In the case of a Moneyball sequel starring the 2023 Oakland Athletics, Brad Pitt can draw inspiration from another one from his back catalogue, Thelma and Louise – because the A’s are hurtling off a cliff.
Even after the relative blowout of a two-game winning streak this week, Oakland is 12-47 on track to lose a whopping 129 games this season.
They’ve had the worst start to baseball since 1903, the year the Yankees made their MLB debut — as the New York Highlanders — and when the sport was still 50 years away from crossing the Mississippi River for the first time.
The A’s only score three and a half points per game and allow seven. Their ugly -199 run difference after just 59 games is beginning to threaten the record of -723 set by the 1899 Cleveland Spiders, the standard bearers for baseball incompetence.
Four members of their starting rotation have an ERA over 6.80 and seven of their daily lineup hit .231 or lower. Only 10 A’s make as much as a million dollars this season, and eight of them have a negative WAR.
Oakland Athletics fans have heard the message of ownership and voted with their feet
They’ve had the worst start to baseball since 1903, the year the Yankees made their MLB debut
A’s owner John Fisher has never really made it a secret that he wants to uproot the team
Baseball is not a sport that gives rise to exaggeration, but this team is the worst it has seen in a century. And it’s all by design.
A’s owner John Fisher, heir to the Gap clothing fortune and worth an estimated $2.2 billion, has never really made it a secret that he wants to uproot the team.
Since taking power in 2005, he’s flirted with moves to San Jose and Fremont before — imaginatively — requesting $855 million in government funding to help build a new ballpark at Howard Terminal on Oakland’s waterfront. Now he gets what he wants and bets on Las Vegas.
Plans have been submitted to the Nevada legislature for a $1.5 billion stadium — with only $395 million in public funding — and the move is expected to be completed in time for the 2027 season.
The A’s have a reputation as nomads, born in Philadelphia in 1901, raised in Kansas City in the 50’s and 60’s and spent much of their time in Oakland acting like a grouchy teenager, seemingly always looking for an excuse to to move.
But they spent 56 years in this city, which will now lose its third team in recent years after the NBA’s Warriors jumped across the bay to San Francisco in 2019 and the NFL’s Raiders headed to Vegas a year later.
Oakland sports fans have seen this all before, but it doesn’t make it any easier. Not when this move seems so orchestrated, gets almost no backlash from MLB, and makes so little sense.
The A’s move from the sixth-largest media market in the country to the 40th, from a city that showed — when previous ownership invested in the team in the late ’80s and ’90s — that baseball can thrive here, to the desert.
Plans have been submitted to the Nevada legislature for a $1.5 billion stadium in Las Vegas
The franchise released stunning renderings of their potential new home last month
The stadium is very close to the MGM Grand casino and hotel on the Vegas Strip
Is there enough evidence to prove that a baseball team can succeed 81 nights a year in Vegas, in the scorching heat of summer? Who’s going to race to the box office for the first deposit on their Las Vegas A’s season ticket if the team looks like this?
Even presenting the plans to lawmakers in Nevada this week, a representative for the A’s plans had to admit that, as in many cities, the stadium’s construction “will have a negative economic impact.”
At least Fisher can count on the money he’s saved on the team in recent years, after decimating the roster so much that their total team wages will be a measly $57 million by 2023 — just $14 million more than the sport’s joint highest . paid players, Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer, each receive from the New York Mets.
Because these are the A’s, low payrolls don’t always kill success, and they were a playoff team six times in nine years from 2012-2020.
But following the 2021 season and the announcement in May of that year that MLB had authorized the team to relocate from Oakland, the ownership once again engaged in a brutal teardown.
All-Stars Matt Chapman, Matt Olson, Sean Murphy, Starling Marte, Chris Bassitt and Sean Manaea all shipped out. The promising young pitching trio of Frankie Montas, AJ Puk and Jesus Luzardo was traded off, and perhaps most detrimentally, manager Bob Melvin – whose 853 wins are second only to Hall of Famer Connie Mack in franchise history – was lured away by the San Diego Padres.
The Athletics began playing at the Oakland Coliseum in 1968 after moving from Kansas City
The Padres are the example of how to do it when there are no other teams in town. Ever since the Chargers hit the highway to LA, San Diego’s Petco Park has been a bustling hive of activity, fervently supporting their team and on gameday you can barely hear yourself think.
This year at the Oakland Coliseum, the home of the A’s for 56 years, you can probably hear someone sitting 10 blocks away.
Oakland fans have heard the message of ownership and voted with their feet. The average attendance at the Coliseum in 2023 is just over 8,000, as if each night pays homage to the haunted stadiums of the Covid 2020 season, the last time the A’s made the playoffs.
On May 15, a 5–2 loss to the Arizona Diamondbacks, the announced attendance—meaning tickets sold, not actual seats filled—was 2,064, the team’s worst tally in 44 years. Those who do show up spend the nine innings of the night fruitlessly urging the owners to sell the team, covering some of the 40,000 empty seats with banners calling for FISHER OUT.
However, one participant the A’s can count on for every game is an unwelcome visitor. A year after the team faced a feral cat infestation at the Colosseum, a possum has burrowed its way into the walls of the visiting broadcast booth, dodging the security team’s best-placed traps and marking its territory so sharply that commentary teams have been forced to move to a completely different part of the stadium – with a large pole in the way – to do their job.
Now the whole team is moving and MLB should use this as a wake up call.
How can they watch as ownership causes this fanbase so much pain? A city that has lost the Warriors, the Raiders and now all hope of keeping the A’s?
A’s have agreed to use land on the Las Vegas Strip, where the Tropicana Las Vegas casino resort is located
Fans chanted ‘Sell the team!’ and “Stay in Oakland!” during several games this season
Athletics fans have also mixed “Fisher sucks” chants during games this season
This is a legendary franchise, the ninth oldest in MLB with the third most championships. The A’s are the team of Reggie and Rickey, Rollie and Eck, the Bash Brothers and Moneyball.
But they’re not Hollywood anymore – they’re deadwood, set adrift and kicked out of town.
MLB will give you the same line as Fisher might – that negotiating a new ballpark in Oakland was impossible. But that’s hard to believe when the product on the field looks like this. When you’re that bad, Cleveland Spiders bad, it all starts to look like they wanted it that way.
An excuse to get out, go to Vegas and get rich quick. But like their team this season, few will bet on ownership to succeed.