Many people will have to move from Oakland to Sacramento to Las Vegas if they want to keep their jobs in athletics. Dave Kaval, the architect of the move, won’t be one of them.
The A-Team president announced Friday that he is stepping down from his position to “pursue new business opportunities in California.” His last day will be Tuesday. Sandy Dean, business partner of A-owner John Fisher and member of the team’s ownership group, will take over as interim president.
From the MLB site:
“We are grateful for Dave’s contributions and leadership over the past eight years. He guided our organization through a period of significant transition, and we sincerely thank him for his continued commitment to the team,” said John Fisher, owner of A. “As we look ahead to the next chapter of our franchise, the team will continue to grow under new leadership, propelling the organization toward success during our intervening years in West Sacramento and in our new home in Las Vegas.”
Kaval leaves the A’s after an eight-year tenure in which they went from regularly competitive (through the 2018 to 2020 MLB playoffs) to one of the worst teams in the MLB. Even more troubling for fans, however, was Kaval’s role in the team’s operations, particularly the way the club under his leadership handled the search for a new stadium, first in Oakland and then in Vegas.
Throughout the process of the A’s ultimately exiting the phase, Kaval was positioned as one of the faces of the move, alongside Fisher. That included the moment he proudly brought up the team’s soon-to-be tongue-in-cheek slogan “Rooted in Oakland” and when the team quietly began talking to Vegas when negotiations with the city of Oakland stalled.
Kaval presented plans for a new, state-of-the-art stadium at Howard Terminal in Oakland. Factors such as the public money offered to help build it were apparently so inadequate that Fisher ultimately decided to rebrand his team as the Las Vegas A’s, with Fisher promising more than $1 billion for a new stadium.
The team still has not broken ground on the selected stadium site at the former Tropicana casino site in Las Vegas. In the meantime, the A’s will play in Sacramento for at least the next three seasons, home to the minor league Sacramento River Cats. The situation is awkward at best for the A’s and an absolute embarrassment for MLB. That’s how bad things were under Kaval.
In an interview with The Athletic, Kaval’s interim replacement suggested that the project was a major reason for his dismissal:
Dean suggested that Kaval decided to leave now because many of the major planning steps needed to move athletics to Vegas have been completed, including a land deal to build a stadium on the Las Vegas Strip and securing government funding for part of the project. .
“I think the decision to step down,” Dean told The Athletic, “is related to the amount of progress that has been made here.”
The A’s reportedly plan to hire a full-time replacement for Kaval in 2025. Whoever it is, they clearly won’t be afraid of getting a headache.
