A's done in Oakland

[Seattle or Bust]

I have been trying to find the right words to facilitate how I'm feeling about this. But I think I have. What is happening in Oakland with the Oakland A's to me is nothing short of a crime. To me, that team is being stolen from 56 years of history. Is being stolen from four generations of fans. It's being stolen from an entire city. It's is being stolen by a man who did nothing to earn this team other than get it signed over to him when his daddy died. He didn't have to work hard. He didn't have to grind away at an 8 to 5. He didn't have to work at all. And what does this man do to show his appreciation for his good fortune? He gives millions of fans the finger, while he high tails it to the glitz and glamor of Las Vegas all on their dime. What a bastion of humanitarianism this man is. I don't care that the man's wealthy. I don't care that the man can do whatever he wants because of his bank account. What I care about are the millions of fans that no longer have a piece of civic pride that means the world to them. All in the name of luxury boxes. Have your wealth. Make your money. Enjoy the finer things. That's perfectly fine. But to steal from these people that have done nothing to you except not wanting to foot the bill for the entirety of your palace when you can afford to chip in a bit?... I changed my mind IT IS CRIMINAL. NOTHING SHORT ABOUT IT.

Hiya, welcome on board. Great to have you. Love your passion and your history, it's gonna be a hell of a ride plus educational for me personally listening to your contributions.

I slightly disagree with the four generations though - the team was planted in Oakland in 1968, probably in a similar fashion to how they have been taken out (my homework tonight is to read up on their Philadephia and KC years).

There will have been no life-long As fans there at that time, would there? They are only 9 years older than the Mariners.

At best someone born in the early/mid 70s i.e. our generation could be the first generation Oakland fans and I don't have 3 further generations sat under me just yet and we probably won't for another decade or two.

Yes horrible for any team to be ripped out of their community - but that is the biggest fault of your fabulous American sports. Unless you are the Green Bay Packers there is little to stop greedy owners tearing up history and relocating.

Around the MLB, how many teams are not vulnerable to this kind of stunt? Yankees, Mets, Phillies, Cardinals, Cubs perhaps? Even the Dodgers weren't safe in the old days albeit relocation is incredibly unlikely for them nowadays.

That's the one thing that does worry me about all the clamour for Stanton to sell the team. He is total scum for sure, but once a team changes hands or passed down a family this kind of thing is on the cards. I have often wanted to ask in here about Sonicsgate but I get the feeling that's it's such an elephant in the room of Seattle history that very few people want to open those wounds.

Be careful what we wish for, and that is not an endorsement of our current owners.

Thank you so much. I am very happy to have a place that isn't TwiXtter to have thoughtful discussions. Although I'm beginning to wonder with some of the comments that I've read in this thread. They know who they are.

What I mean by four generations is:

Gen 1 (Fans that came on board when the team came to the Oakland)
Gen 2 (Kids born between the years 1969-1979)
Gen 3 (Kids born between the years 1990-2010)
Gen 4 (Kids born between the years 2019 to now)*

And Gen Four might be pushing it. I will grant you that.

Regardless, 56 years is a long time. Long enough that I'm freaking tearing up while writing this because I feel the pain of all of those millions of fans that had their hearts ripped out.

- 4 World Series titles won by the Oakland A's. FOUR. (The Mariners have been around for 47 years and haven't so much as even played in a World Series)

- 5 of the most iconic players in MLB history now inducted into the HOF as OAKLAND A's
Dennis Eckersley: Inducted in 2004
Rickey Henderson: Inducted in 2009
Rollie Fingers: Inducted in 1992
Catfish Hunter: Inducted in 1987
Reggie Jackson: Inducted in 1993

That is history worth fighting for.
That is history you don't just flush down the toilet
That is history that you don't get to just take with you when you go to a city like Las Vegas that has no history that has no care at all about this franchise and that 90% of the people liviing there are Dodgers fans.

And whoever made the moronic comment about the fans of the team not mattering, and that it's for tourists, and the tourists will go to the games... get the **** outta here with that. Anybody that says that doesn't understand the connection that a baseball team has with its city. Especially one that has multiple World Series championships and multiple Hall of Famers.

Fans didn't hold up to their end of the bargain.

Oakland has a terrible owner and they haven't spent on talent. I'll grant that.

But they've had plenty of success and have been in the bottom 5 attendance wise every year for the last decade. They haven't been outside of the bottom 10 in attendance since 2005 despite making the playoffs 7 times in that span.

What owner is going to keep a team in a location where the fans do not show up despite success? If fandom runs so deep there... they could have shown up.

[Donn Beach]

There was a period when attendance was pretty good, then they screwed over the stadium to accommodate football, began losing and the team was sold again. From that point it never recovered particularly in regards to the stadium

In 1979, the A’s played a home game with a crowd of 653, one of the lowest attendances in MLB history. Exactly two years later, following Finley’s sale of the team and a doubling of payroll, a then-record 50,000 people showed up for opening day at the Coliseum, according to a San Francisco Examiner article from 1981. In a two-season span, the number of A’s season ticket-holders went from 75 to 3,500.

By 1990, Oakland boasted one of the highest payrolls in MLB and welcomed the third-most fans per game at about 35,000. The A’s made the World Series three seasons in a row in those glory years.


The subsequent decade, however, saw the popular Haas family sell the club. Worse, the local government green-lighted the Coliseum’s pricey Mount Davis extension—a woeful plastic surgery that obscured the rolling Oakland hills behind the outfield wall—to bring back the NFL’s Raiders. Amid these changes, the A’s didn’t reach the playoffs from 1993 through 1999.

[Seattle or Bust]

There was a period when attendance was pretty good, then they screwed over the stadium to accommodate football, began losing and the team was sold again. From that point it never recovered particularly in regards to the stadium

In 1979, the A’s played a home game with a crowd of 653, one of the lowest attendances in MLB history. Exactly two years later, following Finley’s sale of the team and a doubling of payroll, a then-record 50,000 people showed up for opening day at the Coliseum, according to a San Francisco Examiner article from 1981. In a two-season span, the number of A’s season ticket-holders went from 75 to 3,500.

By 1990, Oakland boasted one of the highest payrolls in MLB and welcomed the third-most fans per game at about 35,000. The A’s made the World Series three seasons in a row in those glory years.


The subsequent decade, however, saw the popular Haas family sell the club. Worse, the local government green-lighted the Coliseum’s pricey Mount Davis extension—a woeful plastic surgery that obscured the rolling Oakland hills behind the outfield wall—to bring back the NFL’s Raiders. Amid these changes, the A’s didn’t reach the playoffs from 1993 through 1999.

Yeah it's easy to fill a stadium when you're winning World Series.

The M's have never been to one, missed the playoffs for 2 decades, have had multiple shitty owners, and have been middle of attendance all along. What's the A's fans excuse?

[Donn Beach]

Excuse? I'm talking facts, when they had a committed owner spending money, a somewhat reasonable stadium they drew fans, simple as that. Hey, you want to move the athletics go for it. Just don't try to sell it as being good for baseball, it's an owner that wants to cash in. And this on a site where all we do is complain about a greedy owner and call fans attending games idiots. Terms of the mariners, go look at attendance pre ken Griffey. That's what saved the mariners. And the owner didn't want to draft him.

[Seattle or Bust]

Excuse? I'm talking facts, when they had a committed owner spending money, a somewhat reasonable stadium they drew fans, simple as that. Hey, you want to move the athletics go for it. Just don't try to sell it as being good for baseball, it's an owner that wants to cash in. And this on a site where all we do is complain about a greedy owner and call fans attending games idiots. Terms of the mariners, go look at attendance pre ken Griffey. That's what saved the mariners. And the owner didn't want to draft him.

It is good for baseball.

You have 1 less team in a major city that only needs 1 team. You've moved a baseball team that averages 11k tickets sold per game but like 3k in attendance to a city that will attract a diverse range of people and tourists to enjoy the game. People will make attending a major league baseball game part of their travel plans.

This isn't like the Sonics moving to OKC where Sonics fans filled Key Arena to 80% capacity until the bitter end and then were moved to a desolate hell hole. And guess what, a flight from Oakland to Vegas costs $60 on Spirit Airlines. A hotel room at the Excalibur is $14 a night. A's fans get to fly to Vegas, enjoy a fun trip, and catch their favorite team play baseball.

RE: Griffey... and? The A's have made the playoffs 6 times since 2012. Prior to Griffey, the Mariners didn't make the playoffs for 12 seasons and still didn't until '95. A's fans don't have an excuse. They've had success no matter if their owner is cheap or not.

If you know anything about me, it's that I hate billionaires... but Oakland hasn't done shit to keep their team there.

[Donn Beach]

Moving the athletics to Vegas helps the Giants like moving the Giants to SF helped the Yankees, that's what I see. How successful will they be. Well I don't see Fisher changing his stripes. He isn't opening his checkbook. He will be finding something else to blame if they don't win. Terms them being a tourist attraction there, we shall see. They are still going to be the athletics. Just now playing in a domed stadium with artificial grass.

[Seattle or Bust]

Moving the athletics to Vegas helps the Giants like moving the Giants to SF helped the Yankees, that's what I see. How successful will they be. Well I don't see Fisher changing his stripes. He isn't opening his checkbook. He will be finding something else to blame if they don't win. Terms them being a tourist attraction there, we shall see. They are still going to be the athletics. Just now playing in a domed stadium with artificial grass.

Would you open the purse strings for your team if your team is routinely in the bottom 5, if not bottom 2, in attendance despite making the playoffs 6 times in 12 years?

Perhaps he'd have increased payroll if fans actually gave a shit. They had a team to give a shit about, but didn't show. Can't say the same about M's fans.

If the M's made the playoffs 6 times in 12 years they'd average 40,000 fans a game.

[gil]

I dare you to park your car at any park in Oakland (proper) and go for a 3 hour walk. When you get back, you will have a broken window and your car looted.hing visible

This is the same as downtown San Francisco.

All I can say is that if you don't leave anything in view inside your car, it may not be broken into. I am talking even 11 cents in change on the floorboards will get you a broken window.

How do I know? When I go to these cities to do work, the gas station owners ask me to park at a filling station so they can keep track of my car.... so it doesn't get broken into.

Any crime is too much; not going to argue with that. But I just was in Oakland a year ago, visited a friend overnight, and parked my rental car on his street. No problems.

But I don't leave anything visible when I park my car. Not even a t-shirt when I'm parking in a private driveway in a rich suburb or a small town. It doesn't make these places hellholes or cesspools.

I hope you never lose your rosy, rainbow and unicorn outlook of the world. But those of us that travel for work will keep calling places like Oakland shitholes AND cesspools.

You're funny. I'm a real freakin' ball-of-happiness pollyanna type, right?

There IS a middle ground between thinking that everything is fine and thinking that everything is shitty. In the big picture, long run, things ARE getting better. No, not every place, not every year, not in every dimension. But in general.

It's not like there was some magical time back when cities were safe and there was little crime. Or was there?

[bpj]

Oakland was a dump when I went, but that was years ago. Maybe it's gotten better...

Can any of you tell us what's so great about the city that they deserve an MLB team over other places? Is it just history?

If anyone's going to make a list of 100 great US cities that would be a good home for an MLB team in 2024, I don't think anybody is going to include Oakland. Much less the Top 30.

[gil]

Oakland was a dump when I went, but that was years ago. Maybe it's gotten better...

Can any of you tell us what's so great about the city that they deserve an MLB team over other places? Is it just history?

If anyone's going to make a list of 100 great US cities that would be a good home for an MLB team in 2024, I don't think anybody is going to include Oakland. Much less the Top 30.

Oakland isn't really a free standing city; to me it's clearly part of a metropolitan area that includes San Francisco and San Jose. Lots of places have a stadium that is not in "the city". E.g., Foxboro Mass, or East Rutherford New Jersey. But other than the Oakland Raiders, Oakland As, Anaheim Angels, or San Jose Sharks, it seems that the "brand" goes to the big city - unless it's the region (e.g., Minnesota Twins or New England Patriots).