Oakland Raiders: City’s Commitment To Excrement On Full Display – Again

The Oakland Raiders have been pushing for a new stadium to replace the aging and decrepit Coliseum for years – and during an A’s-Yankees game, the world saw why. Again.

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It is a battle the Oakland Raiders have been fighting for years upon years. It was first waged by the late Al Davis, and after his passing, it is a battle taken on by his son, Mark. The fight for a new stadium in the East Bay is one that has had more drama than your average soap opera, and one that seems destined to end with the younger Davis taking his team and heading for greener pastures – pastures that aren’t routinely flooded with raw sewage.

On Friday night, we all witnessed exactly why the Coliseum needs to be red flagged and torn down – or just nuked from orbit. During a game between the Oakland A’s and the New York Yankees, a clogged toilet flooded the visitor’s dugout with sewage and waste – and apparently brought the predictably foul odor with it.

While we can all probably agree that if a dugout had to be flooded with foul smelling sewage, better it happen to the Yankees than anybody else, it highlights once again, why getting a new stadium built – for both the Raiders and the A’s – is critical.

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This isn’t the first time something like this has happened, nor is it going to be the last. In a stadium where they duct tape red plastic cups to the ceiling to manage leaks, it seems pretty clear that plumbing problems – and quite possibly other problems that could endanger the safety of fans – are going to continue not just springing up, but get worse as time passes.

The city of Oakland has the only stadium in professional sports that houses teams from both the NFL and MLB. The aging stadium and its plethora of problems are quite frankly, an embarrassment to not just the organizations that reside there, but to the city of Oakland as well.

And despite the fact that their stadium is a laughingstock – and potential health hazard – as well as the fact that there are colleges and even high schools in the area that have better facilities, the city remains steadfast in its desire to do – nothing.

Nothing for Davis and the Raiders, anyway.

Oh, they’re bending over backwards to help Lew Wolff and the A’s, of course. After former mayor Jean Quan had negotiated a deal with the younger Davis to provide the land needed to build a new stadium on the current Coliseum grounds, current mayor Libby Schaff came in and immediately nixed it.

And for her next trick, she turned around and gave Lew Wolff and the A’s a 10 year stadium lease. Which, given Wolff’s stubborn – even petulant – resistance to working with Davis to find a solution that works for both teams, pretty much killed the possibility of keeping the Raiders in Oakland.

Schaff gave all the power to Wolff and gave Davis the shaft – or perhaps, the Schafft?

And so, because of the intractable stadium problem in Oakland, the intransigient Lew Wolff, and the political cowardice of Libby Schaff (who wants to reap all of the rewards of having a professional football franchise, yet assume none of the risk) the Oakland Coliseum continues to spew raw sewage all over the place – which of course, happens to us all as we get older.

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But the image of crews cleaning up the foul waste on the floor of the Yankees’ dugout (again, if it had to happen to anybody, better the Yankees than somebody else) is an image that is pretty symbolic of the stadium situation and political process in Oakland.

Is it any wonder Davis wants to take the Raiders to Vegas and out of the stench in Oakland?