The Final Vestige of Something Irreplaceable and Delicate

June 29, 2023 12:19 PM

To those who know what Oakland A’s baseball used to be, what Fisher had turned the team into was nothing short of tragic. A’s teams in the past had brought to Oakland pride and repute, as they had seemed to represent, in their character and color, their misfit swagger and underdog grit, something both essential and specific about the East Bay’s sense of self. In this way, certain of those teams had evinced something distinct about the constructive potential of pro sports writ large: how beloved local teams can bring a people together and lift a city up. Fisher’s A’s evince something very different: pro sports’ concurrent capacity for diminishment and plunder, disillusionment and grift. from The Long, Sad Story of the Stealing of the Oakland A’s [The Ringer; ungated]
posted by chavenet (39 comments total)

"Fisher had spent years systematically degrading the organization—sabotaging its competitive prospects, debasing its stadium, and alienating its fans."

I'm not going to get into who had it worse, but I will say this is all very, very familiar to this Expos fan.

I know this pain. I know this story.
posted by Capt. Renault at 12:32 PM on June 29, 2023 [10 favorites]

Enshittification, it turns out, is for all consumer experiences, not just online ones.
posted by Jon_Evil at 12:32 PM on June 29, 2023 [12 favorites]

I feel for the people of Oakland (the Coliseum is one of the few sporting arenas I've been to live, although it was for a Warriors game, and the lamented Expos' Stade Olympique is one of the others). It remains odd for me to see rhetoric about how awful this bad-faith owner move is that omits mentioning that's precisely how Oakland got the Athletics in the first place.

"I never thought the owners would eat OUR team!"
posted by Earthtopus at 12:36 PM on June 29, 2023 [6 favorites]

I wasn't ready for such a grimdark Moneyball sequel.
posted by box at 12:41 PM on June 29, 2023 [4 favorites]

Yeah I'm an A's fan in mourning. The team would likely be a playoff contender if you think of all the folks they've traded or let walk in the past few years. My favorite player, Marcus Semien, but also Canha, Murphy, Chapman, Olson, Heim, Grey, Hendriks, Manaea, Montos, Trevino. I mean it's nut the talen the team had, and folks seemed to love playing in Oakland! Fisher is the god damn worst.
posted by Carillon at 12:46 PM on June 29, 2023 [7 favorites]

The A's are a prime piece of evidence in the idea of municipal ownership of teams. (No league with owners will ever go for it, for all the obvious reasons but in a just universe this would be normal.)

I feel bad for my friends who are A's fans because they've been jobbed and it's not fair to the passionate ones amongst them.
posted by drewbage1847 at 1:27 PM on June 29, 2023 [7 favorites]

So they’ll move to Vegas just as Global Warming really kicks in and begins to bake it to a crisp.

Fans of irony have a lot to look forward to.

Baseball fans, not so much.
posted by jamjam at 1:30 PM on June 29, 2023 [4 favorites]

In a just universe, teams like the A's that gut themselves on purpose would be declared blighted and seized by the city via eminent domain.
posted by Ampersand692 at 1:33 PM on June 29, 2023 [7 favorites]

I went to an Oakland Roots game (soccer) last weekend, and a sizeable number of As fans were there. In fact, someone even started a "Sell the Team!" chant. It was a good time.

I feel so bad for all my friends and family who have loved this team for so long. They deserve better.
posted by suelac at 1:35 PM on June 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

Have the A's been the most relocated franchise? LV will be their fourth stop. And it's not they aren't a historically bad franchise (except when they were in KC, where they were basically a AAA team for the Yankees because of shenanigans).

By all counts, they are probably the second best franchise in the AL historically. And they had real good teams in the Moneyball era, even with all the teardowns and rebuild. They've made the playoffs 11 times this century even with their anemic payrolls. This just stinks.
posted by indianbadger1 at 1:54 PM on June 29, 2023 [3 favorites]

I can't help but think relegation would solve this. If coming in last meant being demoted to AAA, no owner would ever tank on purpose. They couldn't afford to.
posted by COD at 2:01 PM on June 29, 2023 [10 favorites]

I wasn't ready for such a grimdark Moneyball sequel.

But a pretty accurate Major League remake. At least the premise. (Needs more Jake Taylor, Willie Mays Hayes and Pedro Cerrano.)
posted by martin q blank at 2:16 PM on June 29, 2023 [4 favorites]

This FPP nests neatly with the Ask I posted a few days ago. User jenfullmoon linked this article in her answer and I thought it was worthy of its own post, but it's not one I could make without also ugly crying. Besides the actual content of the piece, it's a nifty piece of writing using the reverse boycott as a framing device to unfold the sad saga of the stealing of the A's, and some beautiful phrasing.

I'm gonna miss them a lot. Pop on over to my Ask if you want to commiserate with me.
posted by rekrap at 2:17 PM on June 29, 2023 [8 favorites]

Future students of history are gonna find our era so boring when they realize "and then a billionaire destroyed it just because he could" is how every story ends
posted by CheesesOfBrazil at 2:28 PM on June 29, 2023 [23 favorites]

I feel for the people of Oakland (the Coliseum is one of the few sporting arenas I've been to live, although it was for a Warriors game, and the lamented Expos' Stade Olympique is one of the others).

You went to Oracle/the Oakland Arena, not the Coliseum. They are on the same piece of land but are not the same building.

It remains odd for me to see rhetoric about how awful this bad-faith owner move is that omits mentioning that's precisely how Oakland got the Athletics in the first place.

"I never thought the owners would eat OUR team!"

The fact that Oakland got the A's due to a lousy owner moving them from another town doesn't make it any better- it's still the work of a lousy owner taking advantage of fans. Kids who went to the first few Oakland A's games are able to take their grandkids to A's games now. Yes of course baseball teams get moved, but the Oakland A's have been in this town for over half a century, almost five times longer than they were in Kansas City- and Kansas City was pretty immediately given an expansion team. That's not happening here.
posted by oneirodynia at 2:41 PM on June 29, 2023 [5 favorites]

Have the A's been the most relocated franchise?

In MLB, I believe they are currently tied. The Braves went from Boston to Milwaukee before settling in Atlanta, and the Athletics went from Philadelphia to Kansas City to Oakland.

In pro basketball, the Buffalo Bisons became the Tri-Cities (IL) Blackhawks became the Milwaukee, St. Louis, and finally Atlanta Hawks. Similarly, the Sacramento Kings passed through Rochester, Cincinnati, Kansas City-Omaha, and Kansas City before arriving in Sacramento.

(I'm not a sports person as much as I am a Wikipedia skimmer, apologies if I missed somebody.)
posted by box at 2:44 PM on June 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

but the Oakland A's have been in this town for over half a century, almost five times longer than they were in Kansas City

What's more, the A's have been in Oakland for 56 seasons (1968-2023), longer than they were in Philadelphia (1901-54).
posted by hangashore at 2:47 PM on June 29, 2023 [5 favorites]

In MLB, I believe they are currently tied. The Braves went from Boston to Milwaukee before settling in Atlanta, and the Athletics went from Philadelphia to Kansas City to Oakland.

And an easy one to miss - the Baltimore Orioles started as the St. Louis Browns Milwaukee Brewers for the American League's inaugural 1901 season, then played in St. Louis from 1902-1953 before heading off to Baltimore. The present Brewers came into the league in the 1969 season as the Seattle Pilots but moved to Milwaukee in 1970.
posted by hangashore at 2:56 PM on June 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

Oh, that was Oracle, you're right, oneirodynia - I must have just been confusing it with the Coliseum BART stop name.

I agree that it sucks sucks sucks that this historical cycle falls on this generation of fans, but eliding how the symmetric way the city got the franchise in the first place just strikes a dissonant note for me. (So too does raw comparison of tenure lengths--Kansas City's tenure was so short relative to Oakland's *because* of the owner skullduggery that Oakland was the beneficiary of. That seems to imply that either Oakland has only "had" the As for 2 season, or that if Vegas ends up hosting the team for one more season than Oakland did they will have retroactively been the right city their whole tenure)
posted by Earthtopus at 2:57 PM on June 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

Ihad season ticket during th Moneyball era.And just to rub salt in the wound, Yankees pitched a perfect game against the A’s yesterday.
posted by TDIpod at 3:09 PM on June 29, 2023 [3 favorites]

Yeah, the Yankee's perfect game was as much an indictment of the A's as an achievement of the pitcher... Maybe that's true for every perfect game, but especially this one. I saw the A's win a home game early in the season which was, in retrospect, incredibly lucky.
posted by kaibutsu at 3:21 PM on June 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

I gave up on the A's long after the rest of my family. It was after the announcement of the deal with LV (While simultaneously negotiating with Oakland) that I threw in the towel.

Mine is one of the families that had roots there. We celebrated DFM500, Jr.'s bar mitzvah in right field.
posted by dfm500 at 4:06 PM on June 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

One of the years I was in grade school we lived in Berkeley. Got to see Vida Blue pitch a game, and that was the year of their start of their World Series streak so I kept a bit of track of them even after we moved. This situation gives me a sad.
posted by Runes at 4:11 PM on June 29, 2023 [3 favorites]

My probably awful take is that the suburban NIMBYs of Oakland who insisted on restrictive zoning rules created such a tremendous affordable housing shortage that there wasn’t any ability for Oakland to play even a limited role in securing the land and supporting needed infrastructure to enable stadium construction. Building a new stadium / development was impossible even when the owner of the team was willing to pay for most of the construction costs themselves. The NIMBY’s are now blaming let’s build housing there instead advocates for derailing the proposed deal between the City and team ownership.
posted by interogative mood at 4:17 PM on June 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

Baseball scholars know that the history of the A's has always been feast or famine; bursts of respectability and success followed by fire sales and very, very dire periods.

Connie Mack did it several times, selling off his name players and filling his lineup with hot garbage for a decade. The current tank-job by this year's model is horrific, but they're actually at a HIGHER win percentage than the infamous 1916 Athletics. The Kansas City A's were, as noted previously, a feeder system for the Yankees with such a terrible farm system that they never even came close to contention while located there. In Oakland, the immor(t)al Charlie Finley was so panicked by the imminent onset of free agency that he tried to fire-sale his stars (stopped only by the Commissioner's veto), and spent most of his time in Kansas City and Oakland seeking to move the team elsewhere and being denied.

Oakland fans can get behind a winning team; when they're doing well, attendance grows. It's never going to be a massive market compared to New York or Los Angeles, but people come out. But the fans are also not stupid; they know when they're being taken for a ride by ownership that doesn't care about the team, the town, the players or the rotting smell coming from the stadium itself. If the owners aren't even going to try, turnabout is fair play.
posted by delfin at 4:50 PM on June 29, 2023 [4 favorites]

Wow, I didn’t know MLB cloned out the hate banners in the outfield before showing highlights. They later restored them bc “It was against their policy.” What it’s against is provably breaking reality in the context of a newscast. I wonder if anyone was fired for that decision, the way the Toledo Blade photographer was fired and effectively banned from news production?
posted by toodleydoodley at 4:54 PM on June 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

We live in Alameda, right across the estuary from Oakland. This sucks for the city and the fans. In the last few years they've lost the Raiders, Warriors, and now the A's.

We've taken our daughter to a couple of A's games because it's closer and cheaper than going to see the Giants. (Although we can take a ferry to see the Giants, which is cool.) The Coliseum is pretty crap compared to PacBell Park, but tickets are expensive.

I don't know how people can afford to take their kids to see many games at today's prices. Where are tomorrow's fans going to come from?

Yeah, the Yankee's perfect game was as much an indictment of the A's as an achievement of the pitcher..

My wife likes cool baseball events and normally I'd talk to her about a perfect game, but she's also an A's fan and hates the fucking Yankees (ptui).
posted by kirkaracha at 5:01 PM on June 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

Building a new stadium / development was impossible even when the owner of the team was willing to pay for most of the construction costs themselves

I see Fisher's marketing is working.

The A's wanted the city to write a check for $880m to get keep the team in Oakland. Actually, I should say they pretended that $880m in tax payer money would have kept them there. We found out later they plan was to move to Las Vegas no matter how much free shit Oakland tax payers sent their way.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 5:06 PM on June 29, 2023 [4 favorites]

I'm so sorry A's fans. You deserve so much better.

Nobody hates baseball more than Major League Baseball.
posted by smcdow at 5:13 PM on June 29, 2023 [3 favorites]

Apparently the A’s crack team of negotiators have so cocked things up in Nevada that they might not get a stadium there after all. They don’t seem to have the votes.
posted by interogative mood at 5:46 PM on June 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

Alas it seems I’m behind as they did get there eventually.
posted by interogative mood at 5:51 PM on June 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

My probably awful take is that the suburban NIMBYs of Oakland who insisted on restrictive zoning rules created such a tremendous affordable housing shortage that there wasn’t any ability for Oakland to play even a limited role in securing the land and supporting needed infrastructure to enable stadium construction.

???

They have a site in Oakland: Howard Terminal. It's been secured for several years now. The A's were planning a huge retail/commercial/housing complex around the ballpark. The deal was very close to final.

Today another infrastructure grant that Oakland applied for came through, bringing the total infrastructure grants to 400 million.
posted by oneirodynia at 6:13 PM on June 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

This just sucks. As a Dodger fan, I remember the misery of the McCourt years (that fucker still owns the parking lots, too) but Oakland has it way worse.
posted by BlahLaLa at 6:22 PM on June 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

I’d read somewhere that there was a protest and delays to the Howard Terminal plan but I can’t find any thing other than complaints by Union Pacific and Longshoremen resulting in some lawsuits that caused some minor delays. So I must agree I’ve been bamboozled by propaganda by the team ownership.

Gavin Newsom should step in with the full power of the state of California to bring the hammer down and take the team using eminent domain. I’m not sure of the legality but it would he pretty awesome to see it tried.
posted by interogative mood at 7:24 PM on June 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

This is another good read: A Fan's Notes.

At the Coliseum, by contrast, you can still watch a game, and the experience isn’t overproduced—or overshadowed—by the stadium itself. The structure’s inherent asceticism is tempered by a few sentimental charms, too, like an out-of-town scoreboard that is still manually operated. The stadium’s unfussiness makes it feel less like a carnival and more like an old cathedral. The Coliseum is a dump the way Notre-Dame is a dump.
posted by oneirodynia at 7:30 PM on June 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

Wow, I didn’t know MLB cloned out the hate banners in the outfield before showing highlights. They later restored them bc “It was against their policy.”

It wasn’t quite that blatant: a post game highlight reel on mlb.com cropped out the protest banners. The subsequent quote was

“We were unaware of the edit,” an MLB spokesperson told The Athletic. “When it came to our attention, we corrected it as it isn’t consistent with our policy.”

which is some A grade buck passing.

(Hate banners is a weird way to describe them: for reference, the visible banners in the footage read SELL, STAY, #FISHEROUT and KAVAL=LIAR.)
posted by zamboni at 4:56 AM on June 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

FTA, "Handmade banners reading “Fisher is scum,” “Liar,” and “Manfraud” had been hung like SOS flags below the right field bleachers, and Major League Baseball had to edit them out of highlights."

sounds like hate to me. Like, the fans hate Fisher.
posted by toodleydoodley at 3:00 PM on June 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

The article is inaccurate about which banners were cropped out, but that’s irrelevant to my larger point- when I hear hate banner it usually means something like this or this. Oakland fans have hated Fisher for a while, but hate isn’t the point of the signs.
posted by zamboni at 3:52 PM on June 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

I really enjoyed that article, thank you for posting it!
posted by kserra at 2:55 PM on July 1, 2023 [1 favorite]