After proclaiming for years that they were “Rooted In Oakland” and repeatedly declaring their commitment to the city, the Oakland Athletics abruptly announced last April that they were cutting those roots and moving to Las Vegas. Then in November, Major League Baseball owners unanimously approved the move, and that was that. Or at least it seemed to be. Far from welcoming MLB to Sin City, Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman said Tuesday that the A’s should stay in Oakland. As the Athletics face the prospect of becoming baseball’s first homeless franchise, it is beginning to look as if contempt for the fans comes with a price.
The New York Post reported Tuesday that Goodman, instead of uttering the expected boilerplate about how thrilled she was to see her city get what is ostensibly a major league baseball team, declared her sympathies for the city that the Athletics pretended to woo and then jilted when it came to crunch time. “I love the people of Oakland,” she declared. “I think they deserve to have their team.” She added that the A’s self-serving, skinflint owner John Fisher “in my opinion, needs to listen to the people that are up there. It’s their team.”
Oakland fans tried their best to make the point that the Athletics were indeed their team last June, 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.” The Reverse Boycott was the brainchild of A’s fan Stu Clary, who wanted to show Fisher, and the world, that despite the team’s dismal performance and cynical practice of repeatedly developing a contending team only to let the best players leave town via free agency, Oakland fans actually did 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.”
After fans of many other teams joined in, Clary exclaimed, “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.”
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Indeed. Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao even accused Fisher and A’s President Dave Kaval of negotiating in bad faith:
I am deeply disappointed that the A’s have chosen not to negotiate with the City of Oakland as a true partner, in a way that respects the long relationship between the fans, the City and the team. The City has gone above and beyond in our attempts to arrive at mutually beneficial terms to keep the A’s in Oakland. In the last three months, we’ve made significant strides to close the deal. Yet, it is clear to me that the A’s have no intention of staying in Oakland and have simply been using this process to try to extract a better deal out of Las Vegas. I am not interested in continuing to play that game – the fans and our residents deserve better.
Goodman, on the other hand, thought that Fisher and Kaval really wanted to stay in Oakland: “I thought, this does not make sense, and so why is it happening? And then I thought, well, because they really want to stay in Oakland, they want to be on the water, they have that magnificent dream. Yet, they can’t get it done.” After the expected controversy started, Goodman issued a clarification that retreated from her earlier statement only slightly: “I mentioned the passionate fans of Oakland who often visit our city to cheer on the Raiders. My points included that it is my belief that in their perfect world, the ownership of the A’s would like to have a new ballpark on the water in Oakland and that the ownership and government there should listen to their great fans and try to make that dream come true. Should that fail, Las Vegas has shown that it is a spectacular market for major league sports franchises.”
Or maybe the A’s will end up somewhere else. They will eventually anyway. Socialist Oakland is no place to be, and if they make it to Vegas, they will become the first baseball team to call four different cities home: Philadelphia, Kansas City, Oakland (where they were “rooted” the longest, but ultimately not at all), and Vegas. They demonstrate the callous indifference that baseball (and other sports) owners have for those who actually fork over money and buy their product. They appear certain that there is nothing they can do, no act of disloyalty or indifference so low that it would keep the fans from coming back. The fans, ultimately, need to show the baseball barons that this is not the case.
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