Every Bay Area Franchise Move: Who Arrived, Who Left, and Who Nearly Did

Thirteen completed moves, five that were agreed and then stopped, and a regional pattern nobody has written down in one place: this is a market that keeps almost losing teams, and lately keeps actually losing them.

The Athletics leaving got treated nationally as a one-off. It isn't a one-off. This region has been losing, nearly losing, and internally shuffling franchises for seventy years, and the pattern only becomes visible when you put every move on one page. So here's every move.

Read the Kind column. Four arrivals, all of them between 1958 and 1968, when the Bay Area went from having no major league team to having five in a decade. Then thirty years of nothing. Then a run of departures and internal moves that's still going.

The Raiders, twice, which is the defining case. Al Davis moved the club to Los Angeles for the 1982 season after a legal fight with the NFL that changed how American sports leagues can restrict relocation. They came back in 1995 to a deal that included the $200 million upper deck at the Coliseum, public money, spent on a stadium modification, to bring back a team that had already left once. In 2017 the league approved a move to Las Vegas and the franchise left again in 2020. Oakland paid off debt on that renovation for years after the team it was built for had gone. If you want to understand why the East Bay reacts to relocation talk the way it does, it's this: they've done this before, they paid for it, and it happened anyway.

The Athletics, which is the current one. Arrived from Kansas City in 1968, spent fifty-seven seasons in Oakland, and are now playing in a Triple-A park in West Sacramento while a domed stadium goes up on the Las Vegas Strip. The full sequence, with construction milestones, is on the A's relocation timeline, and Sutter Health Park is the interim ballpark explained.

The internal moves, which people forget count. The Warriors have played in San Francisco, then Oakland, then San Francisco again, and the 2019 move to Chase Center took a franchise out of the building where it won three championships in front of an Oakland crowd, and put it in a more expensive arena across the bay. The 49ers left San Francisco entirely in 2014 for Santa Clara, roughly forty miles south, and kept the city's name on the jersey. Neither one shows up on a list of franchises that abandoned a region, and both of them moved a team away from the people who filled the old building.

Now the ones that didn't happen. This is the list that actually makes the point, because in two separate decades the Giants had a signed deal to leave and in both cases something outside the franchise stopped it.

1976. Horace Stoneham, the man who had already moved this franchise once, from New York in 1958, agreed to sell to a Toronto group backed by Labatt. The Giants were going to be a Canadian team a year before the Blue Jays existed. San Francisco went to court for an injunction, the delay held long enough for Bob Lurie to put a local purchase together, and the franchise stayed. That's how close it was.

1992. Lurie himself agreed to sell to investors who intended to move the club to the Suncoast Dome in St. Petersburg. National League owners voted the sale down and a local group led by Peter Magowan bought instead. Everything that followed, Bonds, Kent, Bochy's bullpens, the even-year dynasty, three World Series, happens because of a vote in a room the Giants didn't control. That whole era, including the 1993 pennant race the very next season, exists on a coin flip.

The A's near-misses are the mirror image. Fremont collapsed. San Jose was blocked because the Giants hold territorial rights over Santa Clara County and wouldn't release them; San Jose sued Major League Baseball over it and the courts sided with baseball's antitrust exemption in 2015. Howard Terminal was announced in 2018 and never financed. The franchise spent seventeen years failing to move eleven miles and then moved five hundred.

The pattern, stated plainly. Bay Area franchises don't leave because the Bay Area won't support them, the arrivals in the sixties, the crowds in the seventies and eighties, and the sellout at the Coliseum in September 2024 all say otherwise. They leave because this is an expensive, politically fragmented region where getting a stadium built requires agreement between a city, a county, an ownership group and often a second city forty miles away, and that agreement keeps failing. Two of those failures were rescued by outsiders. The rest weren't.

What's still exposed. The Athletics are scheduled to be gone by 2028. The Raiders are already in Nevada. Levi's Stadium is a Santa Clara asset and the 49ers' relationship with that city has been openly hostile at points. The Sharks play in a city-owned arena in San Jose on a lease that will eventually need renegotiating. Nobody should assume the list above is finished.

The buildings themselves are covered on the Coliseum page and the Candlestick page; the count of what was won before all this is on the championship ledger. The history section has the rest.

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