During The MLB All-Star Break, Bryce Harper And Ballplayers From Around The League Took The Time To Rip The Worst Owner In Sports, Oakland's John Fisher, And His Plan To Move The A's To Las Vegas, Predicting It's "Going To Be A Disaster"
LA Times - The Oakland Athletics are 11 weeks from extinction.
They’ll set up shop in Sacramento for three or four years, and after that they plan on making Las Vegas their new home. The A’s fans hate the idea, of course. The elected officials in Nevada, who authorized $380 million in public funding toward a new ballpark in Las Vegas, largely love the idea.
Las Vegas has a strong baseball community, and a growing cast of major league players. I spent the past few weeks asking major leaguers with Las Vegas roots what they thought of the A’s move and whether they believed the team would succeed there. Their comments were thoughtful and often nuanced — well, most of them.
“I think it’s a terrible idea,” Arizona Diamondbacks closer Paul Sewald said. “The whole thing, I fear, is going to be an abject disaster.”
Sewald said he would prefer the public funding be used for schools and roads. He said he also was skeptical that Las Vegas could support the A’s when the Raiders and 2023 Stanley Cup champion Golden Knights already are there, the two-time defending champion WNBA Aces have sold out their entire season, and it is possible that an NBA expansion team could beat the A’s to town.
“We just don’t have enough bandwidth to invest in three, four, five professional teams,” Sewald said. “We just don’t have enough people. That’s OK. We don’t have to be a city that has all four major sports.”
Bryce Harper, the Philadelphia Phillies’ All-Star first baseman, said he was unsure if the A’s would succeed in Las Vegas.
“Everybody is still locked in on the Golden Knights,” Harper said. “It’s a tough thing to see the A’s go away from Oakland. They have so much tradition and history there: the green, the yellow, the white cleats, Eric Chavez and all those guys that played there, Barry Zito, [Mark] Mulder, Huddy [Tim Hudson], the teams they had.
“I see it in Oakland. I don’t see it in Vegas.”
By all accounts, Oakland A's owner John Fisher seems like a pretty terrible person. His parents cofounded The Gap and became filthy fucking rich. John, their third son, went to Princeton, then dabbled in "entrepreunership" post college aka jerking off, telling people you're a bueinssman while living off of your trust fund. That was until his dad said enough was enough and made him go to work helping to manage his family's investment portfolio. John's first order of business? Divest a substatioal chunk of commercial properties and buy acres and acres of forrest land in northern California redwood tree country and get into the timber business.
Probably a pretty decent idea back in the late 90s right before the first really big housing boom (that would later burst) got underway. There was just one problem- those pesky environmentalists and federal regulators got in the comapny's way and they weren't able to mow down all those redwoods Fisher looked at and saw dollar signs.
Around that same time, The Gap got embroiled in a giant lawsuit from workers in its factories citing human rights abuse.
Fisher is 60 now. He, like Saperstein, joined the A’s ownership group in 2005, though he’s owned more than 80% of the team since 2016, per Forbes. For 16 years, he’s run the A’s with the same stubborn persistence he once exuded as a child. In his tenure as owner, he has kept the A’s payroll within the bottom half — and frequently the bottom quarter — of all 30 MLB clubs. And he has steadfastly tried to secure a new ballpark rather than rebuild at the Oakland Coliseum site (there have been six different attempts at relocating during his tenure).
Fisher grants fewer interviews to local media than Lori Lightfood did in her tenure in Chicago as Mayor. A feat so impressive it's only outdone by the fact that Oakland might be the only ballpark in America currently drawing fewer people than Chicago's White Sox.
He is despised by not only his teams fans, but also by organization staff and employees. Which includes the players themselves! Some of which he has gone full vendetta against.
This recent spring training produced one of the funnier/sadder stories you might remember-
Last Dive Bar is an online store that describes itself as a “premier online store for unique and stylish apparel that celebrates the iconic Oakland Coliseum”. Go to the website and you’ll see that their apparel seems to have a central theme…
Their homepage features shirts and hoodies that read “Boycott” and “Sell the Team”. There’s also a shirt depicting A’s owner John Fisher playing with a puppet that resembles A’s President Dave Kaval. Last Dive Bar hosts a yearly Fans’ Fest that is openly anti-ownership.
Now the fun part. Their Twitter account tweeted pictures of 4 A’s players wearing their wristbands…
Esteury Ruiz - demoted. Brent Rooker - benched. Cristian Pache - traded. James Kaprielian - released
Shout out to @bigbobscards for some impressive investigative work here on this one. You know there's nothing that get's the blood flowing to my dick more than a good conspiracy theory. Especially a good sports conspiracy theory.
And this one's as believable as they come.
Just two days before that story broke, Big T blogged about A’s fans coming across a cheat sheet in the Oakland A's proshop instructing employees on how to handle the most basic and simplest of questions.
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As with anything when it comes to big-time business, success and failure starts at the top. And in Oakland, when it comes to the dumpster fire that is the Athletics baseball club, the top is owner John Fisher.
Many have called him "THE worst owner in all of sports". A pretty fucking mighty title when you consider Dean Spanos, Jimmy Haslam, David Tepper, Arte Moreno, and James Dolan all own sports franchises.
In fairness, to call John Fisher the worst owner in all of pro sports might seem hyperbolic. After all, the competition is fierce, with contenders from every corner of the sporting world. But Fisher, through sheer dedication to the art of failure, has arguably clinched the title. It's not just that he's made poor decisions, it's that he's done so with a flair and consistency that borders on performance art.
ESPN's David Dennis Jr. lit Fisher up recently on Around The Horn for the horrendous way he's managed to turn relocating his impoverished team to Sin City into a butt-fuck-a-thon.
The biggest haymakers were thrown by David Dennis Jr., who said "[Fisher] turned the actual team into a hypothetical squad that barely exists right now. They barely have a roster, the lowest in terms of salary in the league. They may or may not have a tv deal. They have no home for the next three years. There's no blueprint for the place they want to go. They have a mayor in Vegas who says 'go back home' and they have a home that says 'we don't want you back here any more.' That's about John Fisher and what he has done to destroy this. He's the worst owner in all of sports."
The fact that John Fisher would carry a vendetta against low to mid-level players (who he pays nothing mind you) for wearing those Lance Armstrong WWJD bracelets in support of a hometown business that backs and supports your dogshit baseball team is mind bottling. Even by fragile, egomaniac sports owner standards. This is a move straight out of James Dolan's playbook.
What sets Fisher apart isn't just a knack for failure- no, it's his ability to elevate disaster to an art form.
Michael Zagaris. Getty Images.(this guy sucks)
John Fisher is a man so adept at the art of destruction that even Nero, watching Rome burn, would offer a standing ovation. Fisher, having inherited more silver spoons than a royal banquet, decided that owning a baseball team was his calling. But not content with mere mediocrity, Fisher aspired to something greater- becoming the living embodiment of a "how-not-to" guide on sports team ownership.
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Under his "guidance," the Athletics have spiraled into a spectacle so dismal that it makes the Cleveland Browns' darkest days look like a hiccup. With a winning percentage reminiscent of a batting average and a payroll so minuscule it's outstripped by the average tech startup's snack budget, Fisher's A's have redefined rock bottom. And just when you thought the team might hit bedrock, Fisher broke out the dynamite.
He decided to drive the final stake through his organization and fanbase's hearts by relocating the team. But not to a gleaming new stadium, mind you, but to a minor league ballpark in Sacramento, a setting so underwhelming that high school baseball teams might file a complaint. This move is the sports equivalent of trading in a dilapidated mansion for a shed… and then boasting about the shed's "intimate" atmosphere.
Fisher's stewardship of the A's isn't just a disaster- it's a meticulously curated disaster, one that would make a supervillain pause and mutter, "Well, that seems a bit much." From begging for public funds to abandoning Oakland after 57 years for a minor league park, Fisher has turned the A's into a case study in how not to run a baseball team. It's as if he's following a checklist designed to alienate every stakeholder imaginable.
And it's great to see Las Vegas native, current MLB players speak up and speak out on just how much a disaster this entire thing is.
The LA Times article continues -
Said Texas Rangers pitching coach Mike Maddux: “I think it would be great to have a big league team, whether it was a team that moves or an expansion team.
“I think the economy is there. It’s grown so much that it can support a team. And all people need is a reason to go to Vegas. If you’re going to go there to watch a ballgame, let that be your excuse to get out there.”
Sewald is not convinced the baseball fans of Las Vegas would become A’s fans.
“They are all Dodgers fans,” he said. “Ninety percent of the people there are from California. That’s how my dad got there. That’s how I became a Dodger fan growing up. They’re not leaving the Dodgers fan base, just because you have a team.”
Chicago White Sox outfielder Tommy Pham said he understood the skepticism. He also said he had heard it before.
“They said the same thing about the Golden Knights: Would this be a hockey town?” Pham said. “And the Golden Knights were winning, and look at it now. Everybody wears Golden Knights stuff in Vegas now.”
It goes on to point out that the A's are going to lose 100 games for the third season in a row this season, and have ranked last in payroll in each of the past two years and have not ranked among the top 20 in payroll since 2007.
“Seeing the A’s, and going to their park the last few years and seeing how that has been kept up,” Angels All-Star pitcher Tyler Anderson said, “and how they run their team — a lot of times, they have really good teams, but it seems like, as soon as they get a good team, they start trading guys before they get too expensive.
“It’s hard as a fan to have a good connection with players and teams there. You hope they come [to Las Vegas] and it changes a little bit.”
“No one in Vegas is an A’s fan,” Sewald said. “Why are they going to change allegiances to a team that is not trying to win?”
If the A’s spend to win in Las Vegas, Pham said, they shouldn’t be concerned about winning over their new hometown.
“Shouldn’t be,” Pham said. “Shouldn’t be, man. These owners are profiting, you know? They cry broke.
“I do the same thing. I cry broke when people ask me for money but, deep down, I know I got it. It’s what people with money do.”
As Fisher prepares the A's for their next acts in Sacramento, and then Las Vegas(?) one can't help but wonder what new depths will be found. Las Vegas had better be careful what they wished for. But one thing is certain, in the annals of sports infamy, John Fisher's legacy is secure. Not as a beacon of success, but as a warning, a cautionary tale of what happens when you let a silver spoon dig a grave for a beloved baseball team.
Cue Bill Simmons telling billionaires to pay for their own fucking stadiums.