So, the Oakland A’s are going to Sacramento and the entirety of Major League Baseball should be ashamed of itself. This is the culmination of a multi-year plan by A’s owner John Fisher to move the A’s from the relatively low profit region of Oakland, where the team has been since 1968, and where they won four World Series. The move will take one of the most storied and historic franchises in the entire Junior Circuit and move them to a city with little historical baseball interest. Las Vegas has always been in that weird space of being wooed by the bigger Cali teams, with fan support split between the Dodgers, Giants, and Padres. Fisher hoped to exploit this lack of specific support by putting an MLB team in Vegas, to join the Golden Knights of the NHL and the Raiders of the NFL. This trio would give Vegas a huge sports landscape in a very short amount of time, and would leave the city of Oakland with no major sports teams for the first time in over a half century.
However, Fisher is an idiot. While he got a massive free payday to move (again, shame on the MLB), Vegas still hasn’t technically bindingly approved his new stadium, and if that doesn’t get built, Fisher is outta luck. On top of that, his lease with the Oakland Coliseum finally ran out, and Fisher doesn’t like spending money, so instead of y’know, having a stadium for a few years, Fisher decided to just pack up, leave, and go somewhere else.
And that’s how we get John Fisher announcing that the Oakland A’s will be moving to Sacramento, a place without a dedicated MLB stadium, for three years. Mind you, they’ll still be the Oakland A’s, or maybe just the A’s, or something else entirely, but probably not the Sacramento A’s, because John Fisher is incompetent and has filed a trademark for the Sacramento A’s while being completely wishy washy on whether the team will change it’s name for a few years. Look forward to watching the Oakland Athletics of Sacramento play baseball in July, I guess, because I cannot imagine this going any worse at this point.
Fisher has been angling for a new stadium for years, and he isn’t getting one soon. Sacramento is operating off a Triple A park, and the A’s are seeing attendance in the low, low four digits, a massive decline in fan interest that is almost certainly the only reason they can get away with housing the team in a minor league park. If nobody shows up, overcrowding just isn’t an issue, I guess.
It doesn’t help that the product on the field is unwatchable because of how much Fisher penny-pinches his good players away and onto other teams. The A’s are like the farm system of MLB, and it’s honestly depressing.
With trademarks filed on “The Sacramento A’s,” and a new marketing push from Fisher, it seems like this new “three year maybe four who knows what Vegas is doing anymore” deal may be lucrative for the billionaire, but will come at cost to Sacramento residents. In order to keep the team there, they’re going to have to pour money into the stadium they plan on putting them in, a cost that will not pay off when the team rebrands in a few years and bids the city goodbye. With that in mind, it’s no surprise residents aren’t happy — even the baseball fans. New taxes, bad spending, and way, way too much leeway for Fisher have led to this disaster, and it’s disappointing MLB won’t do anything to step in and save the Oakland A’s.
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