The Las Vegas A's, redux

They're extremely bad this year, you know. Fun fact!

I was naive.

Everyone knew the A’s were going to be bad this year, and everyone knew why. But we’ve seen tank jobs before. We’ve seen the Astros, who notoriously tanked for several years in order to get the draft picks that became Carlos Correa and Alex Bregman. We’ve seen the Cubs, who got Kris Bryant out of the whole deal. It doesn’t always work — see the Orioles and Pirates, who have both been awful for most of this century, as well as the Tigers, stuck in a perpetual rebuild — but it’s a strategy. Get through the bad times, and get some good players for it on the other side.

With the A’s, there is no other side. There is no end. I was naive because I thought that this would be a normal tank job. It isn’t. No owner has ever been so shameless about losing, so blatantly copying the villain from Major League. John Fisher is a garbage person who would decrease the quality of any dumpster he slept in. There is no end to this. There is no bottom.

I talked about the A’s a little more than a month ago, and not much has changed, other than their refusal to get better and the fact that they abandoned their old binding commitment to Las Vegas for a new binding commitment to Las Vegas. In a way, neither of those things is particularly interesting; Team Continues On Same Pace isn’t much of a headline, and neither is Team Now Moving Down The Street From Where They Said They Would Move.

But back in April, the A’s were just a bad team having an unusually bad month. Sure, it was a dreadful April, but there was plenty of time for them to turn it around and finish with a blandly awful 60 wins. The season has gone on for another month, and it has become dreadfully clear that they are not going to do that.

To win 60 games, the A’s would have to play .462 ball over the rest of the season, which is beyond their ability. To win 50 games, they would have to play .368 ball over the rest of the season, which is still aiming awfully high. To finish with a better record than the 1962 Mets, the losingest baseball team ever, the A’s would have to play .283 ball over the rest of the season. To finish with a better record than the 1916 Philadelphia A’s, the worst baseball team since the McKinley assassination, the 2023 A’s would have to play .255 ball over the rest of the season.

Also, there’s this fun nugget:

Right now, the A’s are playing .196 ball. They are winning almost one out of every 5 games they play. To avoid being the worst team in modern baseball history, they need to win a bit more than 1 out of every 4 games they play. To avoid being the team with the most losses in baseball history, they have to win about 2 out of every 7 games they play. I honestly don’t know if this team will do either of those things. I do know they don’t think they have to.

Losing is good for John Fisher, because he is a loser. He wants to lose because it will make it easier to move to Las Vegas; he wants the team to be uncompetitive so he can whine about how it’s everyone else’s fault the team is uncompetitive and only Las Vegas can fix the problem; he wants the roster to be a laughingstock because it’ll save on Atlas Van Lines costs when he doesn’t have to bring any players to Las Vegas. His eyes are firmly on the prize, and that prize is in southern Nevada.

A’s fans don’t deserve this. This is the part where an A’s fan reading this would blame the Giants for not letting them move to San Jose, which is at least somewhat fair, though whether the A’s actually would have succeeded in building that stadium is open for debate, considering their subsequent history of failing to build stadiums. It is, however, also fair to note that, per Mark Davis, in 2013 the A’s fucked over the Raiders, not allowing them to build a new stadium at the Coliseum:

"I won't forget what they did to us in Oakland. They squatted on a lease for 10 years and made it impossible for us to build on that stadium," Davis claimed. "They were looking for a stadium. We were looking for a stadium. They didn't want to build a stadium, and then went ahead and signed a 10-year lease with the city of Oakland and said, 'We're the base team.'"

Just like it the Giants had done in the previous decade, the A’s looked at their neighbor’s situation, decided, “No, this will mean less money for us,” and didn’t let them build a new stadium. The difference is that the Giants were and are very much active in marketing themselves in San Jose, while the A’s had no intention of using the Coliseum site for anything. They were busy with Fremont and Laney and Howard Terminal, and considered that land completely unsuitable for their own purposes. They just didn’t want the Raiders to have it.

And so here we are, with the A’s doing their best to sell the Nevada legislature on their new stadium. Yesterday, they made a bunch of economic arguments which are almost certainly bullshit, but I haven’t looked at the numbers carefully enough to refute their arguments, so I just have to rely on literally every other stadium deal ever made.

I mean, there’s also this argument that they made:

But who’s to say whether a lie is true or not?

But you know what, okay. For this paragraph, I will take the A’s at face value and assume that they really do just want it to work in Las Vegas and that things will be different there. The team will be better. They will be more involved in the community. John Fisher will actually invest in them once he has a new stadium, unlike what’s happened with the San Jose Earthquakes. Sure, great.

Then why the hell weren’t Fisher and Dave Kaval in Carson City for the hearing yesterday?

Nothing will be different. Sure, the team won’t be quite as outwardly godawful — even in the best case scenario where they win 50 games, they really are once-in-a-generation terrible this year — but ownership still won’t care. Fisher and Kaval will continue to pinch pennies, take revenue sharing money, and make a profit without competing. They will still sell off their stars years before free agency in order to avoid paying them. Their attendance will still be lousy, and people will not watch at home, because what does Las Vegas care about the Las Vegas A’s?

John Fisher is a leech and Dave Kaval is a lackey. They are destroying their baseball team because they are getting a payout from it. This is the way of things. This is American capitalism. The loophole is that if you have 2 billion dollars, no one will ever stop you from anything you do to get that third billion. Fisher is trying. He’s tearing down the team with an empty promise to build it back up someday. He’ll pay you two dollars tomorrow for a third baseman today, he swears.

John Fisher is a disgrace to his team, his name, his family, and his sport. The team will never be respectable with him in charge. Maybe they’ll compete a little bit, win a wild card spot or two, but they’ll never invest enough to be a great team and Rob Manfred won’t say a word about it. The A’s have become a joke because of Fisher, and it will take a very, very long time for that to go away.

I don’t think it’s good that the A’s are leaving Oakland, but at least they’re taking their sack of shit owner with them.