The Athletics’ final goodbye in Oakland has begun, and not surprisingly, the occasion contains a mix of feelings, including anger, sadness, and awkwardness—putting a difficult coda on one of MLB’s thorniest business issues.
The A’s start a three-game home series against the Rangers on Tuesday, the team’s final games at the Oakland Coliseum after a 57-season stay there. The franchise is set to relocate this offseason for a three-year interim stay in Sacramento before ultimately moving to Las Vegas in 2028, with both of those shifts still grappling with their own logistical complications.
Back in Oakland, Coliseum and team officials are bracing for a potentially volatile week. Security has been increased for the three games, and players and coaches have been given a series of additional guidelines, including instructions to not loiter on the field after the final game Thursday.
Though the A’s are by far the worst-attended team in the league, averaging fewer than 10,400 fans per game, the last contest Thursday has long been a sellout, and the club has refused fan overtures to open up “Mount Davis”—the Coliseum’s large outfield seating section built in the 1990s for the NFL’s Raiders—for additional capacity.
Rebukes for the Owner
A’s owner John Fisher released a lengthy open letter to fans Monday, apologizing for failing to complete a stadium deal that would allow the team to stay in Oakland. In the missive, Fisher pointed to constraints from a “binding agreement to find a new home by 2024,” which helped drive the A’s to Las Vegas.
That agreement, part of MLB’s five-year labor deal with the MLB Players Association, indeed includes language to disqualify the A’s from the league’s revenue-sharing plan if a stadium deal wasn’t completed by Jan. 15, 2024. The A’s beat that date with last year’s deal with Nevada officials and subsequent MLB approval to move to Las Vegas. But that supposed urgency is fundamentally based around money, something many A’s fans have struggled to reconcile given Fisher’s estimated $3 billion net worth.
Furthermore, industry sources tell Front Office Sports the inclusion of the revenue-sharing eligibility for the A’s in the collective bargaining agreement with the players was driven much more by team owners and the league than it was by the union.
“With all due respect, which is more than you likely deserve, save it,” former A’s pitcher Trevor May tweeted regarding the Fisher letter. “Be an adult. Get in front of a camera and say it with your chest. Releasing a letter, clearly written by someone else, and including a bunch of names you DEFINITELY do not know, is just disrespectful to those that love the team. … Either stand up with pride or keep hiding. Pick one, we’re tired.”
Even Green Day front-man Billie Joe Armstrong, who was born in Oakland and grew up in nearby Rodeo, Calif., blasted Fisher during a recent concert at San Francisco’s Oracle Park.
“We don’t take no s*** from people like John f***ing Fisher, who sold out the Oakland A’s to Las f***ing Vegas,” Armstrong said. “I f***ing hate Las Vegas. It’s the worst s***hole in America.”
