Oakland A’s owner John Fisher already insulted his own team’s fans by making a deal to move the team. Monday, he also insulted their intelligence.
Fisher published a farewell letter to the fans of Oakland he is planning to leave behind, first in a move to Sacramento next season and then in a planned relocation to an as-yet-unrealized ballpark in Las Vegas. The son of Gap founders Donald and Doris Fisher, the A’s owner has rarely spoken with the media over the years and the team turned off replies to its social media accounts.
But ahead of the team’s final games at the Oakland Coliseum, Fisher broke his silence with what ABC’s Larry Biel called a “great work of fiction.”
The main theme of the letter was that Fisher and the team had a goal to stay in Oakland, but failed. Fisher wrote, “We tried,” claiming the team had five failed ballpark efforts, though not one of them came close to realization. Fisher abandoned the team’s last, best effort to build in the Howard Terminal area of Oakland in order to get a taxpayer-funded building in Las Vegas.
Under Fisher’s leadership, Oakland has had some of the lowest payrolls in baseball, regularly trading away its stars while refusing to invest in stadium infrastructure — leading to incidents like when sewage spilled into the dugouts in 2013. Meanwhile the team received over $100 million in revenue sharing money from the league from 2017-23.
Fisher claims that the team had a “binding MLB agreement to find a new home by 2024,” but that’s not exactly the whole story. Their agreement only required the A’s to have a ballpark deal anywhere — which certainly could have been Oakland — and the agreement only happened as a result of Fisher’s constant penny-pinching. MLB phased Oakland out of receiving revenue sharing money and the players association filed a grievance because the A’s didn’t spend their shared money on payroll.
Perhaps the most disingenuous part of the letter came when Fisher wrote, “I wish I could speak to each one of you individually.” Clearly a man who has refused to give interviews and won’t allow replies on posts has no interest in speaking to even one disappointed fan.
The failed Bay Area ballpark effort — if it was ever truly serious — is just one of a series of failures that has marked Fisher’s adult life, from his defunct real estate company to his $9M in political donations in 2012 trying to unseat President Barack Obama. His only true accomplishment has been being born to wealthy and successful parents.
Now with the A’s abandoning their Bay Area fans, Fisher’s parting gift is a self-serving letter, a non-apology that asks fans to support the team’s “amazing journey” out of town. The fans in Oakland deserve better. Frankly, so do the fans in Las Vegas.
