Baseball’s enduring, warring factions – passion and greed – intersected Tuesday. The juxtaposition was jarring.
In Oakland, California, more than 27,000 hard-bitten A’s supporters showed up for what was billed as a “Reverse Boycott,” a guerrilla faction of fans organized largely through social media, most clad in kelly-green shirts impossible to miss on TV, bearing just a single word.
SELL.
The Town is about to lose its last team standing, as the Athletics – rooted in Oakland since 1968, facility vagabonds since the Raiders laid waste to their stadium in 1995 – are far along in their dalliance with Las Vegas, where taxpayer dollars are looser than the slot machines. Owner John Fisher and his walking PowerPoint lieutenant, club president Dave Kaval, have opted for the quick fix in the desert. Rather than continue negotiating with Oakland on a complex yet potentially lucrative deal, Fisher – perhaps spooked by tumbling prices of Gap stock, perhaps for reasons we’ll never know – is literally trying to take the money and run.
But the fans refuse to be victim-blamed in this mess – and so the boycott was born.
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The logistics were spot-on: Take one of the ugliest dates of the year – Tampa Bay, on a Tuesday night – and rock this funky joint. A night before, the same matchup drew 4,848. Five previous Tuesday dates yielded an average crowd of 3,913 – and just 19,563 fans overall. Yep, the 27,759 – largest crowd of the year – outdrew every previous Tuesday combined.
Point proven, even before Carlos Perez’s eighth-inning RBI groundout provided a 2-1 victory, even before a single banner hung from the outfield seats.
Yet the tenor of those signs has shifted. Fans are done begging Fisher for mercy and rather than imploring the team to stay, they’re warning their Vegas compadres what might be ahead.
Don’t take Fisher’s bait
Vegas Beware
Aker out
No on SB1
Those last two signs show how deep in the weeds this has gotten. Catherine Aker is a relatively anonymous A’s executive whose statement before Nevada legislators that the A’s would be good-faith community partners drew the ire of fans. She’s now up there with Fisher and Kaval, the Mt. Davis of carpetbagging heels in the East Bay.
As for SB1? Yeah, it’s not often you see a senate bill from a neighboring state on a banner in a big league park.
And that brings us some 200 miles east to Carson City, where earlier Tuesday, Nevada lawmakers quietly and humorlessly made political sausage, cutting deals to suit their desires at the end of an acrimonious and frustrating legislative session.
The machinations spat out a favorable result for Fisher: His cabal (not Kaval) of lobbyists found nine more votes among Nevada’s Senate, in part due to lip-service amendments to SB1 (think: pull a few weeds at a youth field or two) and a handful of signatures on Democratic-friendly bills chilling on Gov. Steve Lombardo’s desk.
SB1 lurched out of a Senate committee and Fisher’s $380 million handout cleared its first hurdle and it all felt like another chapter of betrayal in Oakland. The state senators who grilled A’s consultants and Vegas chamber types in a hearing last week turned tail and turned on the cash spigot. Most notably, Sen. Fabian Doñate, briefly a folk hero for calling Kaval “disingenuous” after a dodgy answer on taxes, was a yes.
Oakland’s last hope – unlikely political allies in Nevada – was wiped out.
After the Senate handed the bill off to the Assembly Tuesday, a more tepid interrogation followed. Fisher – absent as always – took a few broadsides from legislators, most notably from Assemblywoman Selena La Rue Hatch, who said she was tired of non-answers from club lobbyists about whether Fisher will quit running a poverty franchise and field a squad capable of luring 27,000 fans out a night to make the deal work.
“Somehow,” she asked Tuesday, “a deadbeat owner, overnight, will suddenly invest in that team?”
Politicians and fans alike seem ambivalent at best on baseball in Nevada. But jobs-hungry union lobbyists are a powerful force, prone to protecting construction and infrastructure jobs no matter the cost. The Assembly is expected to pass the bill, perhaps Wednesday or Thursday, and Lombardo will sign it, and only the wonkiest civic potholes could derail the A’s then.
So Tuesday really was last call at the Last Dive Bar – sad and glorious all at once.
Thousands of fans congregated for a pregame parking lot rally. “SELL” T-shirts were distributed from a van. The mayor egged them on and promised the A’s were still welcome in her town. Former pitcher and current TV analyst Dallas Braden paid a visit, a gesture that spoke far more volumes than his avoid-the-elephant commentary on the club-sanctioned telecast that followed.
Heck, the visiting Tampa Bay Rays gave the boycott a bigger pop, devoting two minutes of their broadcast to the “loud and passionate” atmosphere and the A’s 55-year history at the Coliseum. Manager Kevin Cash reminisced about the 2019 AL wild-card game, where 54,000 fans came out for an A’s-Rays winner-take-all.
The A’s lineup that night? It included All-Star shortstop Marcus Semien (now a Texas Ranger), All-Star third baseman Matt Chapman (Blue Jays), All-Star first baseman Matt Olson and Gold Glove catcher Sean Murphy (Braves). Olson, Murphy and Chapman were traded; Semien and All-Star closer Liam Hendriks actually made it to free agency before the A’s showed zero motivation to retain them.
Observers said Tuesday’s game was nearly as loud, even with lower stakes and an A’s team that’s been playing out the string since starting the season 10-45. “Celebration on the field, Celebration on the speakers!” a giddy Vince Cotroneo said after the final out, a nod to the Kool & The Gang jam that since 1981 has played after A’s wins at the Coliseum.
But it was time to go.
Soon, fans littered the field with debris, beer cans and wrappers and probably a green T-shirt or two. It was a misguided outburst, given that the grounds crew in Oakland, not Fisher, will bear the brunt of this protest-after-the-protest.
Call it a final burst of passion on a day greed, once again, prevailed.
