After months of increasing toxicity between the A’s and the city of Oakland, the two estranged organizations could be finding their way back to each other—at least for a few more years.

The A’s are set to meet Thursday with officials from the city and Alameda County, Calif., according to the San Francisco Chronicle, regarding a potential lease extension, with the session itself representing a marked turnaround from the recent tenor of their relationship. Again foremost at issue—as it’s been for months—is where the A’s will play the 2025 to ’27 seasons while a new ballpark is being built in Las Vegas. 

Despite recent tours of minor league parks in Salt Lake City and Sacramento by A’s officials, including owner John Fisher, there are still two key reasons why the 57-year-old and increasingly dilapidated Oakland Coliseum remains potentially the leading option for those interim years.

• By staying in the club’s current market, the A’s will remain eligible to receive their local media rights fees from NBC Sports California as part of a deal running through 2034 and paying the club $67 million in ’23. 
• The Coliseum is already approved for MLB play and offers player amenities that most minor league facilities do not. Despite extensive physical and operational work to upgrade Buffalo’s Sahlen Field for the Blue Jays during the COVID-19 pandemic, complaints about the facility persisted, highlighting the complications that can occur staging big league games in smaller facilities. Playing at the Giants’ Oracle Park would involve another MLB-approved facility, but also create no shortage of schedule challenges given how actively the Giants use that ballpark for nongame purposes.

A decision on the temporary home for the A’s is due by the summer, when the 2025 MLB schedule is expected to be released. In the meantime, stadium development in Las Vegas has been troubled on multiple fronts, leading MLB commissioner Rob Manfred to say last week he would be “disappointed” if the A’s miss their ’28 target to open the new stadium. 

Further coloring the discussions back in Oakland is a new effort by the Bay Area–based African American Sports and Entertainment Group to acquire a 50% interest in the Oakland Coliseum site currently owned by the A’s. The group would like to develop that land, and plans for the area after the A’s leave for Las Vegas have not been solidified. 

There’s a certain streamer on the market that features the NFL, Premier League, Big Ten Conference, PGA Tour, WWE, Notre Dame football, two legs of horse racing’s Triple Crown, and several other top sports properties. And the platform, as well as sister broadcast network NBC, was not invited to be part of the dramatic sports streaming joint venture unveiled last week involving ESPN, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Fox, leaving big questions on both sides. 

Comcast, the NBCUniversal parent whose Peacock service offers one of the broadest sets of sports programming of any streamer, has steadfastly refused to comment on the new effort involving several of its top rivals. But the company’s role, or lack thereof, in this streaming rebundling is noteworthy on multiple levels. Not only does Peacock have some of the industry’s top sports content, but it is also aligned with the country’s largest cable carrier—with that status now further threatened by the new bundle’s overt attempt to reach cord-cutters and cord-nevers. 

Privately, several Comcast sources reached by Front Office Sports have suggested a certain skepticism with the joint venture, particularly as it doesn’t yet have a name, appointed leadership, finalized pricing plan, or, by the companies’ own admission, a definitive agreement to create the planned product. More broadly, there is also no communicated strategy about how the new service will coexist with not only traditional cable and satellite TV but also single-sport and single-network streaming offerings, as well as digital multichannel providers such as YouTube TV. 

“All the questions you have, they have,” says a source familiar with Comcast’s thinking. 

That skepticism, however, is not surprising given how Comcast competes with the other companies, particularly ESPN corporate parent Walt Disney Co., on multiple fronts. Peacock, meanwhile, is on its own mission to reduce subscriber churn and operational losses, particularly on the heels of a record-setting livestream of a recent NFL playoff game.

The new sports streaming bundle also provides an even more complicated reality for Comcast. While on one hand it further threatens its legacy cable television business, it could also help burnish its much more profitable broadband connectivity business. 

And both realities can, and quite possibly might, exist simultaneously.