October 2nd, 2019—The Oakland Athletics, winner of 97 games for the second straight season, are hosting the Tampa Bay Rays in the AL Wild Card game. 54,005 fans are in attendance for the game, a Wild Card round record.
April 19, 2023—The Oakland Athletics lose 12-2 to the Chicago Cubs in front of 12,112 fans. The loss drops them to 3-16, on pace for a 25 win season, the worst win total for a team since 1899. The next day the team announced it was relocating to Las Vegas.
How did we get here?
Let’s start with the core issue: the stadium.
The Oakland Coliseum, also known as RingCentral Coliseum, and before that, O.co Coliseum, has been home to the Athletics since 1968. It was built during the multi-sport stadium era, so the A’s shared the building with the Oakland Raiders until the Raiders themselves moved to Las Vegas in 2020. The team has been desperate for a new stadium for decades now, and with good reason. The stadium is old and is falling apart. There have been sewage issues in the clubhouses, feral cats, and recently a possum took the broadcast booth hostage.
This is where the actors come into play: the fans, city, and team. The Oakland A’s want a new stadium in a new location and they don’t want to pay for it. Following the sports owners handbook to a T, the A’s threatened relocation unless these demands were met. The city, to their credit, did not cave and had been negotiating in good faith to keep the team in Oakland without putting the financial burden on residents. As for the fans, well, they just want to watch their local team play baseball—and not have the toilet back up on them when taking a piss at the game.
I keep talking about the Oakland A’s as an entity, so let’s peel back that banana. Although many would consider professional sport teams a source of local pride and a public good, teams are privately owned. In the A’s case, they are owned by John Fisher, an “American businessman” aka the failson of The Gap’s founders. In 2005, he bought a stake in the Athletics for $180 million and became the majority owner in 2016. Despite MLB’s protests that owning a baseball team is a poor investment, the Athletics are now valued at $1.18 billion. And Fisher’s personal net worth is roughly $2.2 billion.
Despite making the playoffs from 2018-2020 and having a winning record in 2021, Fisher decided he needed some leverage in stadium negotiations. From Fisher’s perspective, winning games is not good. Fans show up when the team wins and sustained winning means investment in the product. When trying to shake down a city for public funding, the threat of relocation rings hollow when the seats are full. And spending money on the team proves you have the means to build the stadium yourself.
How did Fisher create leverage? He tore the team to shreds. After the 2021 season, he slashed an already bottom of the league payroll in half. In 2021, the A’s were 25/30 in taxable payroll, at $102 million, about $48 million below the league average. Entering this season, the A’s are dead last in taxable payroll at $81 million, a full $107 million below the league average. Pre-tax, the A’s payroll sits around $56 million. For context, the New York Mets top pitcher alone will make $43 million this season. This payroll cut was done by trading away the team’s best players—the players that took the team to the playoffs three of four seasons.
What did the team do after selling away All-Star players and cutting the payroll in half? They doubled ticket prices. It’s almost like this was done intentionally—tanking the team to lose games and enticing fans to forego the product in order to receive public funding, Or Else. The Athletics are, allegedly, a baseball team and trading away young, good players while making the playoffs year after year doesn’t make any baseball sense. And remember the wild cats and possums mentioned earlier? You think The Gap would let that fly in their stores?
“The A's were built to drive fans away, because the aim isn't to build a successful team anymore, it's to get a local government to subsidize real estate investment”- Michael Baumann
Photo by Jed Jacobsohn
Leaving the boundaries of capitalism in play, the only rational course of action is for John Fisher and the Oakland Athletics to fund a new stadium privately. After all, they are a private corporation. John Fisher holds all the power, not the fans. He makes all the decisions, not the fans. He collects the profits, not the fans. It doesn’t matter if the stadium is sold out every night and if the team wins every game. If he wants the team to wear shorts, they’ll wear shorts. If he wants the team mascot to be a feral cat, the mascot will be a feral cat. And if he wants someone else to pay for his personal gain, someone else will pay for his personal gain even if the fans, city, and even the players are 100% against it.
A story like this is why I’m making If They Don’t Win It’s a Shame. As outlined in the first newsletter, baseball is a dying sport, with a dwindling fan base and myriad of problems that won’t be solved so long as it is beholden to the profit-making interests of owners and advertisers, at the expense of fans like myself.
That is the story of the Athletics stadium development. The owner, one person, is interested in profit, not baseball. He wants to own private land and capitalize off the development of the land, while local and state coffers pay the expenses. And millions of people are losing an important facet of their life as a result.
Nevada politicians are giving public funds and a special tax status to the Athletics to move to Las Vegas. How will spending $1.5 billion on a baseball stadium help the people of Nevada as they stare down a water crisis in the desert?
This is the story of capitalism. The body of work focuses on baseball, but it’s a microcosm for our larger world. The self-interested profit motives of those who own the economic engines are at odds with the collective interest of everyone else. Their enrichment is our devastation.
To summarize: the Athletics play in a literal crumbling stadium and they legitimately need a new one. On one side of the path to a new ballpark are millions of fans who love the Athletics. On the other side is a billionaire. What’s the solution?
Socialize the pastime.
