If you don’t follow baseball — and let’s be honest, if you’ve somehow parsed the internet to find my lowly blog, you probably don’t — you may be unfamiliar with the story of the Oakland Athletics. No, I’m not talking about how the cash-strapped franchise used revolutionary analytical techniques to scout players and compete with baseball’s top teams despite having a fraction of the payroll. That story is dramatized in the 2011 film “Moneyball.” The story I’m talking about is far more sad, though oddly enough it shares the premise of a studio comedy that celebrated its 35th anniversary this week: “Major League.”
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. The owner of a professional sports team, in pursuit of personal gain or satisfaction, plans to sabotage the club by appointing incompetent players and staff. “Major League” is probably the most famous use of this premise. More recently, it can be seen in the Apple TV series “Ted Lasso” — though the end goals and motivations for the owner in that show are different, as well as the result. “Major League,” in particular, has taken on a more harrowing relevance over the last couple of years thanks to the impending relocation of the A’s. Baseball clubs relocating isn’t unheard of — it happened quite a lot in the middle of the 20th century — but it’s only happened once since 1971 when the Washington Nationals moved from Montreal to the nation’s capital in 2004. The A’s have, unsurprisingly, been looking to relocate for years. Oakland is a small market, the stadium is a dump, and the city doesn’t have the money to build the facilities the owner wants. But the way the owner, John Fisher, has spit in the face of the fans and city while doing it makes the whole situation much more sinister, and closer to the absurd comic scenario of “Major League.”
The A’s were regularly competitive not long ago, making the playoffs for three straight years between 2018 and 2020, and barely missing out in 2021. But during that 2021 season, the league granted the ownership group permission to look into moving the team. Over that season and the next, the A’s decimated their roster, letting multiple All-Star level players walk in free agency or trading them away, including MVP candidate Matt Olson. Shockingly, the team tanked and finished the 2022 season with just 60 wins in 162 games. Attendance plummeted, still not reaching half of what it was pre-COVID. The payroll dropped to less than that of the cheap “Moneyball” teams of the early 2000s, even without adjusting for inflation. It became clear very quickly that Fisher was slashing costs to make it easier to move the team. 2023 was even worse, with the A’s continuing to shred payroll and winning just 50 games. Soon after, a deal was announced that would take the team to Las Vegas.
The announcement of the A’s move should be the end of the story, but because Fisher wants to do a more faithful homage to “Major League,” he has to add some comedy. Turns out the city of Oakland won’t renew the stadium lease for a team that plans to leave them. Go figure. But the A’s stadium in Vegas hasn’t been built yet, and modern-day colosseums weren’t built in a day. Where was this team going to play? If this were “Major League,” the team would miraculously start winning, the fans would come back, and maybe Fisher would come to the table on the city’s new deal to keep the team in Oakland long term. But real life doesn’t always work out like in the movies. Fisher decides he wants this story’s comedy to come not from his failure to move the franchise, but from having them play in a 10k-seat minor league park in Sacramento. He wants the comedy to come from his inability to name an A’s player when talking about seeing stars hit home runs in their rental home. There are no baseball hijinks in this story, only crimes against the sport. We don’t get to laugh at Fisher being a piece of shit because everything turns out okay. The team is abandoning its community, and nobody seems to care.
The A’s — plucky young bunch though they may be — are still terrible. At the time of writing, they are already languishing in last place in the difficult American League West. Ten games into the season, Fangraphs has their chances to make the playoffs at a whopping 1.1%. The move is going through, whether it be to Las Vegas or not, and no amount of fan and player support for Oakland will keep the A’s there. The only hope is for the league to step in and block the move, and Commissioner Rob Manfred and the 29 other owners have no interest in that. Why would they? It’s all about money, isn’t it? Why should we care about our cultural institutions if they don’t put more cash into the pockets of people who don’t need it?
Fuck you, John Fisher. Sell the team.
