I’m as eager as anyone else to see people leave California, but this is absurd.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, his henchmen, and the California Socialist Republic are all working hard to make the state unlivable. Their efforts have paid off as the population of the California Socialist Republic has been declining at an unprecedented rate. In this context, I thought for a very long time that the Oakland Athletics, a baseball team that is nominally in the major league, were making noises about moving to Las Vegas because bureaucrats from Oakland were trying to entangle the team’s attempts to build a stadium in a jungle of red tape. This was a way to show their contempt for professional sports. I was wrong.
Oakland officials may have been trying to save the A’s in good faith as a last-ditch effort to save a dying city. A’s management and ownership, on the contrary, have broken their promises, made secret deals, and shown a constant disregard for their fans.
The A’s move from California to Las Vegas was a story of corporate contempt toward ordinary Americans. A’s management behaved more like tyrants in the Biden regime, or Big Tech than as patriots who wanted to leave the Golden State to breathe freely. Athletics owner John Fisher, and president Dave Kaval, have behaved in such a way that Sheng Thao is made the hero.
ESPN revealed the entire disgusting story in a nearly 7,000-word article on Tuesday. The article goes into great detail about the A’s Management, who, while adopting the slogan “Rooted In Oakland”, and pretending to negotiate with the City of Oakland for a brand new ballpark, secretly signed a binding contract with Las Vegas, allowing them to move their team there. In the article, Thao receives a phone call from Kaval who casually tells her, at a time she believed that the team was still in negotiation with the city, “Hey just a heads up.” Someone leaked the news to the media that we had a binding agreement with Vegas.”
Thao was completely surprised by this, as she had been in intensive negotiations with the A’s, and even told her chief-of-staff, just before Kaval’s call, that “I really believe we’re going over the finish line.” Kaval’s call, according to ESPN, came after “no breakdown in talks, stalled processes, or contentious back and forth.” Fisher and Kaval kept up negotiations with Oakland to avoid a public firestorm while taking concrete measures to seal the Las Vegas deal as quickly
This wasn’t the only lie they told. Fisher and Kaval’s biggest deception was pretending that the Oakland Athletics are still a major-league baseball team while running it like a minor-league outfit only interested in supplying players to major-league teams. In the 1950s, Kansas City Athletics had a secret agreement with the New York Yankees. The A’s top players were sent to New York at their peak in exchange for Yankees spare parts, never-weres, and has-beens.
Fisher and Kaval are now being criticized by everyone in baseball for operating the Oakland A’s the same way. They have run the team as a farm team for not only one major league club but all of them. They have built championship teams several times, but then traded their best players, or let them sign with other teams because the billionaire Fisher claimed he couldn’t afford to pay what other teams would pay.
We now know why Fisher did what he did. Fisher was trying to leave town. Fisher’s case for relocation was hindered by a healthy fan base, such as the A’s had in the past (the 1990 American League Championship team attracted nearly three million supporters). He had to destroy this fan base repeatedly by savaging the product.
The A’s are one of many teams that bear the fruit of his labor: they field a team full of retreads and nobodies and have the worst baseball record. The A’s also have the lowest attendance of any major league team, which was their goal all along. Fisher and Kaval built quality teams and then got rid of the good players to field lousy squads. Attendance dropped. They then point out the low attendance to claim that Oakland cannot support a major-league team. We would have known for sure if Oakland had a major league team.
Major League Baseball has joined the dirty game Fisher, Kaval and their cronies are playing. MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred said that it was great to see a crowd of A’s fans who were “reverse boycotting” the team to demonstrate the lack of fan support in Oakland.
Loyalty towards long-suffering supporters? An honest, good-faith effort to reach a mutually advantageous deal? Come on man! This is the old America. Look at Bud Light. The new America allows big corporations to do whatever they want, while their loyal customers are thrown into hell. Anheuser-Busch suffered because of the Bud Light boycott, but John Fisher and Dave Kaval would like to see the A’s boycott. They want Oakland fans away from the game so that they can become richer. As an Oakland A’s supporter since 1971, now that the dirty deal has been completed, there are more reasons for fans to stay away.
