As the unstoppable force of John Fisher and MLB needing to move the Athletics out of Oakland sped toward the finish line over the past few months, it’s become increasingly obvious that this move is going to be even messier than one could have imagined. If you need a primer, Joe Sheehan laid out the case against Las Vegas in general back in April here and how much worse the final deal to move to Vegas is than the one that was on the table should John Fisher have opted to negotiate in good faith with the City of Oakland here.
This came to a seeming climax on Wednesday, when 27,759 A’s fans filed into RingCentral(?) Coliseum to reverse boycott the litany of offenses committed against them by an owner whose life’s accomplishments look to consist of [pores over list*] having dropped from between the legs of one of the co-founders of The Gap who happened to be married to the other co-founder of The Gap, all while the Nevada legislature passed a $380MM bill to approve state funding (from a very poor state, mind you) for the public portion of a stadium.
*How damning is it for the entirety of a billionaire’s business acumen to be able to be summed up in two paragraphs in the career section of their Wikipedia page?
A’s fans aren’t completely without hope—owners can’t be jazzed about forever supporting this franchise as it leeches off them via revenue sharing, which the teams who generate the lowest revenue do, and which the smallest stadium in baseball, which is what’s been approved on the small Tropicana site—but it seems extremely unlikely that MLB isn’t salivating lasciviously at the thought of cozying up even more to the gambling industry. It’s also unlikely that the relocation committee is going to actually look at how much worse the Vegas package is than the discussed Oakland Howard Terminal project is for the club and whoever Fisher suckers into buying the team in seven years.
Now, detailing the misdeeds of John Fisher would take days, but in broad strokes, the A’s have slashed payroll to the point of it being a joke (dead last in baseball this year, by a fairly wide margin)—trading any budding stars as soon as they were entering year two of arbitration—while jacking up ticket prices obscenely (check this thread on Twitter or this Mercury News article from 2022) to ensure that the stadium was empty for the optics, all while collecting that sweet revenue sharing dough from teams that don’t refuse to spend money to put a better product on the field. Or, if you’d like an illustrative example, the Royals are spending $35MM more than the A’s to be worse than the A’s, drawing 15,649 fans per game to Oakland’s 9,021 fans per game, and they didn’t jack up season ticket packages more than 50-90% over two years (anecdotally, per the tweet and article) while cutting any parking/concessions/merch benefits to season-ticket holders. Safe to say, any claims Fisher (were he not in hiding) or his MLB mouthpiece Rob Manfred tried to make were going to be made in bad faith.
So when Rob Manfred took the podium yesterday—Evan Drellich of The Athletic transcribed the presser (sub req’d)—Oakland’s relocation was clearly going to be the primary area of concern by the reporters in attendance. This couldn’t have come as a surprise to him. And yet, by the fourth question, he’d already completely screwed the pooch, claiming the city of Oakland never “had a plan to build a stadium at any site,” alleging no community support.
Of course, that’s not true and was instantly refuted (h/t to former MLB Daily Dish co-masthead member Joon Lee, who’s life went in a better direction) by the Mayor’s office:
Then he:
effectively shat on the reverse boycott, patting them on the head and telling the fans in Oakland it was cute,
avoided responsibility for championing the cause of a team whose proposed new stadium is so small as to ensure its permanent status as a recipient of revenue sharing regardless of on-the-field success,
and condescended to everyone regarding public funding/subsidizing of stadium projects, disingenuously asserting that the academics who’ve looked into the issue are divorced from reality, despite—as Craig Calcaterra pointed out (sub req’d
)—having tried to pay for studies to argue his point of view with no success.
If that wasn’t enough, he decided he needed to shit on the LGBTQ+ community during Pride month.
That’s a lot of shitting down one’s leg on a public stage, and it’s far from the first time he’s done this.
I know the Commissioner of MLB is at the employ of the owners—30ish billionaires who are varying degrees of awful—and he’s nothing if not concerned with demonstrating his craven fealty to them, but how can watching the representative you pay handsomely to be your public face plant said face so violently in a pile of manure that you end up wearing pounds of shit yourself do anything other than make you wonder why this man is in your employ?
This wasn’t an instance in which Manfred wore a bad look in the service of his overlords. Poo-pooing the fans in Oakland? Failing to recognize the feelings of the marginalized LGBTQ+ community when asked about the possibility of league-wide pride uniforms, opting to defend the feelings of bigots? Bald-faced lying multiple times in such ways as to elicit dozens and dozens of incensed and indignant articles in the day that followed an unmitigated disaster of a press conference?
How the owners can look at this and seemingly every other press conference or decision he makes, tally up the unforced errors, and not come to the conclusion that this man is unfit for the job? There are few people in this country more universally hated than the commissioners of our professional sports leagues, but Rob Manfred is lapping the competition for at least a second time. There are people who wouldn’t make themselves the news while making the league—and thus the owners—look this bad at every turn.
If this were a publicly traded business, Manfred would have been fired after tanking the stock, what, five years ago? It’s one thing to have to champion the shit sandwich that this A’s relocation to Las Vegas. It’s another to make the entire league look bad every time you open your mouth.
The door is there. Why hasn’t he been shown it?