I'm sure many people who visit this board also visit Marine Layer's ballpark blog. But for those that don't, the latest news out of the Oakland mayor's race isn't looking good for the future of the A's in the city of Oakland.

Of the four mayoral candidates in the race for Oakland mayor only one supports in theory building a new ballpark for the A's in downtown Oakland at Victory Court, Jean Quan. The current frontrunner in the race with nearly a 10 pt lead on Quan, Don Perata, has given up on having the A's build a ballpark in Oakland. Candidate Joe Tuman openly opposes providing any public assistance to a new stadium (which would to some extent be required even if just in the form of tax subsidies or supportive development like a BART station, road improvements, etc...). And the last person in the race, Rebecca Kaplan only supports building a new ballpark at the Coliseum site, which we all know is realistically a non-starter due to the deficiencies that have always existed with that site (and the deficencies that have been uncovered with non-downtown sites over the last 20 years).

If anyone but Quan wins the election (which doesn't seem likely) it appears pretty certain that regardless of how the MLB blue ribbon panel rules this off season, baseball is on it's way out of Oakland. The question that remains now, is will the panel rule that SJ is open to the A's allowing them to move to San Jose and us fans to continue to see them locally or will they be leaving the Bay Area altogether ending a 43 year and counting relationship between the Bay Area and its AL team... But in either case, sometime in the next few seasons we will very likely see the last game played by the Oakland Athletics.