Oakland Ballers Prevented From Playing at Coliseum by A's

Oakland's new team had a plan in place to play a game at the Oakland Coliseum until the A's said "no"

The Oakland Ballers (a.k.a. B's) had a pretty cool idea for their inaugural season: Play one game at the Oakland Coliseum on June 29th when the A's are set to be in Arizona. They wanted to provide the fans one last opportunity to come out to the ballpark that has housed so many of their memories and fill it up one last time. The plan was to hand out loads of tickets to local youth organizations and really make this a community event. 

The B's had paid the deposit to make it happen and had a contract signed to play that game at the Coliseum, but then right around Christmas, John Fisher, presumably wearing his Grinch attire, enacted a clause in their agreement with the JPA that guaranteed them exclusive rights to play at the Coliseum. 

A representative from the A's shared their email to ASM Global (venue management) to provide some extra detail. It reads: "We support the JPA's efforts to bring new events to the Coliseum. However, under our license agreement with the JPA, we have the exclusive right to play professional baseball at the Coliseum, and we therefore do not consent to your request. We are happy to work with the JPA on other ways to celebrate and promote professional baseball in Oakland."

While this is certainly an unpopular move, it's within the A's rights to not grant permission for the Ballers to play a game at the Coliseum. What will likely bug fans is that the A's are potentially on their way out, and this may seem petty to some people. 

On the one hand, the A's may very well end up asking the San Francisco Giants to open up their ballpark across the Bay for at least half of the season for each of the next three years so that Fisher can continue to get money from his RSN deal. If the Giants are going to be asked to pull off that big favor, then why can't the A's open their home, which they're intent on leaving, for one lousy game? 

On the other hand, can you imagine the public relations nightmare a sold out Pioneer League game would be not only for the A's, but for Major League Baseball? Sure, a number of tickets would have likely been comped and the B's game was more about bringing the community together than making gobs of money, but if a PL team was able to pull off 30,000+ butts in seats at the Coliseum, then the A's would face many more questions in Las Vegas and MLB would have a lot tougher questions to answer about why they're leaving Oakland in the first place. 

That's the likely reasoning behind why the A's decided to withhold consent for this event. 

The Ballers had hoped to make the big announcement about their Coliseum game on Thursday and have tickets go one sale today, but those plans are at best on hold for now as the Pioneer League team fights for a path forward.