A’s team owner John Fisher shared a letter to the fanbase on Monday, his first statement to fans since announcing in April that the team was moving to Sacramento, and misspelled one of the most memorable moments in franchise history.
Fisher, who likely won’t attend the A’s final game at the Oakland Coliseum on Thursday, begins the letter with a bland three-paragraph summary of the team’s history in Oakland, incorrectly spelling the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake as “Loma Preita” in the process. Fisher then writes:
“We’ve had it all. And that, I know, is what makes our departure so very hard.
“The A’s are part of the fabric of Oakland, the East Bay, and the entire Bay Area. When Lew Wolff and I bought the team in 2005, our dream was to win world championships and build a new ballpark in Oakland. Over the next 18 years, we did our very best to make that happen. We proposed and pursued five different locations in the Bay Area. And despite mutual and ongoing efforts to get a deal done for the Howard Terminal project, we came up short.
Only in 2021, after 16 years of working exclusively on developing a home in the Bay Area and faced with a binding MLB agreement to find a new home by 2024, did we begin to explore taking the team to Las Vegas.”
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The team and the city of Oakland have each cast blame on the other for the failure to reach a deal for a new stadium and ballpark district at Howard Terminal.
Fisher concludes the letter by acknowledging there is “great disappointment, even bitterness” among the fan base, which has pleaded for years for him to sell the team to someone interested in keeping the team in the East Bay.
“Though I wish I could speak to each one of you individually, I can tell you this from the heart: we tried,” Fisher writes. “Staying in Oakland was our goal, it was our mission, and we failed to achieve it. And for that I am genuinely sorry.
“Looking ahead, I hope you will join our beloved A’s as we move forward on this amazing journey. I hope I will see you again sporting the Green and Gold. And I hope we will make you proud.”