I wrote “Your Team. Their Profits. Our Game.” because I could feel my affection for baseball being worn down by the business surrounding it. John Fisher gave that feeling a name and a face.
He treated the Oakland A’s as a movable asset. The city, the fans, the generations of attachment could all be pushed aside once ownership decided the future belonged somewhere else. Whatever polite language gets wrapped around that decision, I read it as a giant fuck you to the people who helped make the franchise matter.
Fisher bought control of a business whose meaning other people had spent decades creating. They gave it their summers, their money, and a place in their families. Their loyalty helped sustain what he owned. When it conflicted with what he wanted, they discovered how little authority any of it gave them.
I went to 248 baseball games in 2014 because the communities mattered to me. The conversations, the rituals, the places people kept returning to. Watching that part of baseball get treated as disposable makes me question why I keep giving its business so much of my attention.
On June 13, 2023, Oakland fans brought 27,759 people to the Coliseum for a reverse boycott, demanding that Fisher sell. They paid admission to prove they cared. Apparently, decades of loyalty still required an audition. The owner pursued his exit while the fans were left demonstrating that they deserved a team.
The stadium negotiations failed. That did not make Oakland disposable. In his September 2024 letter, Fisher said, “we tried,” and acknowledged the failure to stay. Then let somebody else try. If you cannot make it work, why must the city lose its team before you consider losing control? Oakland bore the loss while Fisher retained the franchise. What a convenient version of failure.
Major League Baseball authorized it. The owners unanimously approved relocation on November 16, 2023. Fisher needed their permission, and every owner voted yes. Milwaukee’s Mark Attanasio chaired the relocation committee. I have praised the Brewers, but my respect for their organization does not excuse his role in Oakland’s loss. My concern for baseball cannot stop wherever defending my own team becomes uncomfortable.
The final home game in Oakland was September 26, 2024, before 46,889 people. Mark Kotsay thanked the crowd and led a final “Let’s go Oakland” chant. That afternoon belongs in baseball’s record as a failure of leadership. The fans supplied the dignity. The owners had already decided that losing those fans was an acceptable consequence.
This is what I cannot stand about ownership anymore. The entitlement. The expectation that buying control earns permanent deference. Fans are supposed to remain loyal through every disappointment, while ownership’s obligations become negotiable whenever they grow inconvenient. I am sick of being told to understand the business by people whose decisions show so little regard for why we loved the game in the first place.
Character matters when respecting other people costs you something. Money. Control. The deal you wanted. If your commitment to a community disappears when those things are at stake, stop expecting applause for your stewardship. Being rich enough to own a baseball team does not make you worthy of the trust that comes with it.
I started this season asking who owns the game. I am ending it thinking about the people in Oakland who were encouraged to make the A’s part of their lives and then watched Fisher take them away. Whatever gets built in Las Vegas will not erase that. Whatever the franchise becomes worth will not make it right.
John Fisher had baseball’s permission to leave and the rest of us do not owe the owners our respect just because they can afford to own something we love.
#FJF
BURN IN HELL JOHN.
The East Bay isn't the same without the A's, Warriors, and Raiders. I'm a lifelong Yankee fan, but getting to witness the Moneyball era as a college student was incredible.