John Fisher to A's Fans: "It's Been Worse For Me Than For You"
Major League Baseball's owners will be voting on Thursday on whether or not to approve the A's relocation bid to move the franchise to Las Vegas. Sin City would be the team's fourth home since they joined the league in 1901.
A's fans made a lot of noise over the summer in what was deemed the "Summer of Sell" by holding reverse boycotts, a Unite the Bay event, and even infiltrating other ballparks around the league on a seemingly nightly basis. They even got the fans in Seattle to chant "Sell the Team" during the All Star Game.
The A's potential relocation has not gone smoothly in any regard, but at some point it has to be the fault of the guy at the top, right? A's owner John Fisher has spent 18 years saying the team was going to move to Fremont or San Jose or Laney College before finally settling upon Howard Terminal not long before Covid hit. Instead of trying to build a ballpark, Fisher wanted to build an empire.
In Las Vegas he is getting a ballpark, but it will be on rented property. No surrounding development. None of the frills that were mandatory in Oakland. Just one crappy ballpark that has already changed sites once and has left the public waiting on renderings that the team doesn't consider trash. Those trash renderings were just used to secure $380 million from the Nevada legislature.
That's the backdrop for John Fisher coming up to three A's fans on Tuesday night at the hotel that is playing host to the owner's meetings. Jared Isham, Gabriel Cullen and Jorge Leon arrived at 7 a.m. Fisher didn't get there until 7 p.m.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Fisher told them, "I just want to let you know I appreciate you guys being here, I appreciate the passion you have shown." He went on to say, "All that time it’s been a lot worse for me than it’s been for you."
Fisher has not spoken to the fans nor the media from the time he bought the team in 2005 until this past summer when he did three interviews--one with a friendly local news outlet that didn't record audio or video at Fisher's request, one with the seemingly bought-and-paid-for Las Vegas Review-Journal, who also has one of their lobbyists suing the teacher's group Schools Over Stadiums to stop the potential referendum and a third that was done with ESPN. That was a hard-hitting piece that didn't paint Fisher in the best light.
This is all that A's fans have gotten from this man in 18 years. They've absorbed his relocation talks. They've absorbed all of the trades that have involved their favorite players. They've taken the ridicule from other team's fans and even other team's social media accounts. And yet, they still love this team. Many green and gold loyalists have been fans of their club longer than Fisher has owned the A's. The fans have more sweat equity poured into this franchise than he ever will.
If things were so bad for Fisher, why not sell the team and make a billion dollars off of what he paid for the team? Seems like a pretty big win. He never tried actually building a roster, handing out a big contract, or exceeding a payroll of $100 million. Instead, he's like Ned Flanders' parents. "I've tried nothin' and I'm all out of ideas!"
A's fans don't have the option to come out a billion dollars ahead at the end of this saga. Instead, they'll be left with no team, a loss of community, a severance from family bonds and memories, and the sport that they love telling them it's their fault.
Baseball is in A's fan's blood. It's part of their identity. That may sound overblown, but you can't just take something away that you have done every night, for six months a year over the course of 30 or 40 years and just be ok.
Other fans will say to pick a new team and follow the sport anyway, but A's fans don't have a connection to the Giants or the Dodgers or the Mariners with their parents, grandparents, or even their own kids. It's kind of hard to just start all over, but even if it weren't they'd still have to ignore the way the League has gone about this entire process this year, painting the fans as the villains and showing zero empathy for what they're doing to the community.
Rob Manfred downplayed the reverse boycott, which was a top-5 moment at the Coliseum for many in attendance. He has blamed the City of Oakland for not having a deal, while they have reportedly raised close to a billion dollars in on-site and off-site infrastructure funding. There's also the fact that one person briefed on the report that has been submitted to owners called the Las Vegas plan "iffy."
If baseball had spent time trying to work with Oakland (or even calling the newly elected Mayor) to get this project figured out instead of burning bridges with the city and its fans all summer, then maybe they could have ended up with a project that was better than "iffy."
Maybe John Fisher is talking about his legacy being tarnished throughout this process. Sure, that's a valid point. Fisher will be remembered in the area he grew up in as the man that ripped the A's out of Oakland. But A's fans didn't make him do that. They didn't set payroll limits or not invest in the team. They didn't spurn the fans at every corner, turning many of them away already, which has led to the crowd sizes of recent seasons.
A's fans didn't create John Fisher's legacy, and they sure didn't destroy it. He did. The fans just brought attention to it.