The Oakland A’s Fiasco Shows Team Owners Are Never the Good Guys
Q: “How can you not be romantic about baseball?”
A: “Look at what the baseball establishment is allowing to happen to the Oakland A’s.”
The Athletics of Major League Baseball will essentially be homeless for a good portion of this decade, once they leave Oakland—their home of the past 57 years, where they’ve won four World Series championships, and birthed the careers of Hall of Famers like Rickey Henderson and Reggie Jackson—at the end of the 2024 season.
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This week the franchise announced it would play the 2025-2027 seasons in Sacramento, more than 80 miles from Oakland, in a small minor league stadium, while it finalizes plans for a permanent relocation. (Clearly uninterested in hearing from the fans, the team’s X account turned off replies to its announcement post.)
Like a real-estate agent trying to convince a young couple that a 250-square-foot studio rental apartment is “cozy”—team owner John Fisher described Sutter Health Park as “the most intimate park in Major League Baseball,” and added that he’s looking forward to watching A’s players—and opposing superstars like the New York Yankees’ Aaron Judge—launch home runs out of the minor league ballpark.
As if to drive the point home—and straight into the hearts of Oakland fans—the team will simply be known as “The Athletics” while existing as transient residents of Sacramento. Fisher’s heart, meanwhile, is set on Las Vegas.
Now, no one could blame Fisher for wanting to move his franchise out of Oakland Coliseum, a cold, hulking cement tomb with a surrounding area that has a very Mad Max feel to it. But no one forced Fisher to buy the Oakland A’s. It’s his business. He reaps the profits. The fans just pay for the privilege to watch the product he puts out.
Oakland A’s fans display signs demanding John Fisher sell the team.
An heir to the Gap clothing chain fortune, Forbes currently estimates Fisher’s wealth at over $3 billion. (It also gives him a 2 out of a possible 10 on its “self-made score.”) And like pretty much every single owner in pro sports, he wants public money to build a stadium in which the team will generate massive profits for him, not the public.
Suffice it to say, Fisher and Oakland haven’t been able to work out a deal for a new taxpayer-subsidized stadium. And though publicly funded stadiums are a scam with a near-universal track record of yielding terrible returns on investment—the city of Oakland really did try to make something work to keep the A’s in town.
As long-time ESPN baseball reporter Buster Olney put it in a tweet, “It appears that the difference between what Oakland offered and what the A’s wanted was about $35 million or so over three years. Or about the same that the [Los Angeles] Angels are paying reliever Robert Stephenson. Meanwhile, owners overseeing an industry worth many tens of billions of dollars stand by and watch their weakest franchise put on this cheap circus, and do nothing. Incomprehensible. And a terrible business decision.”
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Now, Fisher’s dreams of Vegas helping him build a state-of-the-art ballpark resembling the Sydney Opera House look less than assured, making even a 2028 relocation to Sin City more of an aspiration than an opening date.
Seems like a real mess! Surely the comical mismanagement of one of MLB’s 30 franchises—and one of its oldest—would stir some outrage, or at least embarrassment, from the other 29 owners?
I mean, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred surely has to be thinking about stripping ownership of the team from Fisher—who for the second year in a row is fielding a roster with by far the lowest payroll in baseball. (In fact, the A’s 2024 opening day payroll was a little more than $24 million less than that of the notoriously stingy Pittsburgh Pirates, the next lowest payroll.)
It’s not like there isn’t precedent. Manfred’s predecessor, Bud Selig—who before his 23-year run as commissioner was one of the worst owners in the game—stripped ownership of the Los Angeles Dodgers from Frank and Jamie McCourt in 2011 over alleged financial chicanery and gross mismanagement.
But today’s MLB owners and the commissioner (who works for the owners) have no compunction about allowing Fisher to hide behind the facade that Oakland is a “small market” (the Bay Area is the 10th largest media market in the country) and that his perennially underfunded franchise would be successful if only its home city loved it more.
Commissioner Manfred in 2023 mocked A’s fans for not paying money to attend games played by a team whose owner very clearly does not want to win. Then he claimed his statements were “taken out of context.” To add context, he blamed the city instead.
A’s fans chant “Sell the team” as they take part in a reverse boycott event at the Coliseum in Oakland.
“They never got to the point where they had a plan to build a stadium at any site. It's not just John Fisher… The community has to provide support, and at some point, you come to the realization that it’s just not going to happen,” the commissioner said.
More recently, in February, Manfred’s attempt at fan service was to advise spurned Oaklanders to root for the regional rival San Francisco Giants instead. (Manfred clearly has his finger on the pulse of the average sports fan.)
Whatever becomes of the A’s, baseball fans would do well to remember this shameful episode as emblematic of how the owners consider their customers.
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When they blame the next labor dispute on greedy players, remember that owners illegally colluded to keep players’ salaries down in the 1980s and that today most owners still refuse to open their books—lest fans learn how even failing teams make obscene profits. And remember that despite booming revenue, the average player’s salary has remained essentially flat for almost a decade.
When some greasy-palmed politician insists taxpayers will be the prime beneficiaries of a publicly-funded sports stadium—and use civic pride as a cudgel—remember how John Fisher was allowed to tank the A’s into oblivion, and how the owners and commissioner let him do it without complaint.
But wherever the A’s end up, do not blame their fans or the city of Oakland. This is a disgraceful episode that should be owned by—who else?—ownership.
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