It is not uncommon for the people who own professional sports teams to behave in ways that, in the eyes of fans, seem incompetent, cruel, ignoble, or bizarre. Aside from supporters of clubs like Wrexham AFC—which was returned to glory by force of its owners’ munificence and charm—few fans hold their owners in high regard. Generally, owners are fixtures of the fan-franchise dynamic that fans tolerate. Best-case scenario: You don’t think about them much at all.
Certain owners, however, are impossible either to tolerate or to ignore. This is especially true of those who inflict on their fans the ultimate indignity of relocation. History—and hell, too, probably—reserves a special place for people who relocate pro sports teams. Every sports fan knows Art Modell, for example, as the guy who wrenched the Browns out of Cleveland. And we know Clay Bennett as the Oklahoman who stole the Supersonics out of Seattle. We remember these men for the damage they caused, which extends beyond the fan bases they forsook. Rather, it corrupts the foundation of faith on which fandom depends. Fans everywhere are poorer for it.
Perhaps no working owner in sports today exemplifies this better than John Fisher, the stony 62-year-old majority owner of the team still technically known as the Oakland Athletics. For the last several months, Fisher, who does not grant interviews, has been perpetrating against A’s fans the strangest and most nakedly cynical relocation campaign perhaps ever undertaken in the history of professional sports. It appears to be nearing completion. In April, Fisher entered into a “binding” agreement to build a baseball stadium for the A’s on Las Vegas Boulevard. Legislation providing public funding for stadium construction was signed into law by Nevada’s governor, Joe Lombardo, earlier this month. The relocation still needs to be approved by three-fourths of MLB’s owners, but assuming it is, the A’s appear set to become the first MLB franchise to relocate since the Montreal Expos moved to Washington, D.C., and became the Nationals in 2005.
But relocating the A’s would be only Fisher’s most recent transgression against A’s fans. Before signaling his official intent to move the A’s to Las Vegas, Fisher had spent years systematically degrading the organization—sabotaging its competitive prospects, debasing its stadium, and alienating its fans. A couple of months into the 2023 season, the A’s had devolved into one of the worst Major League Baseball teams of all time, and the experience of watching the A’s play had grown disconcerting and surreal. Most of us have an idea of what Major League Baseball games are supposed to feel like. Crowded stands. Calls for peanuts! Fans commiserating pleasantly like picnickers at a city park. A’s games in April 2023 did not feel like this. They felt haunted. At first pitch most nights, there’d be fewer than a thousand people in the stands. The concrete concourses of the old Oakland Coliseum, where the A’s still play, turned into barren wind tunnels that kicked up napkins and discarded programs. Handmade banners reading “Fisher is scum,” “Liar,” and “Manfraud” had been hung like SOS flags below the right field bleachers, and Major League Baseball had to edit them out of highlights. Most of the concession stands had been closed, meaning that it could be challenging even for the small crowds to locate a beer. And above the field at all times hung a consuming silence, a hungry vacuum of sound that rendered the scattered calls for Fisher to “SELL THE TEAM!” unsettling and mordant.
To those who know what Oakland A’s baseball used to be, what Fisher had turned the team into was nothing short of tragic. A’s teams in the past had brought to Oakland pride and repute, as they had seemed to represent, in their character and color, their misfit swagger and underdog grit, something both essential and specific about the East Bay’s sense of self. In this way, certain of those teams had evinced something distinct about the constructive potential of pro sports writ large: how beloved local teams can bring a people together and lift a city up. Fisher’s A’s evince something very different: pro sports’ concurrent capacity for diminishment and plunder, disillusionment and grift.
This is sad for reasons that transcend Oakland. The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal remarked recently that what Fisher’s done to Oakland threatens “the integrity of the 2023 [baseball] season.” Really, it threatens the integrity of Major League Baseball as an industry, as it corrupts the ability of fans everywhere to unselfconsciously invest themselves in their teams. To truly care about a team, fans have to be able to believe that their relationship with it is, at root, reciprocal, that, in spirit if not contractually, their team belongs to them. In Oakland, Fisher’s made it impossible to maintain such a view. He’s treated the A’s less as a community asset than as a corporate cudgel and A’s fans less like community partners than like captured hostages. And now that he appears likely to get his stadium in Las Vegas, he’s showing other owners that, if they want a few hundred million dollars for a new stadium back where they live—or some other city, if need be—they can rather easily do the same.
Strange as it may sound, however, the story of the stealing of the Oakland A’s is not only sad. Or at least, it’s about more than Fisher’s cynicism. On Tuesday, June 13—the same day the Nevada state Senate approved public funding for Fisher’s stadium—A’s fans staged a protest at the Oakland Coliseum. It was a “reverse boycott” of Fisher’s degradation of the A’s, a plan to pack the Coliseum with fans for a Tuesday-night game against the Rays, MLB’s best team. The event was timed to coincide with the annual MLB owners meeting in Manhattan and designed to forcefully refute the lie that Fisher had for years been manufacturing about A’s fans: that they don’t care about A’s baseball. In this it succeeded wildly, putting on display precisely the sense of defiance and soul that makes Oakland so singular of a place—and A’s fans so singular a fan base. It was also more than a little bit cathartic. If the end of the story of the stealing of the A’s was imminent, as it seemed to be, this seemed a fitting coda: a long-suffering fan base facing erasure but not yet invisible—deceived and betrayed but not yet defeated—rising up to imprint itself on the timeline of sports history.
I learned of the Nevada state Senate’s vote to move forward with subsidizing Fisher’s stadium at the same time many A’s fans did: on my way to the Coliseum for the reverse boycott.
I arrived at the Coliseum around 3:45. I made my way to the south lot’s far southeastern corner, where the portable grandstands that ground crews once used to turn the Coliseum into a football stadium still unceremoniously sit, discolored by the sun. That was where the Oakland 68s, an A’s supporters group and the unofficial organizers of the boycott, were setting up. Between iron scaffolds, the group had hung a massive green-and-gold flag emblazoned with Oakland’s official crest: a proud green oak tree, set against a bold gold backdrop. Music—Too $hort, Mac Dre—was already pulsing out of several sets of large speakers. Other flags, raised from lowered tailgates farther out in the parking lot, snapped in the breeze. A food truck was preparing street tacos. Behind a beachhead of tables and lowered tailgates, the 68s were handing out the shirts they’d printed for the event: 7,000 kelly-green shirts reading SELL in white letters across the chest. Before the tables, a sea of fans spilled westward, out into the rest of the parking lot, which was filling up with more fans repurposing the hoods and bumpers of their own cars into drink-making stations and outdoor grills. On open stretches of asphalt, fathers and sons played catch. Between them, middle-aged women snapped back tequila shots.
The festival atmosphere recalled, to my eye, the Oakland tailgates of old, the ones I’d grown up on, the breeze off the estuary carrying a familiar electric bite. The smells that wafted through the air were several different kinds of tantalizing: the sweet grease of grilled meat, the curious zip of gasoline, the seduction of weed smoke. I found this heartening because I had not been sure, after learning of the Nevada state Senate’s affirmative vote earlier in the day, what its effect on the boycott would be. I’d wondered whether the vote would deflate it, skew its vibes more funereal than revelrous. The opposite turned out to be true. By 4:30, the sheer mass of fans—many donning the SELL shirts—had grown from the kind of crowd you’d expect to see at a tailgate to the kind of crowd you might see at a rock concert. News crews were everywhere. Oakland mayor Sheng Thao was there, wearing a Matt Chapman jersey and making statements for the cameras. Chants spontaneously erupted. They’d spark up in pockets, then spread in waves across the lot. SELL THE TEAM! STAY IN OAK-LAND! At first the chants came from fans who sounded more amused than enraged, but as the crowd grew and as more people joined in, the calls acquired cohesion and spine, and soon they were thundering across the parking lot with power-chord force. These were not the laments of the unreachable and wounded. They were exhortations of the ballistic and battle ready. “This is war!” an A’s fan and member of the 68s, Alejandra Leon, said to me at one point, raising her voice over the crowd.
But I don’t want to make it seem like the tailgate was all that serious, exactly. This might have been war, but as Melissa Lockard of The Athletic would later put it, it was also a “celebration of life.” Many fans expressed their frustration with the A’s ownership by placing paper bags over their heads, but they gladly lifted the bags to answer questions or tend to their drinks. People I spoke to told me they’d flown in from Australia, New York, British Columbia. Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day was there. At some point, ex-A’s pitcher and the team’s current color commentator, Dallas Braden, showed up, and fans mauled him. A’s fan Paul Bailey had brought a pair of cornhole boards painted with the likenesses of Fisher and MLB commissioner Rob Manfred. He’d used their giant mouths as the holes. He’d embossed the bags with poop emojis. “I think he’s just a really great guy,” Bailey told me, referring to Fisher, as we watched a quartet of kids play. “Just a really great guy.”
By 5 p.m., the parking lot seemed to be totally full. The almost gold of the falling sun threw a thousand sparks of light off the tops of the parked cars. On one end of the lot, now, a Latino brass band was playing; not far away, a DJ had set up. I was handed a beer by a young man I’d never identify, thanks to the brown paper bag over his head. “Fuck John Fisher,” he said as he handed me a Modelo and wandered off. I drank it happily.
“This is fucking crazy!” I overheard a young woman say to her friend not long after.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” her friend replied.
The comment got me thinking: Had I ever seen anything like this? I was standing beside Alex Espinoza, a senior content producer for local station 95.7 The Game. He said that the proceedings reminded him of the last Raiders home game in 2018, which fans had thought would be the last Raiders home game ever in Oakland. (The Raiders would end up playing one more awkward season at the Coliseum before moving.) After the game ended that night, the sold-out crowd had refused to leave. Music played from the sympathetic PA system, and the fans, in their black and silver and adorned with skulls and bones, partied there together for hours.
For reasons I couldn’t yet determine, however, this comparison didn’t feel wholly adequate. I wasn’t able to articulate the difference until we were inside the Coliseum itself. The place was full, the mood gladiatorial. The 68s’ kelly-green SELL shirts were everywhere. Signs and banners urging Fisher to sell, warning Las Vegas about what they’d just bought, or excoriating Manfred for allowing all this to happen were everywhere, too, hung from seemingly every rail and banister; in the bleachers, an uninterrupted string of intricate, multicolored signs hung over the warning track like bunting.
And the noise—how to describe the noise? It was, I think, the perfect inverse of the vacuum silence that had consumed A’s games all spring. There were, of course, the drums for which A’s fans had become famous—and that fans had stopped bringing to games, out of protest—but the drums were just the start. The stands rattled with stampedes of sound. There were nearly 30,000 people in the stadium, and everyone had come with something to say. The choreographed chants—STAY IN OAK-LAND; SELL THE TEAM—clapped like glaciers calving. They were so loud that at one point A’s pitcher Hogan Harris thought his PitchCom earpiece had broken.
Listen to how fucking loud this is pic.twitter.com/Dv6Z0NvNnB
— Dan Moore (@DmoWriter) June 14, 2023
I made a point of walking around the Coliseum as the game went on, embedding myself with the 68s in right field for an inning, with the guys from Last Dive Bar in left for a few outs, down at the third base line to catch the view from below. I was keenly aware that what I was witnessing might be the last of something, and I wanted to soak it up. Everywhere I went, most of my fellow fans appeared to be doing the same. Most everyone was on their feet. Many milled about in the aisles, wandering and drinking and chopping it up with the attendants, who generally weren’t asking anybody whether they had their tickets. The sense of momentousness so palpable in the parking lot presided over the stadium now, and certain unspoken rules about how baseball games are supposed to feel seemed to have broken down. Everyone recognized that this was no longer just a baseball game. They reveled in what it felt like it was becoming, in the moment. But even more, they respected—because they’d lived through it—what it was a culmination of.
This story of the stealing of the Oakland A’s goes back much further than 2023. It starts, roughly, in 2005, when Fisher purchased the team. There were red flags right away. Rich people buy professional sports teams for all kinds of reasons, of course. Some do it for prestige, others out of genuine interest. Fisher, it would appear, bought into the A’s for their potential as a lure for corporate welfare—even from municipalities other than Oakland, if need be. Between 2006 and 2015, Fisher, alongside then-co-owner Lew Wolff, botched efforts to move the A’s to both Fremont and San Jose. After Fisher finally took over as majority owner, in 2016, he tried—and failed—to obtain permission to build a stadium on the site of Laney College, near Oakland’s Lake Merritt. Two years later, he set his sights on what is known as the Howard Terminal site, on a wedge of waterfront property owned and operated by the Port of Oakland.
What Fisher wanted to do at Howard Terminal was different. He proposed building not just a baseball stadium but a $12 billion stadium-anchored “district,” complete with apartments, parks, hotels, and office space. All on what is, technically, part of a working port. The project hinged on whether he could convince the Oakland City Council to give over hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer kickbacks. He would pay for the stadium itself, he said, but the project was not viable without massive investments in both off-site and on-site infrastructure, not to mention large-scale environmental remediation. (At the present moment, Howard Terminal lacks even sidewalks and sits atop toxic landfill.) He intended for Oakland to make these investments. Never mind that the site of the Oakland Coliseum, in East Oakland, straddles an Amtrak line, a BART stop, and a freeway; sits less than five miles from an international airport; and could accommodate construction far more cheaply and with exponentially fewer political headaches. Fisher wanted a waterfront ballpark with reliable ancillary revenue streams in the coolest part of town. And he wanted Oakland’s help making it happen.
One reason the Oakland City Council didn’t immediately tell him to kick rocks was that Fisher possessed powerful leverage. A year after he purchased his majority stake in the A’s, the Raiders had announced that they’d be leaving Oakland for Las Vegas. Later the same year, the Warriors confirmed that they’d be leaving for San Francisco. The sense in Oakland at the time was that the A’s represented the final vestige of something irreplaceable and delicate. Fisher, of course, encouraged that view. In 2014 he extended the A’s lease at the Coliseum and in 2020 paid $85 million for Alameda County’s share of the Coliseum land. He continued to refuse to build a new stadium on the site—which, importantly, also prohibited his roommates, the Raiders, from building a new stadium on the site. (“I won’t forget what they did to us in Oakland,” Raiders owner Mark Davis said recently. “They squatted on a lease for 10 years and made it impossible for us to build [on that site]. … All they did was fuck the Bay Area.”) But under Fisher the A’s reoriented their marketing strategy around the fact that they were still there, plastering the phrase “Rooted in Oakland” on the stadium’s facade. He did the same on billboards and in BART stations around town. And he commissioned videos in which A’s team president Dave Kaval spoke over clips of Lake Merritt about the A’s undying commitment to staying in Oakland and to Oakland fans. “Our fans and community will know that the A’s are truly rooted in Oakland,” Kaval said in one such video.
The problem with Fisher’s myopic attention to his real estate ambitions was that it came at the detriment of other concerns that typically occupy the owners of professional sports teams. Fisher has hardly invested either in the A’s as an institution or in Oakland as a sports town. The former, as he’s directed all of his money and time into leaving the Oakland Coliseum, he impoverished. (Fisher currently spends less on the entire A’s roster than the Mets do on just one pitcher.) The latter he screwed over. Because Fisher was impatient for his payout. And as negotiations over the terms of his $12 billion project with Oakland slowed in 2021 (Oakland had committed, in earlier talks, to funding the off-site infrastructure, but the city was loath to raise taxes or imperil its general fund to do it, in part because it still has an outstanding balance from the $223 million in bonds it issued Al Davis back in 1995), Fisher ditched sentimentality. He needed to make his appeals more urgent. So like an expert interrogator going in on a prisoner, he started making the present more painful.
It started on the field. In 2021 and 2022 Fisher traded away or let go of Matt Chapman, Matt Olson, Starling Marte, Chris Bassitt, Sean Murphy, Sean Manaea, Frankie Montas, Lou Trivino, and basically every other member of the 2021 starting lineup. But it did not end there. With every passing month, Fisher gave the Coliseum further over to nature, allowing it, in time, to rather evocatively decay. Certainly you’ve heard of the feral cats who colonized the Coliseum? They’ve been joined by possums. Long ago, probably, you heard that the locker rooms flood with sewage. Now the lights don’t work.
Though even then, Fisher wasn’t done. Incredibly, as the Coliseum made news for its degeneration—and as the A’s made news for the same—Fisher doubled season ticket prices.
Every step of the way, fans were reminded that he’d stop turning screws the second he got his stadium. “This is why we need a new stadium,” Kaval told the San Francisco Chronicle. “In order for us to retain our talent, to have a much higher payroll, we need higher revenues. That comes with a new fan-friendly facility.”
In retrospect, it’s clear what Fisher was after. Fans understood even at the time that it suited Fisher for the Coliseum to fall into disrepair. (“[That] was all part of the marketing strategy,” Henry Gardner, executive director of the joint powers agency that governs the Oakland Coliseum, recently told the San Francisco Chronicle. “That the place is decrepit and ‘that’s why we need a new facility.’”)
Fans also saw through Fisher’s frugality. He is worth more than $2 billion, and the A’s were long beneficiaries of revenue sharing. Fans knew Fisher was choosing to manipulate their misery for political gain—that their misery was both the price and the proof of Fisher’s logic. It was for this reason that many fans had stopped showing up to games. But many others continued suffering Fisher’s indignities—and perhaps persuaded themselves that building a $12 billion ballpark village on what was technically a major port made more economic sense than it probably did. They did so not out of any love for the man himself, but out of love for what they still hoped he would preserve.
They wouldn’t hold on to that hope for long. As 2021 rolled on, and as the Oakland City Council continued debating the extent to which it’d humor Fisher’s development demands—the amount of money Fisher was asking for had ballooned, by some estimates, to more than $600 million as the size of his stadium project had grown to even more transformational proportions, now including gondolas—Kaval announced that the A’s would begin “exploring other markets.” Next, Manfred started issuing Oakland not-so-subtle threats about the prospect of relocation. (“Thinking of this as a bluff is a mistake,” Manfred said later that summer.) Not long after, Kaval started live-tweeting from Vegas Golden Knights games.
Then, in April—in the middle, reportedly, of a secret weeklong summit held between the A’s and Oakland mayor Thao for the express purpose of finally brokering a deal in Oakland—outlets in Nevada reported that Fisher had entered into a “binding” agreement to purchase and develop a plot of land with developers in Las Vegas. (The agreement turned out not to be so “binding,” as the A’s pulled out of it just two weeks later to sign another deal, with Bally’s, to develop the Tropicana site, which is the deal they ended up moving forward with, but, you know, details.)
Thao was furious. “Oakland is not interested in being used as leverage in the A’s negotiations with Las Vegas and it is disrespectful to our residents and our fans to string the city along this way,” she told reporters the day after the news of the “binding” Nevada agreement leaked. Fans hoped something had been bungled. But the A’s made no attempt to clear the franchise’s name or ease fans’ fears; instead, Kaval stoked them.
“We’re focused on Las Vegas,” Kaval told The Mercury News. Kaval has not granted an interview or offered comment to even one other local writer or media member since. (The A’s, predictably, did not reply to my requests for comment for this story.)
The response from fans, over whom the specter of relocation had hung for so long, was universal. First there came a release of despair born of a long-pent-up anticipation of loss. Relocation rips far more than just a team from cities. With the team go the community spaces it supported, the shared languages it provided. The utility of those things can be difficult to quantify, in part because they’re so intangible; they’re like a sheet of glass you see only when it breaks. In Oakland, however, the glass had suddenly shattered, and now fans could feel viscerally just how difficult it would be to replace this aspect of their lives.
“There is just not another easy outing that is available on that many spring and summer weekend days that can replace A’s games with my son,” said Jeremy Owens, who started taking his son to the Coliseum when the boy was about 4; in particular, his son loved Sunday home games, after which kids are permitted to run the bases.
“I take my two young kids to games as often as I can, and the A’s organization and community are a part of our family identity,” Karly Kaufman, an A’s fan based out of Alameda, told me recently. “The A’s moving out of Oakland is horrible for lifelong A’s fans like me and for Oakland and the East Bay in general, but it feels especially horrible for the kids knowing what they will miss out on.”
This is a sentiment that I have become attuned to recently as well. My dad took me to my first A’s game when I was 6. We sat in the highest row of the Oakland Coliseum’s upper deck, among the gulls. (Behind center field, across the canyon floor of the field below, construction crews were jackhammering into place the prison wall soon to be known as Mount Davis.) I remember the game being sparsely attended, the breeze off the bay briny and unloving, the way it can be off the Oakland estuary there. I remember fearing the long, unpartitioned troughs that the A’s still use for urinals. I remember the trapped dark-purple smell of the Coliseum’s warren of concrete walkways. I remember that the A’s played poorly, insignificantly, as they would for the next several years. But I remember, as well, how easy conversation between us was, up there in the third deck. How it felt like we were almost new people watching the game together. I loved every second of it.
A few weeks after I started writing this article, my wife gave birth to our first child. My son does little other than sleep, poop, and cry at the moment. But I’ve been thinking of the A’s games my dad used to take me to when I was a boy—how A’s baseball became something of a shared language. I’d hoped that my son and I might one day share the same thing. That we now might not be able to feels like a grave injustice.
Then, however—more slowly, perhaps, but ultimately with more righteousness and gusto, like a hurricane gathering force before making landfall—came anger. Subordinated from supporters to pawns to something more like pests—deceived, diminished, now ready to be discarded—fans were enraged. “Fisher’s disregard for A’s fans is appalling,” Espinoza, the 95.7 The Game host, said to me back in May, summing up the sentiment. “It’s sad how one man can squash something that’s so important to so many people.”
“I feel disgusted, seeing the decline of a once-proud franchise at the hand of a trust fund kid,” Jorge Leon, president of the Oakland 68s, told me. “John Fisher should sell and never walk the streets of Oakland again.” That sense of disgust was made even harder to stomach, as the weeks dragged on, by how senseless Fisher’s decision to leave Oakland increasingly seemed.
The deal Fisher had secured in Vegas appears, by all accounts, to be demonstrably worse than the one he had demanded—and was painfully close to securing—in Oakland. In Oakland, he would have had a version of what the Giants have in San Francisco. And the most expensive concession the city wanted in return was assurance from Fisher that 15 percent of the units included in the housing element of his project be affordable. This wasn’t Seattle in 2006, when public support for spending public money on a new arena for the Sonics did not exist. It was not even Oakland in 2015, when reservations among city leaders about subsidizing the Davis family—for a second time in 20 years—were high. Oakland was prepared to give Fisher license to develop more than 50 acres of waterfront property in the 10th-biggest television market in the country. Oakland had worked with the A’s to pass legislation fast-tracking stadium construction—a big deal in a state where it’s basically impossible to build anything at scale with public money—as well as to complete a 1,200-page environmental impact review. Oakland had likewise already raised lots of money for the off-site infrastructure, to date more than $400 million, which is more than the $360 million that Fisher had asked it to raise initially and which is also more than the $380 million Fisher’s presently set to get in Las Vegas. By some accounts, only $90 million remained between Oakland, Fisher, and a deal by the time Fisher backed out. And Mayor Thao has also been explicit about whether Oakland wants the A’s to stay. “We want the Oakland A’s here,” she said in an interview on June 6. She articulated something similar in an op-ed she published in The Wall Street Journal three days later.
And yet, instead of developing the Oakland waterfront, Fisher’s opting to rent a 9-acre parcel of land that sits behind a casino in Major League Baseball’s smallest television market. The stadium he’s planning on building there will hold only 30,000 fans, making it the smallest in baseball. As Joe Sheehan, cofounder of Baseball Prospectus, has pointed out, such a park seems of dubious economic value. “[That park] has to seat more than 40,000 people, maybe 45,000,” Sheehan writes, “to have any chance to make the A’s more than a corporate-welfare case by 2038.”
One impulse, in light of his seemingly devil-may-care attitude, is to write Fisher off as a clown. But Fisher is only part of the problem; also complicit is Manfred, who continues to imply that fans in Oakland aren’t interested in Major League Baseball. “You look at their attendance,” Manfred said in April. “You can say chicken or the egg. But their attendance has never been outstanding, let me put it that way.” (Recently, when asked about the apparent success of fans’ reverse boycott, he had this to say: “It is great to see what is … almost an average Major League Baseball crowd in the facility for one night.”)
“It feels like a complicated plan, or at least, a self-fulfilling prophecy,” the sportswriter Tim Keown said recently. Keown had written an article for ESPN about how destitute Fisher had allowed A’s baseball to become. The experience seemed to have dragged Keown to the conclusion that A’s fans had likewise drawn. “They don’t really care how messy it gets and they don’t seem to care how much pain it inflicts.”
For A’s fans, the sheer nastiness of all this—the immense injustice—left them, in the end, with only one option: fight back. Because this is Oakland, the impulse came naturally. The resistance progressed in stages. It started online, where, in the immediate wake of the first Vegas land deal, hashtags such as #FisherSell, #FisherOut, and #FuckJohnFisher started to trend. Slowly, it bled into the real world. During the first home game after news of the land deal leaked, several dozen fans picketed the Coliseum, snaking their way through the mostly empty stadium in between innings, signs aloft.
Several weeks later, another independent fan group, formerly dedicated to celebrating all things A’s baseball, known as Last Dive Bar—the name is a loving homage to the Coliseum—organized a rally in the Oakland Coliseum parking lot. It was designed as a kind of release. Fans were invited to huck tomatoes at effigies of Fisher, Kaval, and Manfred. A hundred-some-odd fans participated—my wife, nine months pregnant, included.
In a way, all this was mere warm-up for the reverse boycott. In March—even before it became clear the A’s were likely to be leaving—an A’s fan named Jeremy Goodrich had created a Twitter handle, @OaklandRooted, along with a change.org petition, with the singular goal of pressuring Fisher to sell. Sometime after the petition went online, it was signed by fellow A’s fan Stu Clary. The petition gave Clary an idea: What if there were a way to show the baseball world that A’s fans were not the problem?
“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,” Clary told Lockard. He picked Tuesday, June 13, a home game against the Tampa Bay Rays, the best team in baseball, who were coincidentally navigating their own stadium squalls. This was also the night before the start of the annual MLB owners meeting in New York.
The 68s signed on to help; they began raising money—and would ultimately raise more than $30,000 in all—to print the thousands of kelly-green “SELL” T-shirts, designed by local outfit Oaklandish, that they would give away at the massive tailgate before the game on June 13. Last Dive Bar also volunteered, offering to print thousands of placards to help choreograph in-game chants.
Slowly, word about the planned boycott spread farther outside Oakland, even getting picked up by a few national outlets, thanks in part to the images of the Coliseum that had been shared like disaster porn online earlier in the spring. Not all of the attention was positive. Some critics harped on the contradiction that, by packing the Coliseum, fans would simply be giving Fisher more money he didn’t deserve. But in a way, such criticism missed the point. The point of the boycott was to make a statement—about A’s baseball, about Oakland, and about whom pro teams ultimately belong to. As Jorge Leon, president of the 68s, told me in a break from planning, “The A’s are our team. Fisher owns them, but they do not belong to him. We’re going to shine a light on what Fisher’s done and remind the world we’re still here.”
The Friday night of Memorial Day weekend, Fisher, Kaval, and the circus train of consultants and lobbyists they’d brought with them to Carson City submitted to the state Legislature the bill outlining their proposal for funding the A’s stadium project. It was not received well. Sports economists derided it as an unusually unwise investment of public funds, even by the standards of publicly funded stadium construction. Sportswriters like Dayn Perry, in an article shared widely on Twitter, said that, both for his neglect in Oakland and especially for his efforts of extortion in Nevada, Fisher “is an unaccountable trust-funder who has earned at most a tiny sliver of his current station.” People familiar with Nevada politics, meanwhile, called into question the economic sense of subsidizing a billionaire to the tune of nearly $400 million (at least) at a time when the state was facing a teacher shortage some 1,500 positions wide and in the midst of a budget crisis so severe that, earlier in the legislative session, lawmakers had been unable to pass bills funding paid family leave, after-school lunch, and housing security because Governor Lombardo had insisted the state could not afford it.
Things got even worse for the A’s when lawmakers finally convened to discuss Fisher’s proposal in an official setting. At a public hearing on May 27, lawmakers derided the fact that the bill was being considered at all, let alone on such a rushed timeline; as Dina Neal, Nevada state senator, asked, in a rather pointed fashion, “If you’re operating in a structural deficit … then why are you guys willing to bond or give up for a stadium? You knew that was comin’, cause that’s just dumb.” Some Nevada state lawmakers—perhaps especially those who are baseball fans—likewise found cause for concern in Fisher himself, who had not even bothered to show up to this hearing. They decided, ultimately, not to vote on Fisher’s package before the official end of the legislative session, on June 5, though Lombardo, a supporter of the stadium project, convened a special session to review and vote on Fisher’s bill the next day.
In a way, the special session only made things worse. At one point, Nevada state senator Fabian Doñate called Kaval to the podium to answer a question about whether the A’s would commit to paying a live entertainment tax that other businesses on Las Vegas Boulevard pay. Kaval admitted sheepishly, upon follow-up, that, no, the A’s weren’t intending to pay that tax or a host of other taxes, for that matter. (Under the bill as written, the stadium would be exempt from property taxes, and Fisher would also get to keep the revenue generated from the stadium’s naming rights.) Later, during a session for public comment, former A’s executive and Nevada transplant Steve Pastorino called Kaval a “walking, talking bobblehead.”
As the journalist and corporate-welfare watchdog Neil deMause has reported, the amount of taxpayer money Nevada would probably send Fisher’s way could very well amount to more than $500 million. In online polling of Nevada residents, 86 percent of respondents said they opposed the project.
Back in Oakland, all this infused the boycott with a semblance of hope. Maybe, it was suddenly possible to imagine, the boycott might do more than make a statement? Maybe, somehow, it would make a difference.
Alas, as The Athletic’s Steve Berman pointed out, in the end, Fisher had the backing of people who, in Vegas, tend to matter: the governor, casino interests, local labor unions. After the special session spilled into a second day, the Legislature adjourned for a four-day recess—the point of which seemed to be to give Fisher time to grease palms and gin up votes. He was efficient. By Tuesday, June 13, the A’s had amended their stadium bill to such an extent that Nevada lawmakers felt comfortable approving it. That afternoon, roughly an hour before the scheduled start of the reverse boycott back in Oakland, the state Senate voted to approve Fisher’s subsidy, bringing the A’s one major step closer to the strip.
I ended up leaving the boycott early; my wife was at home with our son—by that point 3 weeks old—and I had to relieve her. I left after the sun had set over the Coliseum’s western edge, the same canyon lip I’d watched with my dad 25 years prior. The sky turned velvety as I exited the tunnel. Then I was walking out alone into the parking lot, the lights and sounds of the game emitting a kind of heat behind me. I turned around for a last look—and that, I think, was when I understood, finally, what made this night different from what we’d thought was the Raiders’ last home game in 2018, or even from the protests that other scorned and abandoned fan bases have thrown in sports history. This hadn’t just been cathartic. And it hadn’t just been a protest. It hadn’t even just been an excuse to make a statement. It had been a last stand, a refutation—namely, of the lie that Oakland fans don’t exist—and, in this way, a reclamation. Fans had achieved something. They’d manufactured a kind of immortalization. As the Chronicle’s Scott Ostler put it, “The night will go down as one of the great protest moments in the history of the Bay Area … the loudest middle finger I’ve ever heard.”
(So loud, in fact, that it was heard in Washington, D.C. Inspired by the reverse boycott, Representatives Barbara Lee and Mark DeSaulnier—Democrats representing Oakland and Concord, respectively—recently introduced to the U.S. House of Representatives legislation requiring franchises that relocate to pay “10 years’ worth of local and state taxes that would have been generated for their former hometowns back to the regions they left,” as the Chronicle recently reported. If the franchise refuses to pay, the bill proposes revoking Major League Baseball’s antitrust exemption, which it has enjoyed for more than 100 years. Lee and DeSaulnier called their bill the “Moneyball Act.” It has since been cosigned by a slew of politicians on both sides of the aisle.)
Two days after the reverse boycott, Governor Lombardo signed SB1, the bill approving the use of public funds for Fisher’s stadium in Las Vegas, into law. The next step in the process is for MLB’s 29 other owners to vote on Fisher’s relocation application; that’s expected to happen sometime this summer. Most believe that the owners will approve it—they are unlikely to prevent one of their own from pocketing hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds, as sports economist J.C. Bradbury has put it, because who knows when they might need that kind of money for a new stadium from their local government?
Of course, even if the owners approve the relocation, it technically remains possible that Fisher’s move to Vegas could fall through; as The Athletic’s Tim Kawakami wrote recently, fans should not underestimate Fisher’s proven ability to screw up stadium deals. (Residents in Nevada could also organize to use a voter initiative to repeal the deal.) Still, it’s not looking good. At the boycott, in instances when they could be compelled to let down their guard, even the most diehard A’s fans I know appeared to be preparing for the worst. “I got my family, and then I got the A’s,” Bryan Johansen, founder of Last Dive Bar, told me. Around us, fans were just starting to stream into the Coliseum, which rose like a downed spaceship to the north. “I can’t fathom what happens if they leave.”
“The A’s are everything,” A’s diehard Right Field Will told me. “This was home.”
Relocation is always wrenching. Owners are generally flippant about the pain they cause by pursuing it. And the loss is always felt as something seismic and personal, generational and wrong. This was true in St. Louis and Baltimore, San Diego and Brooklyn, Cleveland and Seattle.
Furthermore, for sports fans, suffering through extortion is not exactly a novel experience. As deMause points out in his seminal text on this topic, Field of Schemes, “Nearly every major city has been asked at some point to mortgage its future to the sports industry.” Many, many team owners have leveraged the specter of relocation in these appeals. Kim and Terry Pegula, the billionaire owners of the Buffalo Bills, did so recently in New York, coaxing state and local governments into contributing $850 million to the team’s new stadium.
There’s precedent for this, is the point. Still, the stealing of the Oakland A’s is different. It’s different because of the totality of the theft. If Fisher succeeds in stealing the A’s, Oakland will have no major league sports left. Which is devastatingly sad because Oakland was, for a time, perhaps the mightiest sports town in the world. The three teams around which Oakland’s sports scene most closely revolved, the Raiders, Warriors, and A’s—as the sportswriter Frank Deford observed—each invigorated the city. “The franchises swell Oakland with self-esteem and, prancing in its fresh swagger, the city sees itself in a brighter light,” he wrote.
Credit for that bygone sports culture today is most readily reserved either for the Raiders, whose brutality and swagger, in particular throughout the 1970s, reflected the virtues of incorrigibility and grit that this unpretty port town held dear, or for the Warriors, whose shimmying expressions of exhilaration and joy seemed to channel, in the 2010s, the irreverence and charm of the East Bay’s beloved artistic figures, such as E-40 and Mac Dre. At least equal credit is due, however, to the A’s. If the Raiders were a pirating cultural force led by a swashbuckling iconoclast whose players scowled fearsomely in their bloodstained silver and black, the A’s, who dress in Technicolor green and gold, whose owners have almost always been impudent, and whose mascot, for a long time, was a mule, remain an extension of the East Bay’s funkier, more beatnik aspects.
But the A’s have been consistently good. In the early 1970s, they won three straight World Series titles. The figures who defined that era—Reggie Jackson, Rollie Fingers, Catfish Hunter—invoked an air of indifferent East Bay mustachioed cool that, coupled with their paradoxical dominance, made them a source of joy and pride. “The Coliseum hosted what we all called the city’s ‘annual party’ back then,” Gardner, the executive director of the joint powers agency that governs the Oakland Coliseum, once told me. The team that threw that party each year? That was the A’s.
Even through the Moneyball era, when the A’s became known mostly for the competitive costs of conspicuous frugality, the team maintained its essential charm. It was an organization of misfits and outcasts fighting furiously, if with a hint of humor and irony, for recognition and respect.
This was the first thing that, for my part, I came to love about the team. I think of that first A’s game that I attended with my dad. I still remember how cold it was and how poorly the A’s played. But more than that I remember the feeling of history the Coliseum invoked, the weather stains on the concrete. I remember the familial camaraderie of our seatmates; as Nina Thorsen, a mainstay of the right field bleachers—she’s one of the fans who used to bang relentlessly on drums all game long, keeping up the Coliseum’s steady heartbeat—told me at the boycott, “If you park on one end of the Coliseum parking lot and walk to the other, by the time you get there you’ll have a chicken wing, a joint, and a beer, all given to you by fans.” I remember the diversity (ethnic and economic) of those seatmates. I remember the well-worn grooves of the in-game customs; legend has it that the Oakland Coliseum is where a fan named Krazy George invented the wave. I remember the Let’s go Oak-land chants that broke out on our walk back across the breezeway that connects the Coliseum to BART—less vociferous, perhaps, than those I heard the night of the boycott, but memorable nonetheless.
The experience felt, in retrospect, seamless and affirming in the same way that moving to a new city and finally finding your favorite local bar can feel in adulthood. A’s fans, meanwhile, felt like my people. “Loyalty,” as Fever Pitch author Nick Hornby has written, “was not a moral choice like bravery or kindness; it was more like a wart or a hump, something you were stuck with.” At every A’s game I’ve been to since, everyone around me—kindly, unquestioningly—appeared to embrace this view.
These are the people Fisher’s forsaken—the institution he’s tarnished. In full, it’s astonishing. As Casey Pratt, a reporter with ABC7 News, put it to me recently, “This historic market has nearly been destroyed.”
Though the story of the stealing of the A’s is also different for what it represents. This is sports at their coldest, flayed to their most transactional inner logic—something impossible to either believe in or build on. In fact, for all the seedier aspects of the sports business that Fisher’s conspicuousness has laid bare, the story of the stealing of the Oakland A’s doubles, in a way, as a kind of playbook that other team owners intent on either extorting their host cities for public funds or abandoning those cities for more munificent municipalities can pretty easily follow. As Manfred has recently intimated, more than a few owners—in Tampa, Arizona, and Milwaukee, among other places—are likely to try relatively soon.
In this light, there’s yet another way to interpret the story of the stealing of the A’s. It’s still a tragedy—horrific for being so bizarre and drawn out—and it’s still a kind of hero’s tale, a testament to the un-murderable spirit of the people of a sports town.
But anyone who cares about sports would be wise to read it, in the end, in a different way—as a cautionary tale.
Dan Moore is a contributor to The Ringer, Oaklandside magazine, and Baseball Prospectus. Follow him on Twitter @DmoWriter or at www.danmoorewriter.com.
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The Long, Sad Story of the Stealing of the Oakland A’s - The Ringer
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