The Death Rattles of the Oakland A's
Can MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred get more craven?
Dear Readers,
The story of the A’s leaving Oakland — the topic of our newsletter this week — is depressing for a lot of reasons, many of which we’ll discuss below. But in the intro here, we’d like to just give a quick shoutout to their uniforms, the most fun in sports.
How can you beat that? It’s just one of the things Major League Baseball is losing by moving a storied franchise away from the Bay area. All that and more below — hope you enjoy.
-Ian and Calder
Rob Manfred plumbs new depths
It has not been a good week for MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred.
Earlier this week, Manfred caved to a right-wing pressure campaign when he conceded that individual teams, not Major League Baseball, should determine the scope of their annual Pride celebration — including whether to host such an event at all. According to Manfred, this decision is designed to avoid “putting [players] in a position of doing something that may make them uncomfortable because of their personal views,” as well as allowing teams to make specific decisions about their Pride celebration based on their familiarity with their local markets and fan bases. Keep that last bit in mind — based on their familiarity with their local markets and fan bases.
Later in the week, Manfred dug himself into an even deeper hole when he casually insulted the entire fan base of the Oakland Athletics, which was reeling from the news that its beloved team is likely to up and move to Las Vegas.
For the past several years, A’s fans have been caught in a tug-of-war between the team’s owner, John Fisher (heir to the GAP family fortune), and the city of Oakland, which the team has called home since 1968. For most of its time in Oakland, the team has played in the Oakland Coliseum, an ancient multi-purpose stadium that the team shared for long stretches with the Oakland Raiders. As you would expect of a stadium built in 1966, the Coliseum is in … less than pristine condition, a situation that has not helped the team’s lagging attendance figures, which are consistently the lowest in the league.
In 2018, the team began discussions with the city of Oakland about building a new stadium in the area, but those negotiations stalled, leading Fisher to explore the possibility of moving the team to Las Vegas. That possibility became a reality this week, when the Nevada legislature approved a deal to put $350 million in public funding toward a new $1.5 billion mixed-use stadium complex in Las Vegas. Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo signed the bill into law Thursday, making the move all but official.
News of the impending deal landed hard among the A’s small but committed fan base, who responded by staging a “reverse boycott” in which 27,000 fans — more than three times the A’s average attendance — flocked to the Coliseum for a game. The crowd was still relatively small by MLB standards, coming in just above the average attendance figure across the league, but it still sent a clear message: Oaklanders don’t want the A’s to leave, and they want Fisher and the city government to come to some sort of accommodation to keep the team in the Bay Area.
You might think that Manfred — the person charged with keeping the spirit of baseball alive in the United States — would have been touched by this outpouring of fan support. But he couldn’t even muster up the courage to do that. In comments to the media on Thursday, Manfred confessed that he “felt sorry for the fans in Oakland,” before slapping them with a back-handed compliment regarding the reverse boycott: “It's great to see what is this year almost an average Major League Baseball crowd in the facility for one night,” he sneered. “That’s a great thing.”
Apparently not content merely with insulting the A’s fan base, Manfred then went on to bash Oakland’s local government, blaming them for refusing to shell out more taxpayer money to back Fisher’s $2.2 billion net worth. Although it’s true that negotiations between the A’s organization and the city of Oakland had been slow-going, it’s not true that there was “no offer” on the table, as Manfred claimed in his comments this week. As Oakland’s mayor Sheng Thao pointed out in a statement this week, the city had put forward an offer to build a new stadium and was moving forward with the financing and environmental review processes.
Thao added: “The reality is the A's ownership had insisted on a multibillion-dollar, 55-acre project that included a ballpark, residential, commercial and retail space. In Las Vegas, for whatever reason, they seem satisfied with a 9-acre leased ballpark on leased land. If they had proposed a similar project in Oakland, we feel confident a new ballpark would already be under construction.”
One of the major sticking points in the team’s negotiations with Oakland has to do with the amount of public money that the city would devote to a new stadium. Understandably, the city had sought to limit the amount of taxpayer funds going to the new stadium, operating under the assumption that giving millions of tax dollars to a billionaire is a waste of public money and a raw deal for the city’s residents. In fact, that’s not really an assumption; it’s more like a fact. According to numerous academic studies, new sports stadiums consistently fail to deliver the type of long-term, community-wide economic benefits that owners, the league, and city governments point to in order to justify public investment. Oakland was doing the responsible thing.
But does Manfred care about the evidence? Of course not. This was Manfred’s response when a reporter confronted him with the findings of these academic studies this week:
“I love academics; they're great. Take the areas where baseball stadiums had been built, OK? Look at what was around Truist Park before that was built. Look at the area around Nationals Park before that was built. I lived in that city. Academics can say whatever they want. I think the reality tells you something else.”
He then doffed his tinfoil hat and took a big gulp of ivermectin while bidding adieu to the media.
At the end of the day, A’s fans can’t expect much better treatment from Fisher, whose Wikipedia page reads like the description of a B-plot character from Succession. Born to the co-founders of Gap, Inc., Fisher attended Exeter and Princeton before working brief stints in the mailroom of the Republican National Committee and as a fundraiser for then-president Ronald Reagan. After getting his MBA from Stanford, he tried to strike out on his own (sort of) as a real estate executive at a company that did business with Gap, but after he flunked out of that role, he took a cushy job at his parents’ investment management company. Along the way, he used some of his inheritance to buy up the Oakland A’s, the MLS’s San Jose Earthquakes, and (a la Roman Roy) a Scottish soccer team, while using another $9 million to oppose Barack Obama’s re-election and bankroll a variety of conservative causes.
But A’s fan should be able to expect slightly better treatment from Manfred, who is supposed to at least pretend to care about fans as he cozies up to his real bosses, the owners.
Here, however, is the real crux of the issue: Remember Manfred’s little statement that we mentioned up top, about leaving Pride decisions up to owners because they know the preferences and desires of their local fan bases? Bullshit. As the episode in Oakland makes abundantly clear, owners couldn’t care less about the wishes of their fan base. Their single-minded goal is to make money, and they’ll do whatever it takes to make more of it, whether that means thumbing their nose at gay people or moving a team to the middle of the Nevada desert. The idea that these decisions are guided by the owners’ abiding fidelity to their fans is laughable — but once again, Manfred’s laughing his way to the bank.
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