Lew Wolff just wanted the parking lots around the new A’s park in Fremont.
When Wolff and John Fisher bought the team, that was the plan. They would build a new stadium in Fremont, 4 miles away from BART, everyone would drive there, and the team would make money off the parking lots. Remember the Frank McCourt era in LA? It was that, 400 miles to the north.
It didn’t work out. The A’s didn’t get that new ballpark in Fremont, indisputably because of something the Giants did (I have not fact checked this), and then they didn’t get their new stadium near Laney College, and then they ran into some roadblocks to getting their new ballpark near Jack London Square.
That last one still might happen, though. There’s a path there, and how great would it be for the Oakland A’s to build a beautiful new waterfront park in Oakland?
Pretty great all right, if only they’d build a fucking baseball team too.
For the eight thousandth time in the last few decades, the A’s are tearing it down. On Tuesday I discussed their trading Matt Olson and Chris Bassitt, and then yesterday they plunged into the depths of tankdom, sending Matt Chapman to the Blue Jays for, y’know, prospects. The A’s took a look at a young, respectable 86-76 team and instead of trying to win, just packed it in and decided to maybe give it a shot in 2025. Bob Melvin considered the organization’s future and thought, you know what, let’s move to San Diego.
This is what they do. The A’s are an organization of cowards, run by a vulture capitalist who made his money by being born to the founders of The Gap. That’s it. That’s what he did that made himself so rich.
Here’s how much of a failure of an organization the A’s are. The idea for writing this didn’t occur to me today. I have had this tweet saved in my drafts since August:
Since August, it’s been clear that John Fisher, the owner of the A’s, who bought out Wolff in 2016, had absolutely no interest in running a competent baseball organization. The A’s were in a playoff race at the time, and still were giving off all the signals of a fire sale. Then they didn’t make the playoffs, then there was a lockout, then the A’s got a bunch of revenue sharing money that they didn’t used to get, and then the A’s implemented their strategy of being as cheap as humanly possible.
What do you even say about that? It’s inexcusable. It is an absolute dereliction of duty. The entire purpose of Major League Baseball is to sell the best baseball possible to fans all over the country. That is why it exists. That is what it’s for. And the A’s, who play in a bad stadium but otherwise have tons of advantages, such as an owner worth $2.4 billion and a giant media market with tons of massively rich people who would love to show off how much money they have to spend, are saying, nah, fuck it, we’d rather complain about the Giants.
We are long past the point where the Giants are the biggest problem the A’s have. The biggest problem the A’s have is that they have no ambition to be a Major League Baseball team. Sure, they will put some good teams together, but the second they hit any snag, any losing streak, any adversity, they just jettison any hope of contention for the near future because it’s easier to do that than to keep trying.
It’s easier to whittle down your fanbase and blame the people who are abandoning ship — which they are doing because your ship sucks; it is a rustbucket that sinks every 8 years — for being fake fans than it is to actually build something. It’s easier to hire a CEO who gets publicity by trolling the Giants than it is to hire a CEO who can run a goddamn baseball team.
Every single thing the A’s do is the easy, weak thing. This is the history of the A’s. After losing the 1914 World Series, the Philadelphia A’s tore down their dynasty that had won three World Series in four years; when they were in Kansas City, the A’s were basically a farm team for the Yankees; after the team threepeated in Oakland from 1972-1974, Charlie Finley traded most of his best players and let the rest leave in free agency.
The A’s are an embarrassment, and anytime you think they’re not, just know that they’re setting you up for future, much worse, embarrassment. And what John Fisher knows is that enough fans will tolerate this that it doesn’t fucking matter.
For a while now, there have been rumors about the A’s moving to Las Vegas. Maybe they’re true, or maybe they’re a way to leverage a better deal from Oakland. I don’t know. But here’s the thing: the A’s fanbase will not follow them to Las Vegas. The A’s will have to inspire a new generation to love them, follow them, buy their jerseys, go to their games. And to do that, they’ll have to be better than this:
I don’t know what the plan is. I don’t even know if there is a plan. All I know is this: the Oakland A’s are an absolute disgrace, and that will never change as long as John Fisher owns the team.
Drag 'em, Doug. Well said as usual!