Well, he did it. John Joseph Fisher has officially killed off the Oakland Athletics. What a dark, dark time for sports as a whole.
The Oakland Athletics played their last game in Oakland on Sept. 26. The team (which will now be known as strictly “The Athletics”) is working on building a stadium in Las Vegas, which is planned to be done in 2028. Until then, the Athletics will play their Major League Baseball (MLB) games in a minor league stadium in Sacramento.
What a disgraceful end for such a historic and impactful ball club.
The Oakland Athletics redefined how we understand the value of players in sports. Due to the low investment coming into the team, the team manager was forced to take a new look at players, using detailed analytics and statistics to understand what makes winning players. This allowed the team to continue competing despite losing their best players every season.
This outlook on sports completely changed the way that sports are viewed around the world, looking into in-depth statistics rather than taking the eye test for the full value of a player. This technique of finding players allowed for smaller market teams to compete against the giants of the MLB while not having to pay exorbitant amounts of money off their payroll.
However, while Moneyball revolutionized sports on a macroscopic scale, it is also possibly the worst thing to happen to small markets in the long run, such as the Oakland Athletics. Owners now have a reason as to why they fail to invest back into their teams. Since you can just find good players for cheap, you shouldn’t need the constant influx of hundreds of millions of dollars to compete for wins. However, this is a complete misunderstanding of how investment in a team works.
The lack of investment in these teams almost always leads to worse performance by the team, which yields fewer ticket sales and a lower influx of funds. This moneymaking opportunity is lost entirely and the club continues to struggle. The business opportunities for owners of sports teams expect that the success of the team will lead to the success of their pockets, but often, that’s not how they’re treated.
Be it Fisher or Fenway Sports Group, the rise of profit-oriented billionaire owners has resulted in an emerging pattern, one where they are too afraid to invest money because to them, the team is no different than a vacant apartment or a flipped house. The team is an asset and they want their return, hoping it gains random value as inflation increases. They don’t care about supporters, players, or success. These owners just want a buck in their pocket with no care in the world for the team.
In Fisher’s case, an alleged effort to convince other MLB owners that Oakland was no longer the place for the A’s took place. The result was a move to halt all repairs and renovations to the dilapidated stadium despite alleging that the presence of mold, feral cats and more were all barriers to continued play. This was coupled with raising ticket prices while popularity plummeted, and the trading away of many of their best-performing players in his seeming attempt to plead his case for the Las Vegas move.
All of this stems from the monetization of the game – one in which players, and most importantly fans, are forgotten, basic maintenance needs are ignored (by multiple parties) and legacy teams leave their home cities in the dust while franchises galavant from one city to another seeking their next tax break. In fact, most of these team moves are coming as groups like the MLB rake in record profits, making roughly $11.34 billion from 2024 alone.
Despite said profits, teams like the Oakland Athletics have a full payroll worth $63,407,581, the lowest in the MLB by an insanely wide margin. The second-lowest payroll, the Pittsburgh Pirates, spend $22 million more than the A’s; the average spending across the league is $167.5 million; the New York Mets spend $317,778,899 on their roster and were the most expensive team in American sports history on their opening day game.
In a sport that is so tied to money, leaving your team with little to no investment is actively killing the franchise. While the Los Angeles Dodgers are giving Shohei Ohtani a 10-year contract worth $700 million, Fisher isn’t willing to dish out enough money to even have his roster’s payroll match that singular contract.
Although the sports scene seems to have reached its own version of late-stage capitalism, just 12-odd miles away from the most glaring example of profit-driven destruction is a glimmer of hope. After facing a sub-par season, and a concerningly numbers-driven, performance-ignoring president, the San Francisco Giants have fired President Farhan Zaidi. When choosing a replacement, the organization opted for former player and unanimous baseball legend Buster Posey, hoping he’ll bring fans back, prioritize players over profits and listen to fans from across the Bay, marking a new era of people-driven business for the Giants.
