A's Owner John Fisher, Attendance Woes, and Plenty of Concern

The Athletics and attendance woes seem to go hand-in-hand. But not all attendance woes are created equally. There is a lot of context that goes into those numbers for each and every team in each and every sport.

Before COVID hit, the Athletics were drawing close to 20,000 on average. Even after they traded away their All-Star core ahead of the 2015 season, they drew 21,829. The numbers that people like to point to as a reason for the club's departure come from the past couple of seasons, when they were averaging right around ten and eleven thousand per game.

But the context there matters. The fans were told, without much warning, that the team was leaving for Las Vegas. The fans were also blamed not only by the franchise, but by the League itself. Fans rightly stayed away, because at some point they had to draw a line with how they've been treated by this ownership group. They'd stuck around through plenty, but enough was enough.

The reason that the numbers in the first couple of months of the A's stay in Sacramento look bad is because it's a reflection of the franchise's lack of investment in the community. The people of Sacramento have been put in a tough spot, where they want to go watch baseball, but they don't necessarily want to support the ownership group given their recent history.

The A's are also sharing a minor-league ballpark where fans that want to see games can go watch the Pacific Coast League's Sacramento River Cats for about $15 instead of the initial $100 lawn seats the A's were offering.

That's strike one.

The A's then asked for gobs of money for season tickets, and there were a few thousand people that agreed to pay them the asking price, hoping to make some of that money back when they sold off those seats for games they couldn't attend.

The team was drawing 10,069 fans per game at Sutter Health heading into Wednesday's game with the Minnesota Twins, while the capacity is closer to 14,000. With so many seats available per game, the A's started running BOGO deals for $20 to get people to come out to the ballpark. For the fans and businesses that bought those season tickets, that's a slap in the face.

That's strike two.

Then, of course there is the fact that the A's have refused to include Sacramento in any of their branding, and have just started bringing in loosely affiliated Sacramento A's merchandise to the team store. Sacramentans are proud of where they live, and this move by the Athletics has left many to feel like they're being used to line John Fisher's pockets.

Typically in baseball, it's three strikes and you're out.

So when Sutter Health Park isn't packed, it's the fault of the franchise, not the fans. A team should be able to walk into a ballpark in a new city and just turn on the open sign and sell 14,000 seats, but the A's have actively kept the fans away, which seems to be a growing trend.

With the Miami Marlins struggling to draw fans this week when they hosted the Colorado Rockies, there has been a lot of attendance chatter on social media. Monday's game drew just 5,894, while the following games have sold slightly better.

The problem with the Marlins situation is that they already have the new ballpark. LoanDepot Park opened in 2012, and they initially drew well, hosting over 27,000 per game, but those numbers have tailed off of late. The reason is the same: Ownership. If there isn't an investment in the team and the product isn't worth investing in, then people aren't going to come out to the ballpark.

It's not rocket science.

Another example is the Los Angeles Dodgers. They are currently drawing over 50,000 per game due to the extra capacity of the ballpark, but if they dropped to 40,000 per game, they'd still rank fourth and there would be 26 other teams that would love to be drawing that many fans. At the same time, that would be a huge blow for the Dodgers.

It would lead many to believe that they were doing something that was angering a section of their fanbase, and may even lead to some change from the organization. That would be if the club only lost 20% of their typical gate. The A's dropped 50% of their fans, and yet the narrative was built, and believed by many, that the fans were the problem.

Instead, people haven't been listening to what the fans in Oakland have been saying this whole time. They just wanted ownership to stop kicking them and maybe retain a player or two.

Apparently money was always too tight to make that happen in Oakland with 55,000 seats available, but when they moved to a 14,000 seat venue, all of a sudden some money was found to lock up Brent Rooker and Lawrence Butler--in addition to signing Luis Severino to the most expensive contract in team history.

It should also be noted that the A's were drawing right around 21,000 in 2019, the last year before the pandemic (2020-21), another sell-off (2022), and the relocation announcement (2023). Fisher is sure putting in a lot of effort to move to Las Vegas, where he can max out at 30,000 fans per game.

For 9,000 extra fans (that may or may not come), he has tarnished his own legacy, the legacy of the A's, killed baseball fandom for hundreds of thousands in the East Bay, and brought Sacramento along for the ride.

The fans in Oakland made sure that everyone knew who the villain of this story was, and for him to not know this would be how they'd react goes back to his previous lack of understanding of knowing his consumer in the first place.

If Fisher is to be believed, he's also good to put over $1 billion of his own net worth ($3.1 billion) on the table to get this new ballpark built. Even if he's able to make that happen, he'd still have to figure out a way to actually draw fans to the ballpark, because he's shown in two different cities now that he's more of a repellent, looking to join a city filled with attractions.