Oakland Athletics owner John Fisher has basically been too cheap to build a winning team for a starving, steadfastly loyal fan base. Ahead of the A’s move to Las Vegas that’s slated to happen by 2028, the club will play at Sacramento’s Sutter Health Park beginning in 2025. Quite a bummer, eh?
Fisher might have one of the more hated tenures of any owner in all of sports, squandering countless talented players during his tenure. In essence, Fisher wasted the revolutionary Moneyball method of assembling competitive teams executed by longtime GM Billy Beane.
In a press conference on Thursday to officially announce the A’s temporarily playing in Sacramento, an attempt at positive spin doctoring backfired on Fisher when he spoke about how excited he was for the move.
“We’re excited to be here for the next three years, playing in this beautiful ballpark, but also being able to watch some of the greatest players in baseball, whether it be Athletics players, or Aaron Judge and others, launch home runs out of this very intimate — most intimate park in all of baseball.”
To give you an idea of how over Fisher the A’s fans are, last June, they took to the Coliseum in protest of his ownership of the team. The turnout was over 27,000 people. Oakland hasn’t averaged that high in home attendance since all the way back in 2004.
Custom merch was created and spectators angrily chanted at Fisher, imploring him to sell the team.
Sutter Health Park has a full capacity of 14,014. Repeated attempts at stadium deals and proposed new stadium projects fell apart in Oakland. Now, we’ve reached a point where, until the move to Vegas is official, the A’s will simply be called the A’s, with no city affiliation.
The whole A’s saga and their leaving Oakland is a debacle on so many levels that it’d take thousands of words to do it justice in this space. Suffice it to say, John Fisher is not a well-liked owner, and gushing about high-paid superstars in competent organizations with massive payrolls isn’t a good look. Judge makes an average annual salary of $40 million, whereas the entire A’s payroll this season is just under $62 million.
Adding insult to Fisher’s perpetual tone-deafness, Judge and the Yankees are 6-1 to start the season, while the lowly A’s are 1-6 and have been outscored 44-15. No end in sight to what could be a historically terrible season of a thousand slow, painful deaths over the course of 162 games. But hey, John Fisher is all jazzed about this new Triple-A Park and knows a massive stadium is on deck in Vegas, so everything’s OK in his mind.
Good lord. What a mess. Sorry to all the fans in Oakland. As if losing the Raiders didn’t suck enough…
