It’s the last stand of the Oakland Athletics. Fans of the alleged major league baseball team are planning to take a public stand Tuesday night at Oakland Coliseum against the rich and powerful elites who have set the franchise on the path to destruction. They’re staging a fan-organized “Reverse Boycott” to send a message to those who are intent on getting the team out of town: “We’re still here.” This is bigger than the story of a baseball club: if the little people can strike back here, there’s hope for America as a whole.
Oakland A’s fans? Such people actually exist? Many will find that hard to believe, as the 2023 Athletics haven’t been drawing flies, and there is a good reason for that: they are a terrible team that plays in a dilapidated stadium in a bad area of a dying Leftist-run city. On Sunday, the A’s won their fifth game in a row, but don’t buy playoff tickets just yet: the victory brought their overall record to 17 wins and 50 losses. They still could end up being the worst major league baseball team since the Cleveland Spiders won 20 and lost 134 in 1899 and were dropped from the National League.
The nauseatingly awful 2023 team is just the latest manifestation of years of neglect by the team’s owners and management. The ownership’s tendency to pinch pennies until they scream for mercy was given a charming patina in the book Moneyball, which was later made into a movie starring Brad Pitt; the idea was that the cash-strapped A’s fielded good teams year after year because of the genius of general manager Billy Beane (Pitt in the movie), who managed to find diamonds in the rough at bargain-basement prices to keep the team in contention.
That was true for a while, but over the years the team gained a reputation for developing a contending team and then letting the players go elsewhere just when they were reaching the prime of their careers rather than paying them competitive salaries. And in the last few years, the roof has caved in: management stopped doing anything at all to improve the team, and now fields what is essentially a minor-league team that plays the Washington Generals role for the rest of the league. Clearly, they wanted to leave town, and now the last act is approaching.
The central assumption for years has been that the A’s couldn’t play the big-money game that other teams played because Oakland was a small market and thus made less money than its competitors. But this was never true. Oakland is in the San Francisco Bay area and could, with a decent ballclub and a pleasant stadium, draw just as much or more than the San Francisco Giants, who are doing wonderfully. In fact, when the A’s were fielding championship teams in the 1970s and 1980s, the talk around the Bay Area was that the Giants, not the A’s, might move elsewhere. But now the Battle of the Bay has been settled, and the A’s are the ones who are packing.
The problem really was that a succession of A’s owners simply had no interest in spending the money that was necessary to put together a championship team. One A’s fan explained the vicious circle this created: “It seems like the A’s kind of get s— on in every facet. It’s just unbelievably frustrating when they would look at it and say, oh, yeah, the fans aren’t there. Well, the owner has never invested a dime in the franchise or the ballpark and we’ve seen countless players (leave). If the A’s cared at all, if (A’s owner John) Fisher cared at all, we would have multiple World Series.” Instead, now Fisher’s craven minions point to the empty Oakland Coliseum and invoke it as a justification for moving the team.
And so A’s fan Stu Clary came up with the idea of this Reverse Boycott to show the baseball gods that the Oakland fans actually do exist: “I just thought we should do this outrageous thing and go on a night when nobody else typically would go, and let’s see if we can get some attention out of it and raise awareness to our plight.”
The Reverse Boycott has gotten a lot of attention; Clary exclaimed, “Wow, just the way it’s taken off. Now I’m seeing that there’s fans all around Major League Baseball that are going to be wearing A’s gear to their games on Tuesday. And I totally get the other teams’ (fans’) reactions, too, because I remember when the Expos left Montreal just thinking, ‘What a raw deal these people are getting. All they do is love their team, and they get saddled with this crook of an owner,’ and now history is repeating on us.”
Related: The Oakland A’s Are America in Microcosm. Yes, That Means We’re In Trouble.
Does any of this sound familiar, even if you know and care nothing about the Oakland Athletics or Major League Baseball? It should. America itself is now being sold out by crooked elites who care nothing for the plight of ordinary Americans. Old Joe Biden is to the United States what John Fisher is to the Oakland A’s: all he sees in them is a way to make a profit, and he fobs off the people he is supposed to be serving with empty promises and outright lies (it was only a couple of years ago that the A’s, now Vegas-bound, were proclaiming that they were “Rooted in Oakland”).
So all Americans, even those who have no interest in baseball, should be rooting for the Reverse Boycott and for the A’s fans to prevail over the elites and manage to keep the team in Oakland. If the powerful and indifferent elites who are selling the A’s down the river can be beaten, maybe the powerful and indifferent elites who are selling America down the river can be beaten as well.
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