The East Bay deserves a major league team.
That’s why the A’s announcement on Thursday that they’ll be moving to Sacramento for at least three seasons starting in 2025 doesn’t hit as hard as I thought it would, as I thought it should.
The A’s might be a member of Major League Baseball, but they haven’t been major league — in the true sense of the term — in a long time.
Maybe this is actually au revoir for the worst-run organization in professional sports — one that showed outright contempt for its fanbase and the unspoken covenant between teams and the regions they call home.
Or maybe it’s just goodbye for now.
The A’s have plans — three, maybe four years in Sacramento and then a glitzy new future in Las Vegas — but to bet on owner John Fisher and team president/professional lackey Dave Kaval to follow through on their plans is to be willfully ignorant of their history.
That nine-acre ballpark they want in Las Vegas is still not guaranteed to be built. The A’s might come crawling back to Oakland in the months and years to come.
I do think Fisher and Kaval make it to Sacramento, though. There, they’ll play at a 10,624-seat Triple-A ballpark that’s currently home to the Giants’ top minor-league affiliate. It’s befitting of this minor-league organization.
(Sutter Health Park in Sacramento, for the record, is on a 13-acre plot. Fisher called it “very intimate” in his press conference on Thursday. What does that make the nine-acre domed stadium they have planned in Las Vegas?)
Yes, Fisher and Kaval might have considered Oakland a small market, and Major League Baseball might have agreed, but they were just small thinkers. An estimated 3.2 million people live in Alameda, Contra Costa, and Solano counties, roughly the same number as live in the state of Nevada. But good luck driving from Reno to Las Vegas in a day. Meanwhile, you add millions more potential fans to that already massive number if we include everyone within an hour’s drive of Oakland.
Yet the A’s squandered all of that. They spit in the face of the unspoken covenant that sports teams are a public service, deciding that instead of a give-and-take, they’d simply take.
So now they’ll barnstorm from desperate market to desperate market, ending in the most desperate place in America, Las Vegas.
Sacramento wanted to take the A’s in because it wanted to prove it was a Major League town for when expansion came around. (They’re smart enough not to want Fisher full-time.) Folks in Utah were hellbent on bringing the A’s to the Salt Lake region for the same reason.
Ultimately, the A’s chose to stay in Northern California because, despite the fact they plan to go to what will be the smallest media market in baseball in Las Vegas, Fisher and Kaval were too afraid of losing the whole of their current television deal with NBC Sports, which they can maintain, to a degree, with the move to Sacramento.
Ironically, in a sport as provincial as baseball, Sacramento (metro population 2.4 million) might even be a more viable market than Las Vegas. And because of incompetence, Fishers’ A’s might stay there. Sorry, Sacramento.
As Fisher and Kaval are protected by the Major League Baseball cartel and incapable of feeling shame, all options for their future remain on the table. And so the embarrassment will continue.
And knowing them, they’ll probably keep “Oakland” on the front of the A’s jerseys while they’re playing in the capital city. Their cheapness isn’t bound to the city limits.
Good on the city of Oakland for not acting desperate in these final days of the A’s, even as the city and East Bay knew it meant losing its final big-league team this fall.
Might Mayor Sheng Thao have asked for too much when she and the city asked for $97 million to use the Coliseum for up to five years — 13 times the current rate? Perhaps. The A’s aren’t the first East Bay residents to move to Sacramento because of rent hikes.
But at least the city stood up for itself in this abusive relationship. The A’s will leave in shame, but the city can hold its head high — it made a strong effort to keep the A’s in Oakland, and it kept its priorities straight in the process.
The failure of the A’s to stay in Oakland rests on Fisher’s shoulders.
It’s obvious Fisher got into this baseball racket because it was easy money. As the value of teams kept rising, so did Fisher’s investment.
But now that he actually has to do something to earn that money, it’s all gone horribly wrong.
Is Fisher actually excited about playing in a 25-year-old minor-league ballpark in West Sacramento?
Does he really want the headache of building a new ballpark in Las Vegas?
It all sounds like a lot of work — and a lot of money to spend — for a limited upside, at best.
A noted recluse, Fisher is having to pander to folks in Las Vegas (where he’s encountered a few tough rooms) and now Sacramento, where he provided less than two minutes of soulless, charmless comments from the ballpark concourse, with views of the beautiful Tower Bridge and a double-wide trailer behind him.
Sure, he might be slightly closer to the Nevada state line, but he’s no closer to actually having his forever home in the desert. Will Las Vegas even be habitable by the time he gets there?
There is, of course, an easy reprieve to this, Johnny boy.
This embarrassment can end in short order, and you can pocket billions in the process.
The answer is plastered on kelly green flags and t-shirts and stickers all over Oakland: sell.
Sports teams are supposed to be rich folks’ playthings. A way for them to have some fun and give back to the community in the process; noble wastes of time.
But Fisher certainly doesn’t care about the community.
And now he doesn’t seem to be having any fun, either.
Good.
I hope it only gets more painful from here.