This year, we’re getting to see the real-life “Major League.”
But unlike the movie, the Oakland A’s aren’t a lovable group of misfits coming together to prove their owner wrong and play well enough to keep them from moving the team.
The A’s are just terrible and they aren’t going to get better.
Willie Mays Hayes, Ricky “Wild Thing” Vaughn and Jake Taylor aren’t coming through the door to excite fans with a late-season run to an early playoff exit in a winner-take-all Game 163.
But just like Cleveland’s owner in the film, Oakland owner John Fisher is doing everything he can to hurt the team, tank attendance and give the team the best possible excuse to leave its home and take a the joy of baseball away from what was once a loving, exciting fan base.
First, the facilities are falling apart.
There is no reason to go to the Oakland Coliseum anymore. Whether it’s the sewage overflowing into the dugouts, a possum living in the press box, a gang of feral cats -- which actually ended up taking care of a rat problem -- or the fact the park sometimes affectionately called “Baseball’s last dive bar,” is just plain ugly.
A telling part for me is there is an inoperative pay phone outside the stadium. It likely hasn’t worked for years, and it’s not really an issue, but how much would it actually cost to take it out? The refusal to even spend that minimal amount on anything pertaining to the park is representative of just how far ownership is willing to let it all fall.
And with all that is before you, look at the product on the field.
Through May, the team was 12-46, and one-third of the way through the season, Oakland was on pace for 30 total wins. That would be more than the all-time worst MLB season held by the Cleveland Spiders, who went 20-134 in 1899, but would leave the A’s with 132 total losses and coming close to that version of the record for futility.
The worst record of the modern era is held by the Philadelphia Athletics who went 36-117 in 1916, and the worst of the last 100 years was the Boston Braves who went 38-115 in 1935. You would have to go all the way to a 43-119 record by the Detroit Tigers in 2003 for the worst record for teams that played 162 games, and the A’s are set to be far worse than that.
And the worst part is, they’ll probably be worse than they already are.
Every player is trying his best and wants to perform on the field, but they all must know their best hope is to play well enough to be traded.
Look at former Kansas City Royal Brent Rooker, who has been one of the lone bright spots with a .260/.354/.874 slash line, 11 home runs and 32 RBI. That is definitely good enough for him to spend the second half of his season outside of Oakland.
So how much worse is this team when the only players on it who are good enough to even be backups on other teams are gone in August?
And the point of all this was made abundantly clear during the offseason. The team traded Sean Murphy, one of the best catchers in baseball, and A.J. Puk, an up-and-coming left-handed pitcher, and made it clear it would regularly start the likes of Jace Pederson, Nick Allen and Seth Brown -- again, nothing against the players, they’re trying their best, they’re just not major-league quality players -- before then raising season-ticket prices.
Obviously it was all a ploy to lower attendance, and it has worked. The A’s garner far less than 10,000 fans per game and are closer to 2,000 or less at most home games. The stadium looks empty any time you see it.
And even though all the stadium issues were the same, that wasn’t always the case.
Look back to just 2018 or 2019, when the team won 97 games each year and totaled more than 1.5 million in attendance, or 2014, when it surpassed 2 million fans in an 88-win season. Videos from those games were crazy and the fans showed up to support the team even though they played in arguably the worst park in baseball (rivaled only by Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, Fla.).
With the recent announcement of an agreement for Fisher to purchase of land in Las Vegas and plans to move the team, it has become abundantly clear yet another team will leave the fans of Oakland hanging after they already lost the Raiders and Warriors.
But the best-case scenario for the new field in Vegas is a 2028 opening, while the A’s lease at the Coliseum ends after next season. So the main question is where does the team play in 2025-27? And that’s if the voters in Las Vegas even approve the stadium deal, which is currently polling pretty poorly and wouldn’t be the first time one of Fisher’s stadium ideas fell through.
If they extend the lease at the Coliseum, what will games look like after three more years of being this terrible? Fisher will have no reason to increase attendance or invest in the team before moving to Vegas, how low can an MLB team’s attendance really go?
Or there has been talk the team would play at the current home of their Triple-A affiliate, the Las Vegas Aviators, which holds a capacity of 10,000 people. There’s no real example to look back on for any of this.
So how low is Fisher willing to go just to get his real estate deal in Las Vegas so he can sell the team he paid $180 million for in 2005 for at least $2-3 billion in 2028?
Cleveland got its redemption in Major League and stuck around while giving joy to its fans. No such luck is coming for the Oakland faithful as Fisher sets one of the worst precedents possible to give billionaire owners even more incentive to go greed first and say to heck with you to everyone else who actually cares about the game and their team.