Lighting Out for Some Desert Town

On the sad story of the Athletics, Las Vegas, and the city of Oakland.

The “death by one thousand paper cuts” process that has been the Oakland A’s new stadium/relocation fiasco has hit a series of inflection points First there was the news that the A’s ownership, led by cheapskate owner John Fisher, signing a binding agreement to purchase land in Las Vegas to build a new stadium for the franchise with around $395 million in public funds committed to the project. This was recently followed up with renderings of what the ballpark might look like when built.

Finally, and perhaps most damningly for those of us who would like to see the A’s stay in Oakland, there’s the news that Nevada legislators passed the bill that would pave the way for the A’s to move to Las Vegas.

This has not been much of a surprise, as Major League Baseball and the A’s ownership have been pursuing these multiple paths (looking at Las Vegas while also looking at potential sites in Oakland, culminating in the Howard Terminal location).

However, these more pronounced steps towards the team leaving Oakland coupled with the abysmal product put out on the field donning the A’s colors (owing to Fisher’s *ahem* “fiscally restrained” approach to team management) has led to much sadness and consternation amongst the fans (and yes, there are A’s fans).

One of the easiest scapegoats in this fiasco is the city of Oakland itself, but I would argue they do not deserve the scorn. While the city losing all three of the professional teams that called it home would be devastating (though the Warriors are still in the Bay Area and never, in their name at least, were just Oakland’s team and thus the sting of that change is blunted a bit), I think they are doing what is right for the city itself, specifically by refusing to commit that public money to contribute to a stadium project that should be able to be privately financed.

Oakland mayor Sheng Thao said, in a statement following the first announcement of a binding agreement in Las Vegas, “In a time of budget deficits, I refuse to compromise the safety and well-being of our residents. Given these realities, we are ceasing negotiations and moving forward on alternatives for the redevelopment of Howard Terminal.” While there were things that the city hypothetically could have done to make the development of a new baseball stadium for the A’s an easier thing, I think on the whole they held up their end of the bargain. Taking a hard line on the public money was the right thing to do.

Obviously, Fisher and the A’s ownership goes in for a great deal of scorn. Fisher, along with Lewis Wolff, took over the A’s ownership in 2005 and Fisher became the sole owner in 2016. This stretch has seen the A’s put together really good teams (the Céspedes/Reddick/Donaldson/Gray teams of the early 2010s and the Olsen/Chapman/Semien teams of the late 2010s/early 2020s) that were quickly dismantled as those players came up for their next contracts. Rather than investing a reasonable amount of money into the team (no one is expecting the A’s to immediately turn into the Yankees or Mets when it comes to spending, but retaining solid franchise cornerstones like Olson and Chapman was both a no-brainer and not financially unreasonable).

But rather than modestly committing to players who could be franchise cornerstones and who seemed to genuinely love playing in Oakland, Fisher would rather trade them away as the team would bottom out. This most recent time, with the moves to get rid of Chapman and Olson and Sean Murphy, it felt less like savvy Billy Beane moves in order to remain competitive while playing in a “small market” (I mean, Oakland is not a small market, but I digress) and more like Fisher intentionally trying to make the team look bad and kill whatever fan support was left to smooth the path for a relocation.

We’ve all seen Major League and like to imagine that somehow real life could be like that.

Unfortunately, real life isn’t like the movies and the efforts of an owner who, for whatever reason, wants to handicap their squad through financial limitations usually prove effective. This is what one sees with the A’s, who are clearly the worst team in the league in terms of on-field performance and attendance.

While I think Fisher deserves every bit of derision and contempt directed his way, the entity that received most of my ire now is Major League Baseball, personified in commissioner Rob Manfred.

If Major League Baseball actually cared about the Oakland location, the fans there, and what that city represents, I firmly believe Manfred could have used the force of his commissionership to get something done or to get people in place at the A’s to get something accomplished.

But they don’t care. A city that is steeped in so much baseball history (in addition to the MANY great A’s teams, this is the city that gave us Frank Robinson and Rickey Henderson and Dave Stewart and Vada Pinson and Curt Flood (and over in my hometown of Alameda, CA you had Willie Stargell and Jimmy Rollins and Dontrelle Willis) and so diverse (as Major League Baseball claims to want to make overtures to diverse communities and make them interested and baseball again).

The argument that Oakland and the East Bay is somehow a bad baseball market took a major hit during the (ingenious) “reverse boycott” on Tuesday, June 13th.

The narrative that being pushed is that there are no fans in Oakland, and thus there’s no way for the franchise to be financially stable there. What people fail to mention when they bring up this point is that Fisher has not given the fans a reason to come out because they’re so willing to move on from any player who shows some potential and ability. There’s no consistency, not even a modicum of investment to put out a consistent team (again, they don’t have to be the Yankees or the Dodgers in terms of spending).

That, coupled with an unwillingness to improve the home field, and understandably people are not inclined to go to the game.

There are great baseball fans in Oakland, some of the best in the league, they just need to be able to show it. Thus, this narrative of Oakland not being a good spot for baseball because of a lack of fan support is quite ridiculous.

My duel anger at Fisher/A’s ownership and Manfred/Major League Baseball was only confirmed by Manfred’s needlessly flippant, even rude, comments following the passage of the Nevada bill.

While I was able to accept the Raiders’ decision to move to Las Vegas (it perhaps helped that they’d moved out of Oakland once before and there’s something that can span geography about them, though I do always associate them with Oakland in some essential way), it’s different for the A’s. I don’t know if I can follow them there like I did with the Raiders. I do know that I’ve shifted my MLS allegiances (a league in which, admittedly, I’m not terribly invested) from the San Jose Earthquakes to Austin FC because Fisher is an owner of the Earthquakes.

But it appears as if, like Gram Parsons sings in the excellent “Return of the Grevious Angel,” the Athletics are “lighting out for some desert town.” It should not have come to this, and yet it has.