Time: 7:10 Central
Weather: Too warm for me but I’m sure others love it, 80°
Opponent’s SB site: Athletics Nation
TV: Twins TV. Radio: Sometimes my reception gets fuzzy if I turn on the light attached to the same outlet, sometimes it doesn’t, that’s the magic of it
Tonight’s A’s starter is 28-year-old lefty Jacob Lopez. He throws a low-90s fastball, a slider, cutter, change and sinker. When he fools hitters, he’s good at minimizing hard contact, but he doesn’t fool them often enough and he walks a lotta guys, which equals a 6.64 ERA (and 5.77 FIP) for this season.
The reasons the A’s left Oakland are complex, but here’s the very simple version: John Fisher is a useless failson s**theap who wants as much public money as he can possibly get, because he sucks.
The slightly longer version? The Oakland Coliseum was an old-ish building in poor repair (several instances of raw sewage in the dugouts, a much cuter invasion of feral cats), and — more importantly — featured very little in the way of luxury/premium seating. The team had wanted a new building since at least 2001, and had floated the idea of leaving the city altogether but staying in the Bay Area. A notion of moving to San Jose (40 miles away) was nixed by the Giants, who had territorial rights there; one of moving to to Fremont (25 miles away) was nixed by the city of Fremont.
The A’s signed a 10-year lease renewal in 2014, with the understanding that the team would seek a new stadium in the same county as Oakland. The team proposed several dumb, greedy ideas which were shot down, and eventually useless failson Fisher got his heart set on part of Oakland’s Howard Terminal. The city was half willing to work with him on that one, since they had their own ideas about redeveloping the area, but there were significant problems including interference with other industries, infrastructure costs, environmental concerns, inevitable sea level rise, and so on.
Still, when the city and the team were only about $100 million apart on a $12 billion project, the deal fell apart in 2023. Useless failson Fisher announced he would be moving the team to Las Vegas. There’s lots of details behind this, but the best explanation came from the then-mayor’s chief of staff: “I don’t think he [Fisher] got cold feet. I think he got an accountant.”
Although Fisher had inherited a butt-ton of money from his parents (founders of “The Gap,” a fashion chain store that mostly operated in “shopping malls”), most of said money was tied up in various highly-leveraged investments. When Oakland asked him to contribute a little more on his end, Fisher likely couldn’t do it.
Plus, MLB was sick of revenue-sharing going to a team in one of America’s most lucrative markets. The league had set a deadline of the start of the 2024 season for the A’s to commit to a stadium deal, or revenue sharing was done.
And Las Vegas was calling.
In 2020, the NFL’s Raiders had moved out of Oakland Coliseum into a brand-new $1.9 billion stadium in Vegas, with $750 million in taxpayer funds, mostly because local newspaper owner/political fixer/far-right lunatic Sheldon Adelson had his paper blurting constantly about how the stadium would create JOBS and TOURISM and all the usual nonsense.
John Fisher saw that money and DROOLED. He figured, if everything didn’t go exactly as he wanted in Oakland, he could move to Vegas for sure. Adelson died in 2021, but Vegas would still be handing out tons of money if Fisher moved there, right?
It did, at first. After severing ties in Oakland permanently and purchasing land for a stadium site, the team got the Nevada legislature to commit $380 million to the project. Whoopee! Start your digging engines!
Only thing is… the stadium (which is gonna require a roof, it is hot there), will cost $2 billion. And Fisher has had problems raising the money.
You can read A’s fan/blogger Bryan Cantrill on it here. For the first half of 2025, whenever the A’s posted pictures of construction equipment, that stuff was rented props. And meanwhile the A’s are playing in Sacramento where it get DANG HOT in the summer, and the city already hates Fisher. Cantrill guessed that MLB would eventually force the team to sell to someone who could finish a stadium, in Vegas or someplace else.
But, that was then. Now at least there’s some stirrings of construction going on. It was just announced that Mark Cuban (the former Dallas Maverick owner) has purchased an unspecified piece of the team, to go along with a Korean investment firm and concession company Aramark each owning other pieces (and $300 million being owed to Goldman Sachs). Even though, as Neil deMause observes, each little piece sold away reduces what Fisher will eventually get from selling (which is certainly the end goal, not operating a team in MLB’s smallest market). deMause writes “‘I’m tentatively ready to shift my bet from “John Fisher will never move the A’s to Las Vegas” to “John Fisher will eventually move the A’s the Las Vegas and it’ll be a beautiful train wreck.’”
MLB should never have approved the move in the first place… but, as Marc Normandin writes, they loved the idea of threatening other cities with relocation if those taxpayers don’t give owners everything they want. And the league named Fisher to their “executive committee” as a reward for amping those threats. Manfred knows what matters in baseball.
The most annoying was how Fisher very publicly moaned and wailed about how SAD the move made him. The team posted a letter to fans about this great sadness, complete with (fake) nostalgia for memorable moments from the team’s past (moments that happened largely when John Fisher was living at Philips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire or Princeton University in Uranus). The letter misspelled the name of the 1989 earthquake as “Loma Preita” instead of “Loma Prieta,” among other idiocies.
One A’s player responded:
“With all due respect, which is more than you likely deserve, save it. Be an adult. Get in front of a camera and say it with your chest. Releasing a letter, clearly written by someone else, and including a bunch of names you DEFINITELY do not know, is just disrespectful to those that love the team.”
“‘We tried.” lol. The fact that you STILL think that anyone cares about that at this point shows, once again, your lack of understanding of WHY people love the game. You love owning stuff, just not your actions. Either stand up with pride or keep hiding. Pick one, we’re tired.’“
That player was Trevor May, by the way, you might remember him.
On June 13th, 2023, A’s fans organized an unofficial “reverse boycott,” where they packed Oakland Coliseum with nearly 28,000 people (a lot for that season), some of whom were rocking chants of “sell the team!” Trevor May got the last three outs for the 2-1 victory.
Many fans brought homemade signs, some of which you can see in the header image. But my favorites that I’ve seen are these:
There were several articles about the team’s last days in Oakland. Stroke survivor and San Francisco writer Drew Magary (who grew up in Minnesota) described seeing a game when the stadium was nearly empty. Logan Murdock wrote a sad/funny personal remembrance (mild cussing included) of sharing A’s fandom with his Dad.
Bryan Cantrill was at the “reverse boycott” game, and called it something his kids would tell their grandkids about, someday. He thought about John Fisher telling protesting A’s fans (at team meetings in Texas) that “it’s been worse for me than you.”
Cantrill wrote, “John Fisher might be right: it is, in fact worse for him, because this shared humanity of sports eludes him. His camera roll is not filled with A’s-themed birthday parties, or of selfies with his kids in rally caps, or of toddlers running the bases late on a Sunday afternoon.”
“Oakland A’s fans will always have what cannot be taken away: our solidarity with – and love for – one another. We are raucous, brainy, creative, and eclectic; our lives are richer for having one another in them. John Fisher has none of this, and never will. As terrible as it is for us, it may indeed be worse for him.”
Finally, this SF Chronicle article quotes two authors of a recent book, Goodbye, Oakland: Winning, Wanderlust and a Sports Town’s Fight for Survival. About all the love fans had over the years for the A’s, Raiders, and Golden State Warriors (now playing in San Fran instead). What they consider the teams’ epigraph? “Fans gave unselfishly, owners accepted greedily, franchises moved heartlessly.”
