The Downfall of the Oakland A’s

By Billy Fallon

The A’s were once the prized possession of Oakland. While in Oakland the organization saw four titles in 1972, 1973, 1974, and 1989. In addition, even though they have not won a World Series since, they have captivated all of baseball with their “Moneyball” style of baseball perfected by Billy Beane that produced playoff team after playoff team in the early 2000s. Even after this initial wave, the A’s made the playoffs six times from 2012-2020, but the team we see now is almost unrecognizable. By far the worst team in baseball, the A’s once again have over 100 losses this season after losing 102 the year prior. So the question has to be asked: How did they collapse so quickly? The answer is not so simple, so in this article, I will dive into a few of the many reasons the Oakland A’s have become a shell of an organization.

The Ownership
John Fisher is a terrible owner. I understand a lot of owners are ultimately motivated by the bottom line, but Fisher’s obsession with turning a profit instead of putting a good product out of the field baffles me. The thing is, he’s not even the first A’s owner to do this, Stephen Schott and Ken Hofmann were the same way. Does anyone remember one of the biggest parts of the Moneyball book and movie involving Ricardo Rincon? The owners refused to pay an extra 233,000 dollars for a player. That’s pocket change for these owners. The whole reason the concept of Moneyball exists is that the owners were too cheap to let Billy Beane resign their star players, so he had to create a philosophy that required the scouting department to take players in the draft, sign players nobody wanted, and pull off miraculous trades for players nobody was really interested in, and yet Beane kept producing playoff teams. Even though he did not win a World Series as a GM, Beane should be up there with the greatest of all time for constantly taking teams with no funding to the footsteps of the World Series, where they lost to teams with a payroll of over 100 million dollars more than Oakland. Even when Fisher took over in 2005, Beane was still around and dealing with the exact same issue that he faced with the previous regime. Only this year did he stop officially heading the baseball operations department, and what do you know, everything has crumbled to the ground. John Fisher does not care about baseball, he has been trying to move the A’s to Vegas for years and when he finally got his wish this offseason, he put zero effort into putting together a team. They are bottom of the league in almost every statistical category, were the first team eliminated from playoff contention, in August might I add, had a perfect game thrown against them, and sport by far the worst record in baseball. Yet, Fisher couldn’t care less, he’s getting a nice big check to move to Las Vegas with a nice location near the Las Vegas Strip where he can make money from tourists hand over fist for however long he is allowed to own the team. The worst part is the rest of the owners and the commissioner supports his move, which brings me to my next point.

The MLB
The MLB is following the trend of other professional leagues of abandoning Oakland, California. The city of Oakland is in massive financial trouble, as they have things such as homelessness problems and a lack of funding for many community-based programs. So, when sports owners come in asking for the city to pay millions if not billions of dollars to fund new state-of-the-art facilities, they do not have the capital to do so. As a result, owners take their teams and move to a place that will pay said money. It started with the Raiders moving to Las Vegas in 2019, along with the Golden State Warriors moving back across the Golden Gate Bridge to their new home in San Francisco. So, given that the Oakland Coliseum is old and in desperate need of renovation, the A’s owners decided they should ask in a half-hearted attempt to have the city pay for the stadium to keep the team in Oakland. Needless to say, they did not come close, and John Fisher took his demands straight to Las Vegas, a city that has welcomed professional sports as of late with the Golden Knights of the NHL and the aforementioned Raiders of the NFL. So, after some strenuous negotiations, John Fisher weaseled his way into a brand new stadium on the Las Vegas strip for his ballclub. The worst part about this is how in favor the MLB itself is in abandoning Oakland. While the official vote for relocation won’t happen until November, Rob Manfred has already gone on interviews trashing the Oakland fanbase and the city itself for not providing an official offer when they had little funds to do so. In fact, the city told the league they were prepared to cut programs to help build a stadium in Howard Terminal just as Fisher had requested. The city of Oakland itself said a concrete offer was on the table, just that the city was not prepared at the time to offer the whole amount at the time of negotiations, as they were prepared to gather that money in the coming months so they could agree. Not to mention, Rob Manfred continued to make insulting comments about the community of Oakland for not showing up to games. The reason why no one is showing up is because the A’s are the worst team in baseball, Rob, not because they don’t care for the team. Just to show him up, the A’s fans planned a reverse boycott, where they would pack the stadium to show how people cared, where almost 30,000 people showed up to a game against the Rays (for reference their average attendance is about 8,500), to which Manfred called it an “almost average MLB crowd”. Seriously, a movement started on the internet got 20,000 more people to show up to a game than average and you say it’s an almost average crowd. The man who leads the MLB is so arrogant in his comments that he shows cities disrespect and completely disparages the history of organizations in exchange for making a profit. Chalk this move up not to the city of Oakland or the A’s fanbase as Manfred suggests, but to the pure greed of the MLB itself.

The A’s moving to Las Vegas does nothing for the fanbase, in fact, it will shrink because now they are losing the support of the Oakland area and most likely will not capture the Las Vegas fans anytime soon. Oakland has seen all their professional sports taken away because of situations out of the fans’ control. As we have seen with the Raiders, Las Vegas won’t provide a good fanbase for an organization, in fact, it will make it so the A’s play 162 games on the road because most of the opposing team’s fans will fill up their stadium. Yet, in November the move will most likely become official, and as the team heads for Nevada, the city of Oakland will lose its last team, and so with it the decades of memories and titles the A’s have brought to their fans. If I’m trying to get anything out of this, it’s that owners should stop prioritizing the bottom line over producing a good product because in the long run that will eventually affect the bottom line as well. While John Fisher will be written a big check and be given a shiny new stadium to make himself feel accomplished, he will have no fanbase to display his pathetic efforts at building a team to.