Kurtenbach: A’s fans send final message to deadbeat John Fisher by turning Oakland funeral into party
OAKLAND — Wednesday night was the wake. Thursday afternoon was the funeral.
The Oakland A’s are dead. Big-league professional sports in Oakland are dead.
And we know exactly who to blame.
When you buy a professional sports team, you enter into an unwritten but sacred covenant. You are responsible for shepherding the organization for the fans of that team, the city on its chest, and the region it represents.
A’s owner John Fisher failed to fulfill that responsibility. There’s no evidence it was ever his intent.
No, Fisher bought the A’s to line his own pockets, and he has for nearly two decades. It was just another safe, no-effort investment made with his parents’ money. The team is incorporated as Athletics Investment Group LLC, after all. He cut costs left, right, and center — and not just on the field. He let the Coliseum crumble to the point of total disrepair, too.
At the same time, the value of the franchise kept going up, as the rising tide of professional sports lifted all boats, even Fisher’s. And his little baseball investment paid a dividend, too, as the league paid Fisher out via revenue sharing for being in a “small market” despite the East Bay having a population of over 2.5 million.
And when, ultimately, someone told him he had to actually run a baseball team — that he was making all the other cheapskates in the cartel that is Major League Baseball look bad — Fisher failed so miserably he had no choice but to accept charity.
It’s all he’s ever known.
So here’s one final thought for you, John, and I’ll make it free, because I know costs scare you.
You have blamed everyone but yourself for the A’s leaving Oakland. Bad politicians, absentee fans, mean neighbors. But your culpability in this shameful saga is unimpeachable.
You are significantly richer today than you were when you bought the team, and all you had to do was sell your soul.
If there’s justice in this world, Fisher will pay the price for his mismanagement and incompetence in the years to come.
In the meantime, that price was paid by everyone who was at the Coliseum on Thursday, in person or in spirit.
The final game at the ballpark wasn’t about the building itself, despite the A’s efforts to frame it as such.
No, it was about Oakland; the East Bay.
Thursday afternoon, the A’s won. It was 67 degrees without a cloud in the sky. In a word: perfection. And amid anger and incalculable disappointment, A’s fans — Oakland and the East Bay — did what they do: They turned the funeral into a hell of a time. Despite the best efforts of Fisher and his cronies, they made Thursday a celebration.
Only a fool would leave this place.
Barring a miracle — Fisher repenting and selling the A’s in the next few months — Thursday will be the final Major-League professional sports game played in Oakland. It’s a fate unbefitting the one-time “City of Champions,” whose only failure was attracting owners somehow more incompetent than local government.
Expansion isn’t coming. A team isn’t relocating here, either. The Bay’s incumbents in the NFL and MLB — the Giants and 49ers — won’t let it happen. Oakland’s loss has been their gain, too.
It all made Thursday the last hurrah in a town that’s seen quite a few of them.
Rickey Henderson was there. Dave Stewart, too. They received a standing ovation when they threw out the ceremonial first pitch for the game.
Then A’s starter J.T. Ginn led the team out of the dugout to nearly 47,000 roaring fans, wearing their best for the funeral: Fingers and Jackson and Fosse, Henderson and McGwire and Eck, Chavez and Crisp and Mulder, Cespedes and Donaldson and Vogt, Chapman and Olson and Semien. Each name on the back of the jersey enough to elicit vivid memories of other picturesque cloudless days and those heavy, cold, summer nights.
And as fate would have it, Semien, an East Bay native and now a Texas Ranger (don’t look up what the A’s offered him in free agency), led off the game to cheers and then loud chants of “Let’s go Oakland.”
Of course, neither Kaval nor Fisher showed up Thursday.
They didn’t have to look the fans — who believed in the team, even when the organization didn’t — in the eye.
They didn’t have to see all the kids wearing A’s jerseys and elephant hats and rationalize why they were robbing them of a part of their childhood and innocence. I’d love to hear Fisher or Kaval explain to the crying children that littered the park Thursday (it was heartbreaking) why it was the last A’s game in Oakland.
I’d like to see them explain it to those crying adults, too.
Those two buffoons can convince themselves that they’ll be greeted as heroes in Sacramento and (they think) eventually, Las Vegas.
But when you buy a team like the A’s, like Fisher did in 2005, you also buy the history and the community around it.
He burned that down. It was just collateral damage in his quest to squeeze out a bit more profit.
And seeing as Fisher has never built up anything of real worth in his life, much less something as pure and positive as a sports fan base, it’s going to be comical to see him try to start from scratch now. He still doesn’t realize that the fanbase — not the brand or the players — was the most valuable thing he bought into nearly two decades ago. He certainly doesn’t know that won’t be able to buy it back down the line.
A giant inflatable beach ball made to look like a baseball bounced through the crowd in the middle innings Thursday. By the fourth inning, it rolled onto the field near the left-field foul pole. A security guard, after feigning a toss back in the crowd, deflated the ball to a chorus of boos.
No shade on the security guard — he was just doing his job. But while I’m an idiot sportswriter, not the scion to a billion-dollar fortune, that moment seems like a fairly apt metaphor, no?
It took a while to start, but in the fifth inning, A’s fans chanted “Sell the team” for the first time. It became a frequent refrain for the remainder of the game. In the seventh inning, the chant toward Fisher became unprintable. Maybe I misheard and the fans were wishing him “luck” on his future endeavors.
I doubt Fisher was even watching on TV.
A smart owner and team president would have never found themselves in such a position to be so reviled, leaving behind a home and a market like this for a vagabond life — taking on the lifestyle of a divorced dad, living at a friend’s place in Sacramento, hoping their loved ones (it’s a one-sided relationship) come by and see them.
Had some last-moment clarity struck, Fisher, Kaval, and the A’s would have made the game free (they’ve done it before), sold concessions and gear at cost, and hosted an awesome going-away party for Oakland.
Instead they jacked up prices, looking to make an extra buck on their way out of town. Never waste a tragedy, right? Doesn’t that tell you everything?
You could even see where the team got too greedy Thursday — a nice swatch of 50-something seats in the lower bowl on the first-base side they couldn’t sell because, I’m sure, the price was too steep.
They even messed up the cash grab. Of course they did.
There have been a few company lines the A’s have pushed on their way out of town.
One is that “Sacramento isn’t so far away.”
Are they planning on staying for a while?
The second, echoed by A’s announcer Dallas Braden Thursday, is even more annoying:
“Don’t be sad it’s over, be happy it happened.”
Sorry, but that only works when there’s something worthwhile on the other side.
The A’s aren’t leaving the Coliseum for some new, improved ballpark on the waterfront — some grander future in Oakland or the Bay.
No, they’re heading to a minor-league ballpark two hours away. If they’re lucky, they’ll have someone build them a ballpark in Las Vegas years from now.
Had Fisher possessed any heart or brains, had he employed a team president who could get a job with any other organization, he’d have realized he had something special with the A’s. He’d have recognized that there was something raw and real with this team, city, and fanbase. It was punk rock in a world of corporate stiffs.
You can sell that.
Instead, Fisher and Kaval saw it as the problem. They wanted to be corporate stiffs.
Worse yet, they blamed Oakland for their incompetence.
Wait until they find out what’s on the other side of this. It’s a harsh world out there and things are about to get a whole lot tougher for the overmatched duo.
We’ll consider the schadenfreude a going-away gift.