Trevor May, who retired from baseball yesterday after one final season with the Oakland A’s, was until now known for two things: being a pretty good relief pitcher, and being a big competitive video game player. Now, he will be mostly known for what he said yesterday about team owner John Fisher during his retirement announcement on Twitch:
To the A’s organization and every single person part of it, I love all of you. Every single one of you except for one guy. And we all know who that guy is.
Sell the team, dude. I tried to get a “SELL” shirt, it didn’t get here fast enough. Sell it, man. Let someone who actually, like, takes pride in the things they own own something. There’s actually people who give a shit about the game. Let them do it. Take mommy and daddy’s money somewhere else, dork.
And also if you’re gonna just be a greedy fuck, own it. There’s nothing weaker than being afraid of cameras. So that’s one thing I really struggled with this year was not just eviscerating that guy.
Do what you’re gonna do, bro. You’re a billionaire, they exist. You guys have all this power. You shouldn’t have any, because you haven’t earned any of it. But anyway, whatever. It is what it is. The reality is you got handed everything you have. And now you’re too soft to take any responsibility for anything you’re doing.
Yeah, whatever, Oakland is Oakland. You can make all the cases, it’s not a great city, bah bah bah bah bah bah bah. But you’re putting hundreds if not thousands of people out of work that have worked somewhere for decades. And you haven’t acknowledged that at all.
So just be better, that’s all we’re asking. Just be a human being. Because this is just billionaire keeping up with the Joneses: He sees all the other billionaires’ yachts, he wants a big yacht too, and that’s what all this is about. And it literally is that stupid. It’s that dumb. It’s that dumb. It’s that dumb.
And: mic drop.
Aside from just instantly becoming possibly the most popular player in history with Oakland A’s fans, is May’s dressing down of Fisher likely to accomplish much? Probably not, since the MLB owners who need to vote to approve the A’s move to Las Vegas aren’t usually swayed by the opinion of a single player. But at the same time, reasons not to approve the move, or at least to think twice about it, are piling up pretty fast: the lack of a finalized stadium plan, the teachers’ union lawsuit, the refusal of the city of Oakland to let the team play there as a lame duck unless an expansion replacement is promised, the likelihood that a move to Vegas would earn Fisher a spot as a perennial revenue-sharing recipient. There’s not a ton of glory in this move for any owner aside from maybe Fisher, who seemingly isn’t all that much more popular with his fellow owners than with his former relief pitchers.
And there is precedent for rejecting a move: When then-San Francisco Giants owner Bob Lurie tried to move his team to St. Petersburg in 1992, he got only four votes out of the ten he needed from other National League owners, in part because local supermarket baron Peter Magowan was waiting in the wings to buy the team and keep it in San Francisco. And likewise, local NBA baron Joe Lacob right now says he is ready to buy the A’s and keep them in Oakland — so it’s not completely impossible.
When the Giants’ move was blocked, a pair of the prospective Tampa Bay owners filed an antitrust suit, which ultimately ended up with the Devil Rays coming into existence as an expansion team four years later. That’s an option here too: Since MLB is openly considering expansion once the A’s and Rays get new stadium deals, it would be simple to grant an expansion franchise to Las Vegas if they wanted after having Fisher sell the A’s to Lacob. MLB could even let Fisher get the Vegas expansion team — you know, if they wanted to keep associating with a dork.
I also question Fisher’s ability to finance his part of the stadium. I believe that any cost overruns will be paid for by the team- with Vegas poised for more construction (NBA Arena/Casino, mirage becoming the hard rock, Tropicana rebuild and several other properties doing major renovations), costs for a baseball stadium should go up.
That’s all assuming he can get a major lender to agree to give him money in the first place. “Yeah I know there’s that ballot issue, but once we sue the school teachers that should go away!”
Agreed, Al. Fisher and his sidekick have proven as incompetent at negotiating their own soft landing as they have been about negotiating with their current hosts and operating a baseball franchise.
These guys make the PAC-12 execs look like geniuses…
This one’s easy: Fisher’s not selling, end of story.
Lastly: Relocate your NBA franchise out of Oakland to SF, set up your WNBA expansion franchise NOT IN OAKLAND but in SF. Yet talk up some Wonderland fanstasy of Lacob buying the A’s and saving them for Oakland?! Lacob greasing the skids for abandoning Oakland himself anyone?….
Tony, c’mon man
You’re from around here, and you know that whole “relocation” narrative is bologna.
I have no doubt that Fisher doesn’t want to sell.
I also have no doubt that he would sell if the league rejected his proposal to move to Vegas, especially if handed the carrot of an expansion team.
I don’t exactly *expect* that’s going to happen, but it’s more possible than it was a couple of months ago.
The difference with the NBA franchise and the MLB are two fold:
1) The NBA franchise technically moved within the same media market so the team effectively didn’t move in the NBA’s broadcasters eyes.
2) The MLB anti-trust exemption allows the MLB to block any move for any reason they don’t like. It’s not something the NBA or even though they’ve been trying the NFL has.
The moves are not remotely comparable.
The Warriors moved less than 20 miles away. That is about an hour on public transit or a bit more than a half hour driving in traffic. The 49ers moved further than that and nobody seems to think it’s a disaster for San Francisco.
And it’s still in the same TV market. I doubt they lost many fans over the move.
But Las Vegas is about 550 miles from Oakland. A completely different TV market and way too far for fans in Oakland to travel.
All of this “Oakland is losing all of its teams LOL” is nonsense that buys into the ownership narrative that cities *need* teams to be “world class,” which is always defined in a circular way and really only serves the interests of the ownership class. In many cases it’s dog-whistle racism too.
Now, as I understand it, the Warriors paid for their own arena so they could have, hypothetically, built that in Oakland.
But there is no available universe in which those guys would have preferred to stay in Oakland vs San Francisco and be more accessible to their techbro friends.
Oakland shouldn’t feel bad about itself because it can’t be more more like San Francisco. It needs to serve the people that live there, not impress anyone else.
It’s certainly not impossible. One thing we (including me) seem to keep glossing over when talking about what MLB might do is the fact that there is a pretty good stadium deal on the table in Oakland at the moment.
Fisher – like Wolff before him – has effectively refused to consider it, but the amount of money offered is enough to do a decent job of building a new stadium. He would have to contribute some money himself, but significantly less than the Vegas play is going to cost him (and his fellow owners). The conditions precedent are likely negotiating points that can be ‘wiggled’ to some extent (perhaps a great extent, you don’t know if you don’t try…), so there is “an option”.
And for the reasons specified in Neil’s article, sports leagues don’t like to move franchises when there is a local option. It’s bad business… it makes your other existing hosts wonder if they are next. And as the Kroenkster and the NFL have recently found out, it can turn quite badly for you if you thumb your nose at your current partners too openly (though I would admit that they were about as ‘open’ about screwing over St. Louis as it is possible to be…).
Anyway, I would say don’t give up hope A’s fans. And if the choice is some kind of Montreal redux – where the league buys the A’s from their despised manchild owner and holds them while issuing him an expansion franchise for his grand illusion in Vegas, well, it wouldn’t be completely surprising… and unlike Montreal/Washington, it doesn’t sound to me like the league would have to own the A’s for years to make this work.
I don’t think Fisher has endeared himself to his fellow members of the billionaire owners club any more than he has to his franchise’s existing fan base.
With the opening of The Sphere last week, the A’s unbuilt Vegas stadium is already obsolete. You want to see a giant Bono in 16K resolution, or the infield-fly-rule? They’re going to need a couple billion more dollars.
The idea that anyone would use it as a concert venue in a market saturated with concert venues is pretty funny
I greatly respect Bono’s talent, accomplishments, and sure also his service to the greater good, but there’s even a part of Bono wouldn’t want to see Bono in 16k. Too much detail! Yikes!
Done correctly, MLB can offer an experience that is differentiated from the glitz of an increasingly pixelated Las Vegas if they went all in on something wholly faux retro. Putting aside the insane and ill conceived public subsidies for just a moment, Fisher isn’t even smart enough to plan for venue that brings something novel or significant to LV. Based on early renderings thus far he would instead adopt banal motifs that attempt to blitz senses that effectively obscure the game while also increasing the cost of the facility and add no value to the city or MLB – it as is implied would just be lost in the mix of other bright and shiny objects blinding patrons of the desert.
Agreed- a Las Vegas baseball team needs ownership that’s creative and willing to spend. Not just on players, the game day experience has to be special. Every night in Vegas there’s an endless list of other entertainment options, that’s not really true in any other market, New York comes closest. Both those teams spend crazy money.
Another Vegas thing that doesn’t get a lot of attention- there’s not a record of the support a bad pro team will get. The Golden Knights have been competitive their entire existence. The Raiders are kind of in their own world, but we’ve seen how full that stadium can get with opposing fans. Those people aren’t coming to an A’s game.
Las Vegas seems to be lousy with venues already.
There’s the Sphere, the arena where the Golden Knights play, a different one where the Aces play, UNLV’s own arena, the one where the Henderson Knights and Ignite play, the new NBA arena which seems like a certainty now, the Raiders stadium, Las Vegas Ballpark, Cashman Field, and maybe others I don’t know of.
UNLV’s old stadium is also still there but I guess that will be torn down now.
Baseball stadiums, domed or not, aren’t very good for non-baseball events. The shape is wrong, but also just aren’t many few concerts that would be suitable for a 30,000 seat stadium.
We’re getting Madison Cubed Garden aren’t we? Then all we’ll need is a professional Blernsball league.
Yeah, beyond U2 I was really hoping Tesseract would be lined up to play MCG…or is that the Slurm talking?
Goodell gets another 3yrs plus – at $65m+.
I mean, are you kidding me?
He’s not dealing with Failson Fisher and the Fuckhead Flunky every day.
I AM.
Seriously. What is the world coming to? Tell me what Goodell does right? Honestly. Every spring he hugs some guy at the draft who will have a traumatic brain injury before he’s 23 (the player, not – well, nevermind). He tells his poorest OG members they’ll have to move to a place they don’t want to be and where no-one likes football, but it doesn’t matter because they actually can’t lose money even if no-one shows up to games.
And that’s worth $70m? SMH.
The Commish has to deal with the Rose’s, the John Rockers, the Charlie Finleys, the Marge Schotts, the Frank McCourts – I mean not me but somebody did. And do I get paid for this? NO!
It’s like babysitting some days I tell you. They’re both bad but give me two Mark Davises over one GAP heir who’s family businesses are all collapsing any day. At least temporarily. I mean I don’t know anyone who thinks the Davis family will still own the Raiders in ten years. Maybe five.
Meanwhile I’m still dealing with the same two stadium issues I’ve had since I started.
And I’ve noticed people are starting not to take me seriously. That’s just wrong, man. Sure, I’m not an owner. And the owners tell me that every day. One or another does, anyway. Usually right after they tell me it’s not up to me to decide whether Oakland pays a relocation fee. But still. I’m a big deal. You don’t get to be the commish unless you are a big deal, no sir. And I am.
$75m. Give me a break.