Many people are going to have to move from Oakland to Sacramento to Las Vegas if they want to keep their jobs with the Athletics. Dave Kaval, the architect of the move, will not be one of them.
The A’s team president announced Friday that he is resigning from his position to “pursue new business opportunities in California.” His last day will be Tuesday. Sandy Dean, a business partner of A’s owner John Fisher and member of the team’s ownership group, will take over as interim president.
From MLB’s 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 unwavering commitment to the team,” said A’s owner John Fisher. “As we look ahead to the next chapter of our franchise, the team will continue to grow under new leadership, driving the organization toward success during our interim years in West Sacramento and at our new home in Las Vegas.”
Kaval is leaving the A’s after an eight-year tenure that saw them go from regularly competitive, making the MLB playoffs from 2018 to 2020, to among the worst teams in MLB. More upsetting for fans, however, was Kaval’s role in the team’s business operations, specifically how the club handled the search for a new stadium, first in Oakland and then Vegas, under his leadership.
Throughout the process that saw the A’s eventually exit stage left, Kaval was positioned as one of the faces of the move, alongside Fisher. That included when he proudly pushed the team’s soon-to-be-ironic “Rooted in Oakland” slogan and when the team started quietly talking to Vegas as negotiations with the city of Oakland stalled out.
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 lacking enough that Fisher ultimately decided to turn his team into the Las Vegas A’s, with Fisher pledging more than $1 billion for a new stadium.
The team still hasn’t broken ground on its selected stadium site at the former location of the Tropicana casino in Las Vegas. In the meantime, the A’s will play at least the next three seasons in Sacramento, at the home of the minor-league Sacramento River Cats. The situation is awkward at best for the A’s and an outright embarrassment for MLB. That’s how bad things got under Kaval.
In an interview with The Athletic, Kaval’s interim replacement suggested that the project was a significant reason for his resignation:
Dean suggested that Kaval decided to leave now because many of the significant planning steps needed to move the Athletics to Vegas have been completed, including a land deal to site a stadium on the Las Vegas Strip and the securing of government funding for part of the project.
“I think the decision to step down,” Dean told The Athletic, “was tied to the amount of progress that was made here.”
The A’s reportedly plan to hire Kaval’s full-time replacement in 2025. Whoever it is, they will clearly not be afraid of taking on a headache.