The Oakland A’s are scheduled to play their last home game ever in Oakland after 57 years there this Thursday, and team owner John Fisher marked the occasion yesterday by releasing an open letter to A’s fans. It is, and this will not surprise you if you have observed literally anything Fisher has done ever, very, very bad:
- “Triumphs, near misses, the 1989 Loma Preita earthquake in Game 3 of the Bay Bridge Series, the 20-game win streak, a Hollywood movie, and an unmatched cast of players, coaches, and fans,” the letter said. “We’ve had it all.” That’s an odd list — filming “Moneyball” get a shoutout but not the A’s threepeat in the 1970s? — but most of the attention has been focused on the misspelling of Loma Prieta, which is pretty bad if you know how Loma Prieta is pronounced and how Spanish vowels work, at least one of which Fisher or his ghostwriters apparently does not.
- “We proposed and pursued five different locations in the Bay Area. And despite mutual and ongoing efforts to get a deal done for the Howard Terminal project, we came up short. … Though I wish I could speak to each one of you individually, I can tell you this from the heart: we tried. Staying in Oakland was our goal, it was our mission, and we failed to achieve it. And for that I am genuinely sorry.” Actually, Fisher and top honcho Dave Kaval abruptly announced they planned to focus on moving the team to Las Vegas amid a snit over whether Oakland would provide more than the $775 million in infrastructure money it had agreed to now that interest rates were on the rise and the Howard Terminal project no longer looked as juicy to Fisher’s accountants. As apologies go, this came off as somewhat less sincere than Dave Grohl’s.
- The bit about “I wish I could speak to each one of you individually” rang hollow for an owner who famously doesn’t attend his own team’s games.
Still, it’s all very on brand for a guy who announced his own team’s temporary move to Sacramento by not being able to name a single A’s player.
Whether this is actually the final A’s game in Oakland is still a somewhat open question: Fisher still doesn’t have financing finalized for a stadium in Las Vegas, and he can’t keep playing in a minor-league stadium in Sacramento indefinitely. It’s at the very last the last game for now, though, and Fisher is reportedly marking the occasion by hiring extra security out of fears of fan violence, even telling A’s manager Mark Kotsay not to address the fans after the game but “instead retreat to the clubhouse.” And so the Oakland A’s end, not with a bang but with a whinge.
Something tells me that Kotsay did not need to be told that… he knows who (and what) he works for.
They A’s defied Fisher within the bounds they could. He told them to wear the “Athletics” emblazoned jerseys. They wore the “Oakland” ones instead. Kotay and the whole team came out to doff their hats to the fans. He gave an emotional speech. I, and I think most of the fans in attendance, sensed it was truly heartfelt. He had trouble getting through it. People lined up around the stadium for a chance to get a scoop of dirt from the field. More than a few ripped out seats, and many scribblings of “F* Fisher” were made on seats and elsewhere with sharpies. Lots of tears and hugs between strangers and old friends alike. Nothing nice would be deservedly said about the owner.
I would have bet money he just left without a word, but this is still pretty close.
The “apology” just feels so off-putting, as if he’s asking his wife if his dress pants makes him look doughy, and doing it blatantly in a way that elicits a “no” response.
If I were the wife, my only response would be, “you look like a f—ing whale.”
No need to apologize, SELL
At the very least MLB should have done what they did with the Giants in 1992 and force them to make the team available for sale to a local group.
San Jose proposed site required US Supreme Court permission, which they quickly ignored , because granting permission required overturning a rule that’s 100 years old. Anyway, it was (still us) SF Giant’s territory!
The Fremont space was one of several Fisher fantasy projects of stadium plus retail plus condominiums. Speculators caught wind of it and started buying nearby properties. Also locals did not want it, vehemently so!
Please forgive typo above: “us”—>”is”.
And another thing… 49er owners attempted similar project: new stadium with adjoining retail shopping mall, for the greater glory of team, and themselves. ;) It was put to a vote in San Fran, and citizens rejected it. Now the team has a new stadium, no grandiose retail around it, & it’s located 50 miles from their namesake San Francisco.
50 miles? So the Niners play almost as far away from San Francisco as the A’s will from Oakland next season?
In terms of driving miles it’s more like 85-90 miles from the Coliseum to the River Cats’ Stadium depending on route. For the Niners It’s about 40 miles from Candlestick to Levi’s. Longer if you take 280. I would bet for a significant number of Niners fans the new stadium is actually closer or maybe a wash, though not so much for those who live in SF proper.
As an (ex) A’s fan from the South Bay SacTown means they are now about 135 miles away vs 40-45 miles before. I suppose some fans from Contra Costa county they might be closer than they used to be (or a wash) but for most fans they will be much further away.
I used to commute from Davis to OAK in the late 90s. That drive was pretty much exactly 90 miles. so, 100/105 to the Sac river probably.
You can put NFL stadiums on the edge of metro areas and it doesn’t really matter (although I would bet Levi’s stadium is probably fairly close to the population center of the Bay Area, it’s just far from San Francisco proper).
Like the Glendale Cardinals, Miami Gardens Dolphins, and East Rutherford Giants- the Santa Clara 49ers really are only asking their season ticket holders to schlep to the sticks for 8-9 games per seaso.
Arlington Cowboys!
And the cities in the team names get the best deal. Their name continues to be advertised at no cost to the city.
If Fisher actually went to a game, he probably would have been able to speak to each fan individually.
Nice to hear you on ESPN’s podcast about this topic!
ESPN has a podcast with Neil?
How do I find that please?
Yeah, how do I find that too?
Why can’t the A’s share a stadium in Vegas with the Raiders? I think it should come full circle.
Because Marc Davis hates the A’s with good reason, the A’s said “no” to the raiders building a stadium in the parking lot at the coliseum (A’s had veto power over changes to the coliseum as did the Raiders). So no way the A’s would ever be allow to play at allegiant stadium. Also I’d think Allegiant isn’t setup for baseball to be played there (just like chase center can accommodate hockey)
The only thing John Fisher has ever succeeded at is being the worst owner in professional sports. SELL THE TEAM.
Fans at new Comiskey were chanting the same thing at Reinsdorf the other day.
Fisher is terrible. He is not alone in that.
When the As moved from Philadelphia, Connie Mack, who by that time was pushed out by two of his sons, wrote an open letter to As fans. In it he blasted the other AL owners and his sons for torpedoing a deal that would have sold the team to local interests (or so I have read, I have never seen the actual letter).
The new owner immediately moved to KC.
Its’ the
The A’s are an outstanding team they could’ve won a long time ago their farm system is as good if not better than most of the MLB teams except the Yankees.
So why did they lose so much? media says it was the ugly old and gray Coliseum. ? you know that nobody wants to go there and also, other modern stadiums have entertainment and food places to go before and after the game. That they need a new stadium because it will help them pay for stars. ????! excuse me? when have the A’s not had stars?
If the Coliseum is sold out that’s good right!? then if they then build a new one even in other part of Oakland years later won’t they be doing well?
No! its’ not about winning its’ about making money! and the A’s have been losing for a long time! its’ not because they couldn’t IMO- I think the idea is to show fans that they need a new stadium or you can’t win! they can win they have the farm system and the GM to do it but they won’t so the question is is it fair to accuse them of something like this? I don’t for sure but I have to ask the question- Are the A’s TANKING!? Why? to move, to fool fans into supporting a move or get Oakland to build a new stadium. They want to move and who knows why but the goal is a new stadium and they seem to be trying to prove you need a new stadium to pay for star players. They don’t want to try and build their own new stadium in Oakland or get a little help from Oakland to build one- No!, it has to be drama and all kinds of ridiculous moves to get money.
Also, moving to Las Vegas (a tiny metro area and media market relative to the Bay Area) pretty much guarantees that the A’s will stay receiving revenue sharing dollars indefinitely. That’s also part of the calculus here.
And just quietly: it’s asking a ton of Las Vegas residents to prop up three, and potentially *four* major sports franchises in a market that small. And before anyone says “the tourists will step in and boost the numbers,” there’s a pretty major counterpoint to that theory right here in Central Florida.
If tourism was the idea it fails for baseball. I can kind of understand it for the Raiders. They were a weird team with a national fanbase. You can see the tech bro fans flying to Vegas twice a season for a weekend debauchery they sell to the wife as watching.
I cannot see that model with 81 baseball games.
It hardly bears repeating, but the $20 beers that are the lifeblood of a baseball stadium don’t make much sense in competition with immediately adjacent premises that will comp patrons alcohol to keep them on-site.
There was a study done of the affect of out of town visitor on the Golden Knights games, it was found that about 500 ticket/game were sold to out of town visitors. The calculus the A’s are putting forth is expecting 30% of the stadium to be filled with out of town folks which for a 30,000 seat stadium would be 9,000 tickets! There would be some chance of that for a weekend, but a monday, tuesday, or wednesday in April or May? Not a chance (and even on a weekend I’m be highly skeptical)
All teams receive revenue sharing, they changed the format.
No, all teams do not get revenue sharing. All teams get a cut of central revenue, but low-revenue and small-market teams get revenue sharing checks on top of that.
There’s an obvious solution that will probably never happen but should anyway:
1) Sell the team to Lacob
He led the group that bought the Warriors for $450M, and the team is now valued at $7.7B.
2) Lacob buys out or brings in AASEG as minority stake ownership partners in order to acquire the Coliseum site, which AASEG now fully owns
The city and county have already sold their respective 50% shares of the property to AASEG, so acquiring it would be a private transaction that no longer has to consider public finances or the rules surrounding the sale of public property.
3) Build a new stadium on the north lot and develop all the other land around it
The site is already entitled for a new stadium. The overall property is 120 acres. For comparison, the Giants’ Mission Rock development area in San Francisco is only 28 acres. The Coliseum site already has an adjacent BART station (with the airport connector), Amtrak station, and freeway access. This whole area could quite easily be developed into a dense, mixed-use, transit-oriented, and multi-modal district centered on a new A’s stadium and the old arena (which still hosts a good number of events) that would allow profit to be made for the new owners on the development, increase the tax-base for Oakland, and add thousands of units of housing in a region with a severe housing shortage.
Right, but if Fisher (or Manfred) wanted that to happen, it already would have.
Fisher only wants to spend other people’s money. A full scale coliseum site redevelopment is something he could never have afforded.
He could have partnered with developers at the Coliseum site the same as at Howard Terminal, even if bay views feel sexier.
(I have no clue whether the ROI would pencil out at either site, but it’s not an issue of Fisher himself not having deep enough pockets.)
The thing is I don’t think he does have deep enough pockets. He certainly has family money and lots of gap stock. And in days of low interest rates could probably get financing for a project. but he’s clearly not a deep thinker. When financing might have been available he had these goofy non viable stadium plans. I think he just likes collecting his tv money and revenue sharing, keep expenses as low as possible. Coast this out until Manfred delivers on whatever expansion payday he promised the owners.
Put it this way, he has a lot of cash on hand to buy the seemingly infinite number of garden rakes he steps on constantly.
Fisher wanted to own and redevelop the Coliseum site, simultaneously to the Howard Terminal plan and the favorable TIF district in Jack London Square. That was part of what was supposed to pay for Howard Terminal and, I guess, partially prop the team up after opening.
I think the truth is somewhere in between. Fisher ain’t broke yet… his assets remain substantial but cashflow-impaired, as anyone can see from Gap’s slashed dividend payments. He wanted to use Oakland to diversify heavily into real estate, and being confined solely to the Coliseum site wouldn’t have satisfied him towards that end. It’s a big reason why Vegas seems so desperate and stupid… he doesn’t control the land, it doesn’t diversify his assets away from his cashflow-impaired starting position at all, and it permanently impairs the value of the team. But hey, all that couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.
Forbes (probably generous) assessment has Fisher at just under $3Bn in net worth.
Given that a number of his holdings are private, it is difficult for anyone to determine what the net value of those actually is. At least some of his “non baseball” assets are encumbered/restricted (IE: the family business).
But with the A’s pegged at somewhere around $1.2Bn, he doesn’t have a lot of extra cash to play with. Nor does he have a great deal of free equity to raise capital from.
I don’t think, at this point, anyone with real cash and an appetite for development risk would be willing to partner with him. His record of erratic and incompetent behaviour is a significant impediment to any possible partnership that might get an LV ballpark built.
Who wants to hitch their wagon to the gang that couldn’t shoot straight? You could put up with the incompetence and cringeworthy “strategies” if you were making money hand over fist, but you won’t be.
The odds are pretty high that he never gets his team moved out of Sacramento in my view. If the club does move somewhere else, it seems unlikely he will still own it when it does.
The A’s owned a 50% stake in the site. Seems weird to have purchased that if there want some even half-baked plan for it.
I don’t think they have a real game plan! it was the NHL and NFL that gave the A’s the idea that they could succeed in Las Vegas!
Leaving a huge market when you’re the only team in the stadium old or new, for a small market famous wealthy city or not just doesn’t make a lot of sense.
And Sacramento!? the heat the fans that now have to travel further and the ticket prices!? That’s bold and arrogant of MLB and the A’s but sadly fans will accept it and buy their tickets and sit the heat to watch the A’s.
But see, the A’s will win! Oh yea, they’ll win because MLB can’t risk fans not showing up at the games and, it’ll make the move look smarter!
And the fans again! they just spend and go with the flow never stand for anything. I thought Oakland was classy and strong for saying “no” to giving Fisher and Mark Davis public money? Well, why didn’t most other cities do it?
I’m confused! 9 acres, a small market and a shady city? MLB letting Fisher do this is greedy, makes them look bad and silly and classless. Could it be something more than just a new stadium?
And think that most of the “Franchise Free Agency” started with Raiders legend/ icon Al Davis and Dolphins, Cowboys and Rams owners.
I think they thought Oakland would move things along with the threat of Vegas looming. No smart person would look at the Raiders and Golden Knights and think a extreme tight wad could replicate their success with a Major League Baseball team.
It certainly would make sense if Fisher was using Vegas as a threat and then found himself stuck with it once Oakland officials didn’t respond by upping their bid. Though it also makes sense that Fisher may have drunk his own Kool-Aid and convinced himself that Vegas was a better deal, just because Nevada wasn’t playing such hardball, even if the Oakland offer was actually better. Or it could be both — grifters gonna grift, but also failsons gonna failson.
“I’m goin’ out west where the appreciate me”
And by west, I mean Sacramento, of course.
He ain’t in Vegas yet.
Please don’t be fooled by the lights and the glimmer and the skyscraper hotels and the megastar residences at opulent casinos. In terms of the economy, Las Vegas as a metro area is incredibly fragile and (literally) poor, highly dependent on a tourism industry where the wages are kept artificially low, and is liable to cratering at the first sign of a real economic downturn.
It’s kinda like Orlando, where people look at the five-star resorts and the futuristic presentation of the Disney properties, and don’t realize that the average median income of the metro area is somewhere between bupkis and miniscule.
The people who think “the money is in Vegas” don’t consider that Bill Foley has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to make it a hockey town. And the Raiders are the 1st or 2nd most popular team in California and are heavily dependent on Californians for their season ticket base.
Succeeding in Vegas is going to be much harder for an MLB or NBA as a poor, small market over saturates
Sadly I wasn’t surprised to see the A’s leave Oakland.
I knew the writing was on the wall when the Warriors left Oakland. Oakland made the Warriors relevant and kept them from dissolving after failing in SF, and Oakland made huge contributions to basketball culture. If the Warriors can abandon that without a second thought and still be confident their attendance numbers will be good, that tells you how much the balance has shifted to the SF newcomers and their money.
Then when the Raiders left, it was clear Oakland was no longer the same place. That is Oakland’s team more than any other.
It was obvious their former mayor Schaaf didn’t care about keeping the A’s in Oakland because she was more focused on getting the newcomer dollars and “revitalization”. She might as well be the mayor of any other place in the country.
Her tenure as mayor signaled the beginning of the end of Oakland as an independent entity outside of SF and the beginning of Oakland as just SF across the bay from SF.
What I predict is Oakland will shell out subsidy money for an MLS stadium if they haven’t already because that’s what the newcomers are most likely to support. Then Oakland’s status as a bedroom community for SF gentrifiers will be complete.
What a sad fate for the natives of that city and their unique culture.
The USL Championships’ Oakland Roots will be playing games in the Coliseum beginning in 2025. Would be nice to see if the Ballers did that too. Guaranteed they’d sell out and prove a point.
The Ballers are some time and distance away from being able to sell out a game at the Coliseum. They’ve done very impressive things in a short time building up the franchise and the fanbase and bringing in fan investirs and other investors as well. But they simply don’t have the paying fanbase numbers yet to sell out the Coliseum or even be able to afford to lease it in the near term.
I do think the Savannah Bananas could sell the place out for a game or two playing exhibition entertainment ball like they do. They’ve been doing it in other Major League parks already.
The whole notion that the Warriors ever “belonged” to Oakland the way the A’s or Raiders did is laughable and simply untrue. The Warriors have always been the Bay Area’s only NBA team and they belong to the region collectively, as do the Sharks and Earthquakes.
The Warriors played on the west side of the Bay in SF and Daly City for a decade before making the full time move to Oakland in 1971. And even their 1975 championship home games were played at the Cow Palace due to scheduling conflicts at the arena in Oakland. They also never took on Oakland’s name.
I can understand why a certain subset of people were disappointed to see the Warriors move back to San Francisco, but the privately financed Chase Center and the place is highly accessible by transit from most of the Bay Area. And again, they are the whole greater metro area’s team, not Oakland’s speciaifically.