A’s Fans Deserve Better Than John Fisher
At this point, a considerable amount of ink has been spilled with respect to the Oakland—sorry—the Athletics departure from Oakland. Nearly everyone in the baseball world, from former players, to commentators, to fans, podcast hosts, and even the vaunted Jeff Passan have taken their chance to call out the cruelty and greed that permeates this decision. This is going to be a long piece, but it isn’t going to be heavy in baseball-jargon. This is going to be a discussion about how the greed that moves the kelly green to Vegas—sorry—Sacramento, has imperiled baseball as a tentpole of the American experience. To start, I know that a lot of you might have no idea what I’m talking about, so I’ll begin with a brief history of the A’s, and how this comedy of errors has played out over the last several years.
The Oakland Athletics trace their history back to the other side of the country, as they were founded as one of the original members of the American League in 1901 and called Philadelphia home until 1954. After a 14 year pit-stop in Kansas City, the A’s ended up in Oakland in 1968. It is important to note that those moves are not analogous to what is happening today. When the A’s moved from Philadelphia to Kansas City, part of that calculation involved the reality that the Philadelphia Phillies had called that city home since 1883. And when they moved from Kansas City, the Kansas City Royals replaced them in 1969. Neither city was left without baseball. Four years after arriving in Oakland, they won their first of three consecutive World Series Titles (adding another in 1989) and cemented themselves as an institution of Bay Area sports. They have long been known for having some of the most dedicated fans in the game, every A’s game I can remember watching was full of crowd shots of fans banging on drums, strumming banjos, and painted green and gold. The A’s now-former stadium, the Coliseum, is the place where the Wave was invented. Yes, the thing that every non-sports fan associates with sports games was first conceived in Oakland in 1981, by a man known as “Krazy George Henderson” who was in attendance for the last game at the Coliseum on Thursday, September 26. For the vast majority of the A’s history, and still today, this is one of the healthiest, most robust fanbases in professional sports. So where did it all go wrong?
Krazy George Henderson, the inventor of the wave.
On June 1, 1961, John Joseph Fisher was born to Donald and Doris Fisher, the cofounders of Gap. After 43 years of being a trust fund baby and raising money for Republicans in California, his parents finally decided that it was time for this baby billionaire to have his first big responsibility. Nicknamed “Harpo” by his parents due to a propensity to harp on them until he got what he wanted, I can only imagine how uncomfortable it must have been to watch a 43 year old grovel until his parents bought him a baseball team. One of his early critics, dating back to when he used his parents’ development company to clear forests to build roads and luxury housing, quipped that “You should change the spelling from J-O-H-N to G-R-E-E-D,” which turned out to be more of a prophecy than he could have imagined.
Fisher’s ownership of the A’s marks an unfortunate continuation of lackluster A’s owners. While all MLB team owners are evil in one way or another, the history of A’s owners includes two of the most important men in the history of the sport—Connie Mack and Charles Finley. Mack was the first owner of the A’s, following one of the most successful careers in the game. He played professionally and managed before becoming an owner. He currently holds the record for the most games managed in MLB history having managed the Philadelphia A’s from 1901 through 1950, and fittingly has both the most wins and losses of any skipper in the game. He won five World Series and was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1937, which was the second induction class. The only people that predate Mack in the Hall of Fame are Honus Wagner, Babe Ruth, Christy Mathewson, Walter Johnson, and Ty Cobb, often considered to be five of the greatest baseball players ever (though your humble blog host disagrees). Finley is a legend is his own right, and I would recommend giving his Wikipedia page a read to fully grasp his impact. He is most known for his marketing exploits, such as changing the color of baseballs, hiring MC Hammer as an executive, and offering players bonuses to grow moustaches.
In more recent years, the A’s are known most for being a cheap team, squeezing all of the money they can out of their fans and spending as little of it as possible on the on-field product and the stadium that they call home. The A’s are so cheap that many of you are probably familiar with a movie that they made about it, Moneyball. While many baseball fans love that movie, the truth of the matter is that the film is a glorification of greed, penny-pinching, and vulture capitalism. The team was driven to be the most efficient baseball machine it could be and mathematicians and consultants were roped into the effort. It was the Amazon Warehouse of MLB. Maximizing profit and outcomes while paying players as little as they could. For those of you who think that all MLB players are millionaires, check out this article written by Travis Sawchik, if you don’t want to read it, the biggest takeaway is that the median career earnings of 1,453 players to accrue at least one day of service time in 2019 was just $357,718. That is a little less that 10 years of the average income in the United States. It’s still a lot of money, but it is not enough to live off of for the rest of their lives. John Fisher, on the other hand, is worth approximately $2.4 billion, which leaves him just short of the 400 wealthiest people in America, yet he runs his baseball team on a shoestring budget. Why? Because he’s a greedy little weasel, just like many other owners of professional sports teams. While the A’s of the early 2000s popularized this trend of cutting costs, John Fisher took it to a new level.
Since he took over in 2005, the A’s have had one of the lowest payrolls in baseball every year. He has traded away all of the team’s best players, allowed his own ballpark to fall into a state of disrepair, begged taxpayers for billions to build a new one, and finally, when he didn’t get what he wanted, announced that he was moving the team to Las Vegas. For some reading, that might not feel like that big of a deal. But let’s look at a few examples of how this petty tyrant has ruined one of the most storied franchises in the sport.
The 2022 season saw five (!!!!) excellent examples of the A’s doing everything they could to save money by making their team worse. Matt Chapman, a fantastic fielding third baseman known most for consistency and a comfortably above average bat was traded to the Blue Jays before the 2022 season for four players that I have never heard of. Just so they wouldn’t have to pay him. Across the diamond, they had another Matt, Matt Olson, a first baseman who is a regular All-Star, Gold Glover, and MVP candidate. He was traded to the Braves ahead of the 2022 season for another four-player return. This trade was barely better, as the A’s did at least get a starting catcher out of it. Olson is one of the most feared power hitters in the game and has been excellent for the Atlanta Braves. None of the players in either of these trades even come close to making up for the departures of the Matts. Worse still, the A’s shortstop in 2022 was Elvis Andrus. Then a 33 year-old veteran of 13 years in MLB had played well in 106 games for the A’s and was making $14 million—low for a good starting shortstop, but far too much for the A’s. Oakland acquired Andrus by trading away two young stars in Khris Davis and Jonah Heim—the latter of which became a critical piece in the Ranger’s World Series win last season. They knew what they had to pay him, he was signed to a contract that the A’s had to honor when they acquired him. Part of that contract included a clause that would have granted him a $15 million salary in the next season if he reached 550 plate appearances in 2022. In late August, Andrus sat at 386 plate appearances, on pace to hit the 550 mark with room to spare. Since the trade deadline had passed and the A’s couldn’t ship him out to another team for a bag of peanuts and half of a soft pretzel, they cut him (for non-baseball heads, they fired him, dismissing him from the team and denying him the ability for his contract option to vest, and denying him the continued income from his contract). If that wasn’t enough, that move came at the end of a week where they also cut Jed Lowrie and Stephen Piscotty, two long-standing A’s. Cutting veterans allowed the team to pull up younger players who are not guaranteed the same salary due to the MLB’s collective bargaining agreement. It is important to remember that John Fisher is a billionaire. Not a millionaire, he’s worth about 2,400 times more than someone who has $1 million. So, when he cuts payroll it is not because he has to. He wants to.
Yes, that is what you think it is.
Fisher, a faux-frugalist, also claimed that the Coliseum was in a constant state of disrepair. And on that count he was right. The urinals leaked onto the floor, sewage would fill the dugouts if it rained, and a family of feral cats joined a possum as the stadium’s only permanent residents. But, a reminder, Fisher is a billionaire and the A’s certainly had the money to fix the stadium. But instead he tried to reach his hands into the pockets of the taxpayers in the city, asking them to finance a new stadium for him and his failing franchise. The City of Oakland cares so deeply about the A’s that they were willing to invest some money in a new stadium for the team despite massive budget shortfalls. It is important to remember that the people of the city love the A’s. A telling chart provided by Baseball Reference shows you that the A’s still put up respectable attendance numbers as late as 2019, just a few years ago! They lost almost 1 million fans in one year following their 2021 announcement that they were leaving the Bay for Las Vegas.
At the end of this saga, John Fisher is standing in the ruins of the Oakland A’s, pointing fingers at the city and worse, the fans, for their inability to spend enough money for him to keep his franchise in Oakland. In a page-long letter to his team’s fans, he apologizes that he failed to keep the team in the Bay Area and says that he wishes he could speak to each of his fans personally. If that were true, then why would the A’s turn off replies and comments on all of their social media posts? If that were true, then why weren’t you in the crowd with the fans throughout the last season? John Fisher stripped the team down to the bone and let its stadium rot in the northern California sun to manufacture an environment deeply unfriendly to fans. He put together a terrible product and packaged it in a stadium that was falling apart around the dedicated few who continued to suffer through his tantrum. For those of you who are fans of the Netflix show, I Think You Should Leave, John Fisher is effectively MLB’s version of this skit:
Arguably the worst of this situation is that they don’t even have to leave Oakland yet. There is no stadium waiting for them in Las Vegas. As of the writing of this entry, there isn’t even a plan to build a stadium. All we know is that John Fisher wants the city to spend $1.5 billion for him because he is unwilling to invest even a dollar in the fans that have invested hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars in his team. The A’s aren’t going to Las Vegas next year, they’re going to Sacramento to play in a stadium that was never intended to house a Major League Baseball team. We have no idea how long they may have to play in Sacramento. There is no reason for them to leave the Coliseum this year. Even if the ownership is dead-set on leaving Oakland, and it appears they are, they could still stay in the Coliseum until their new billion-dollar-convection-oven of a stadium is built in the desert.
As I watched the game on Thursday, the camera crews panned around the stadium. I spent three hours watching the A’s win their final game in Oakland while adults and children wept over the loss of their team. To a lot of people, baseball is just a sport. To many of us, though, it is far more than that. It is how we grew up spending summers with our friends, our parents, or strangers in the stands that become your best friend for 9 innings while you cheered on your favorite players. Nearly 50,000 fans sold out the Coliseum to watch the end of their team. Fans that Fisher claimed were unwilling to spend money to watch the A’s. It has nothing to do with the A’s, and everything to do with their greedy owner. No one wants to give money to a person who is going to take away the very thing that they are paying money to watch. The Coliseum housed generations of A’s fans. And on Thursday we watched that end. It would be sad if this had to happen. It’s feels gross that the whole spectacle was unnecessary.
Long after the game ended, fans hung around as members of the grounds crew handed them cups and water bottles full of the dirt from the infield and the warning track. For some of those people, that dirt will be the last memory of summers they spent with their dad in the hot sun, eating hot dogs and watching their favorite players. Those memories are everything to some people, if you haven’t read the first post I made on this blog, I would recommend checking it out if you don’t believe me. I would also suggest reading this wonderful retrospective put together by FanGraphs, the best baseball website in the game. Some of my most cherished memories involve sitting in uncomfortable seats at Fenway Park with my dad, just watching some guys play a game. But we shared that experience. Just like millions of A’s fans have for the last six decades.
John Fisher is robbing A’s fans of their team, tainting their memories with the bitter taste of an owner who doesn’t give a shit about the people that made it possible for him to ever ask a city for $1.5 billion. This is a disgrace and a mark on the other 29 owners and the institution of MLB. Fandom means a lot to a lot of people. If money is so important to Mr. Fisher, maybe he should sell the team to someone who actually cares about the people and the city that have made the team as successful as it has been. Then he can have his billions and leave the rest of us alone. Fans of the A’s deserve better than what he has given them as owner. I hope that this isn’t the end of baseball in Oakland. And I hope that MLB learns something about letting idiots like Fisher own baseball teams—though none of us should hold our breath.
