the planned stadium in Las Vegas that the A’s plan to occupy starting with the 2028 season.
“What John is doing there, I just toured it the other day, is magnificent,” Wolff said. “It’s beyond what I thought we could do.”
Though relocation talk for the A’s mostly centered on the South Bay for the past 30 years, the emergence of Las Vegas as a potential new home wasn’t entirely new. Talk of a move to Las Vegas actually came up as far back as the early 2000s, Wolff said.
“I think some reporters said, ‘Well, maybe they have to move,’” Wolff said. “And Las Vegas was one city, but we didn’t spend more than an hour or two on it.”
Asked if there was anything else Fisher could have done to keep the team in Oakland, Wolff said litigation was the only remaining choice. At one point, Wolff said he spoke to Al Davis, the late owner of the Oakland Raiders, about the possibility of suing MLB itself.
“The only option to us was to sue baseball,” Wolff said. “Al said, ‘Are you crazy, Lou? Just sue ’em!’ We were so honored by Bud to be in baseball. John and I talked about it, and we said we’re never going to do that.
“We might have won that case if we did, but we — neither one of us — wanted to. We wanted to be a cooperative partner in baseball. And I think we were, and are.”
In Las Vegas, politicians have approved up to $380 million in public money to help Fisher build a new stadium, which could wind up costing $2 billion in all, above the team’s initial estimates. Could Wolff and Fisher have just eaten the cost of a privately funded ballpark in Oakland?
“We had never once asked for any financial assistance from Oakland, not once,” Wollf said. “That was not even a factor. The factor was, we got no attention at all from the three different mayors.”
Quan, however, said that the A’s were offered land “at a really discounted rate,” and that “there are a lot of public perks that he would have gotten.” Flooding was a concern at the Howard Terminal waterfront site.
“We had gotten the grant for the sea wall,” Quan said. “We had also gotten the grant for an expanded and extended freeway exit. These are all things a developer probably would have had to pay for, but we did that as a city to prepare the site. We also were going to be willing to let him have the income from the parking lot until the cost of the parking lot was paid off.”
But to Wolff, “cooperation” always lacked, not just with the city, but with Alameda County as well.
“We needed a partner to at least (move) all the applications,” Wolff continued. “Entitlements and things like that needed to be processed as fast as possible, not as slow as possible. That’s number one. Number two … they just had so many other issues: housing and homelessness, and it’s a city that could go bankrupt.
“It was nobody against us, particularly in Oakland. It was just apathy.”
— With contributions from The Athletic‘s Andrew Baggarly
