The Oakland Athletics played their final home game of the 2026 season on Sunday in West Sacramento, a building nobody designed for major league baseball. They finished 64-98, and 799,240 people watched them do it across the whole season, the lowest total in the sport and the only club that didn’t clear a million. It was their second season at Sutter Health Park while Las Vegas builds something more permanent, and the plan says they’ll play there in 2028. Plans have said things before.
It’s tempting to watch the A’s fade out of Sacramento and think this is just what happens to bad teams in bad stadiums. But franchises don’t drift out of cities. They leave along a fairly well-worn path, and once you’ve seen it once, you start noticing it everywhere. A team lets its stadium and sometimes its roster slide. It goes looking for a new building somewhere else, usually with public money attached. And somewhere in the middle, a rival city offers something the current one won’t, or can’t, match.
The A’s followed that path almost exactly. Oakland spent years negotiating a waterfront ballpark project at Howard Terminal, with the city eventually putting around $375 million toward infrastructure while the price tag kept climbing. In April 2023, Oakland’s mayor ended those talks days after the team announced a deal in Las Vegas instead. Nevada had authorized up to $380 million in public assistance. Baseball’s other owners approved the move unanimously that November, and MLB reportedly waived the roughly $300 million relocation fee the league would normally have collected, since the fee exists to compensate the other clubs for a market opportunity, and in this case the other owners apparently didn’t need much convincing.
Oakland has actually lost three professional teams this way since 2019, counting the Warriors and the Raiders, and the Raiders are worth sitting with for a moment because their story runs the opposite direction of almost everyone else’s. Al Davis wanted a better stadium deal in the early 1980s, the NFL said no, and Davis sued. He won. A jury and later the Ninth Circuit found that the league’s own relocation rule was an unreasonable restraint of trade, and the Raiders played in Los Angeles from 1982 until Davis brought them home to Oakland in 1995 on a deal built around bond-financed stadium upgrades. Twenty years later his son Mark did what his father once fought the league to do himself, asking for a way out, and this time the NFL just said yes. Nevada put up $750 million, the owners approved the Las Vegas move 31-1, and the Raiders started over there in 2020. When Oakland later tried to sue the NFL over losing the Raiders a second time, the courts dismissed it. The city’s claim that it would have kept the team, or landed a replacement, without the league’s approval process was called too speculative to count as real injury. The Ninth Circuit agreed, and the Supreme Court wouldn’t even hear it.
That’s the split that shows up again and again. An owner with a grievance against the league has real legal tools. A city that loses a team it feels it deserved almost never does.
Baltimore found that out the hard way in 1984, when Colts owner Robert Irsay had his team’s belongings loaded into moving vans in the middle of the night and driven to Indianapolis, which had already built a stadium with no tenant. Maryland’s legislature was moving to let the city seize the franchise through eminent domain, and Irsay got out ahead of it. A federal court later ruled that Baltimore couldn’t condemn a team that had already left the state, a narrow jurisdictional finding rather than a statement that a city could never claim a franchise as its own. The Colts were just gone before the law could reach them, and Baltimore spent twelve years without a team before Art Modell moved the Browns there in 1995.
Montreal’s Expos ended differently but landed in the same place. A downtown ballpark plan died without provincial backing, and Major League Baseball itself bought the team from owner Jeffrey Loria in 2002, then picked Washington as the new home. Some of the Expos’ minority partners believed something had gone wrong in how that sale was handled and took it to arbitration. A New York panel ruled against them in November 2004, reportedly finding that Loria hadn’t committed fraud. The Nationals played their first game in 2005, and Montreal never got a hearing that said otherwise.
Cleveland’s reaction to losing the Browns is the one case here where a city got something close to a happy ending, and it’s worth understanding exactly why. When Modell announced the move, Ohio’s congressional delegation didn’t wait around. Within weeks, senators were drafting legislation aimed squarely at pro sports leagues, including proposals tied to the kind of antitrust protection the NFL depends on, the same lever Missouri’s Stuart Symington had pulled against baseball three decades earlier when Kansas City lost the A’s. Facing that kind of fast-moving political heat, the NFL had every reason to settle Cleveland’s situation quickly, and it did, inside of three months. Modell kept his personnel and moved to Baltimore, where the new team would legally be considered an expansion franchise. Cleveland kept the Browns name, colors, and history, and the league promised a new team by 1999. It delivered, and that new team cost the league nothing. Al Lerner paid a then-record $530 million expansion fee for the right to own it, money that went straight to the other owners. Cleveland’s fix was fast, political, and actually profitable for the NFL. St. Louis’s situation wouldn’t be any of those three things.
The Rams’ Long Goodbye
The Rams’ 1995 lease with St. Louis promised the team a stadium ranked in the top 25 percent of the league for 30 years. When an arbitration panel found in 2013 that the Rams’ own improvement plan would meet that standard and the city’s would not, the local stadium authority had to decide whether to fund roughly $700 million in work the Rams wanted. It never did. Part of that was simple math: St. Louis was still paying off $720 million in bonds from building the original stadium, and the county pulled its share of a later financing plan in 2015. But by then, city officials increasingly doubted the money would even matter. Kroenke and his COO had privately begun working on a Los Angeles stadium as early as the summer of 2013, more than a year before the public task force that was supposed to keep the Rams in St. Louis was even formed, and one account of that period has Kroenke telling the league he could give notice to leave as soon as 2015 if the dome wasn’t upgraded. St. Louis was negotiating against a decision that may have already been made.
Through those same years, Kroenke and Demoff told St. Louis over and over that the team was staying. “I’m going to attempt to do everything that I can to keep the Rams in St. Louis,” Kroenke said in April 2010. Demoff called the odds of a move “one-in-a-million” in 2014 and said the California land Kroenke had just bought was “not a piece of land that’s any good for a football stadium.” Court filings later alleged that behind those statements, Kroenke had told Commissioner Roger Goodell and two fellow owners as early as 2013 that he intended to build in Los Angeles and wanted to stay “under the radar” while he did it, with Goodell reportedly answering that the league would “respect your confidentiality.” When the Inglewood land purchase became public in 2014, one former NFL executive wrote that pressing Kroenke for a straight answer would make it “harder to play dunce,” and discovery reportedly showed Demoff supplying Goodell talking points the commissioner used at a Super Bowl press conference to deny knowing what the land was for. The day before the January 2016 vote, Rams staff were reportedly drafting a farewell letter to St. Louis fans. Demoff referred to it internally as the AMF letter. AMF, according to testimony at a later hearing, stood for Adios, motherf-ers.
The application Kroenke’s team ultimately filed with the league didn’t hide the ball on how it felt about St. Louis. It argued the city wasn’t a viable market for three professional teams, cited studies ranking St. Louis near the bottom of the country in population and economic growth, and concluded that any team that stayed there would be, in its words, “well on the road to financial ruin.” NFL owners voted 30-2 to let the Rams go.
St. Louis, St. Louis County, and the region’s stadium authority sued the Rams, the NFL, and its other owners in 2017, alleging breach of contract, fraud, and interference with the city’s business dealings. The case never went to trial. Weeks before it was scheduled to start in January 2022, the NFL and Kroenke agreed to pay St. Louis $790 million, with no admission of wrongdoing on either side. There was no team attached to the deal. The league had never promised St. Louis an expansion franchise, and despite years of speculation that one might be part of a settlement, the agreement contained no such commitment.
That settlement is the rarest outcome on this list. Nobody else who lost a team to a league vote walked away with anything close to it, and nobody got there the way Cleveland did.
The Deeper Dive
Why did Cleveland get a team back and St. Louis get a check? The simplest answer is timing and leverage. Cleveland’s leverage was political and immediate: a furious congressional delegation threatening the league’s antitrust standing within weeks of the announcement, the same threat that had moved baseball to expand into Kansas City in 1969. The NFL could make that problem disappear fast, and reactivating the Browns cost the league nothing, since Al Lerner’s $530 million expansion fee covered it. St. Louis’s leverage took years to build and came from a courtroom, not Congress. By the time it mattered, in 2021, giving St. Louis a team wasn’t free. It would have meant real league expansion, which dilutes every other owner’s share of a fixed pie, or taking a franchise from somewhere else and creating a brand new aggrieved city. Cash was simply the cheaper problem to solve.
The legal mechanics matter too. The NFL’s relocation policy exists specifically because the league lost the Raiders antitrust case in the 1980s and wanted a documented, objective process that would hold up in court if challenged again. But violating your own internal policy isn’t automatically illegal. St. Louis needed an actual legal theory, and it built two. The first was breach of contract: St. Louis argued the relocation policy functioned as a binding agreement the Rams and league owed obligations under, and that the city and its stadium authority were legitimate third parties entitled to enforce it, even though they’d never been NFL members themselves. The second, and the one that did the real damage, was fraud. St. Louis alleged Kroenke and Demoff knowingly made false public statements to keep the city spending money on a stadium plan it wouldn’t have pursued otherwise. That’s a straightforward fraud claim: a false statement, relied upon, causing real financial harm. The emails and call records that surfaced in discovery, the 2013 phone call, the coordinated talking points, the farewell letter, made that fraud theory look credible enough that the NFL chose to pay rather than let a jury see the rest of it, with team owners’ financial records also headed for disclosure. The settlement doesn’t mean a court found the Rams or the league guilty of anything. It means the league decided the risk of trial was worse than $790 million, which is its own kind of answer.
The A’s departure from Oakland followed the same basic shape as every case here, minus the fight. Nobody sued over Las Vegas. The city gave up before it ever got that far, and by baseball’s own quiet math, that turned out to be the cheapest way for everyone involved to get exactly what they wanted.
For the Curious
Who Killed the Montreal Expos? (Netflix, 2024) traces how a franchise with genuine history slipped away from a city that couldn’t get a new ballpark built, and it’s a useful companion piece if you want to see the Expos side of this story in full rather than the two-paragraph version above. For the St. Louis side, the sports-law podcast Conduct Detrimental covered the lawsuit obsessively while it was actually unfolding in 2021, including a two-part “St. Louis Rams Town Hall” recorded live with fans and local officials, a sit-down with veteran litigator Jim Quinn on both the St. Louis and Raiders relocation cases, and a November 2021 fireside chat with longtime NFL writer Howard Balzer that walks through the whole dispute from the 1980s Cardinals-to-Arizona move up through the pending settlement. Neither the documentary nor those episodes are an easy listen if you were rooting for either city, but both stick to what the record actually shows.
Worth Watching
Keep an eye on Sacramento and Las Vegas over the next two years. The A’s foundation work in Las Vegas is reportedly complete, with a 2028 opening still the target, and every step between now and then is one more chance to see whether this particular version of the playbook ends the way it’s supposed to.
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Written by Bob Sloop.