On a quiet night in Alameda, when I open up the windows, walk the dog, or sit out on the porch, and if the wind is just right and the schedule aligns, I can hear it.
Bum nah nah nah.
Bum nah nah nah.
It’s the recorded organ undercurrent to the best chant in the world, echoing from five miles away, carrying over the estuary waters and serenading me at home. It’s the ever-so-often soundtrack of my summers, and every time I hear it, I can’t help but play along:
Let’s Go Oak-land.
Let’s Go Oak-land.
The A’s are not my childhood team. You can’t consider me a diehard Green and Gold fan. My relationship with the team is one born solely of proximity — it stems from a decade of living in and loving the East Bay.
But it still hit me like a ton of bricks as that dulcet bass line crept into my living room again and again these past few nights. Much like the organ music reverberating over the water, the truth was inescapable:
We’ll probably never hear that chant at a big-league game again.
As I write this, the digital photo frame in my office rotated to a picture of me, my wife, and our then six-month-old daughter at her first baseball game — April 16, 2023. The A’s played the Mets at the Coliseum that day, and Lottie was generally unamused.
Last Friday, we took out-of-town friends to see the A’s play the Yankees. As I carried her through the insane traffic of the Coliseum concourse, she pointed to the field below us and yelled, “Baseball!”
The A’s might not have been my team, but they were supposed to be her team.
And it angers me to no end that they’ll never end up being our team.
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Yeah, sure, we can hop on the ferry, walk down the Embarcadero, and watch the Giants play — and we have — but that’s not our team.
No, our team is just a quick drive or bike ride up the road.
Our team has us clapping and chanting in the living room just before bedtime, because how can you not join in when the wind carries a good time?
Our team was the last standing major-league representative of the East Bay, a distinct and vibrant community that’s bigger than Pittsburgh, Kansas City, Cleveland, Indianapolis, or Milwaukee.
That status as the last one standing was so significant that the A’s and their charlatan team president, Dave Kaval, built marketing campaigns around being “rooted” in the city and region.
And while each of those aforementioned markets has two or three major sports teams, Oakland and the East Bay are now left with none.
So where does this all leave Oakland? A minor-league town? A suburb?
None of that sits right with me. It’s simply incorrect.
But as we’ve discovered firsthand three times now, logic and loyalty have no place in modern professional sports.
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The powers that be in the league offices — the jerks who let all of this happen — look at Oakland’s proximity to San Francisco and San Jose and say, “They’ll be fine.”
They don’t realize that’s not how this works, because they’re soulless ghouls who don’t see people anymore — they only see markets and the suckers that populate them.
There’s a whole world of John Fishers out there, and they run these games.
But before the door hits the A’s owner on the ass on his way out of town, let’s make something clear:
He wants the world to believe that the East Bay turned on the A’s.
It didn’t.
The East Bay has love for the A’s that won’t go away when the team leaves. If you need convincing of that, you’ve simply never paid attention.
No, the East Bay turned on Fisher.
And don’t let anyone tell you something different.
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No one likes the story where the bad guy gets away with his dastardly plans, and yet that’s what’s happening here. No comeuppance from them is in sight. The bill that will be paid by the players, who will be playing on a cleat-melting hot surface in Sacramento’s minor-league stadium.
Of course, that bad guy will play the victim all the way to the end. That’s the play these days.
“We tried,” Fisher claimed in an open letter to fans that was clearly written by someone else. (At least Fisher can blame that person — or chatbot — for the massive typo in said letter.)
I guess the free money Fisher is getting from his relocation will be plenty green. What else could he care about?
Family, tradition, love of the game, connection to the community? That’s for the weak. Fisher is a true capitalist alpha who is afraid to do interviews and answer basic questions, but not afraid to brown-nose the politicians who control the public funds he shouldn’t need, but wanted anyway.
For him, this entire ordeal has always been about lining his pockets.
And the joke’s on us, because he’s going to do it. Again, to folks like Fisher, people are just pawns in the money-making game — useful only to a point.
In that process, he destroyed something important and positive in this community.
That’s his legacy.
Fisher and Kaval had no problem buying 50 percent of the Coliseum. Still, they let it crumble and degrade — it helped their argument that they needed more public money for their new ballpark, be it in Oakland, Las Vegas, or their rent-free studio apartment they’ll hang at for at least the next few seasons in Sacramento.
They wanted to manufacture plausible deniability that should never be granted. They incredulously asked, repeatedly and embarrassingly, “How could anyone be expected to live (or make money) here?”
They did the same thing to the A’s roster. Moneyball looked downright lavish compared to how Fisher ran his team. The largest contract in A’s history — $66 million over six years — was signed by Eric Chavez in 2004.
Fisher bought the team a year later and he never beat that mark. Shohei Ohtani makes $70 million per season now.
This season, the A’s payroll was five times smaller than the New York Mets’. The A’s haven’t made the playoffs since the COVID-shortened 2020 season, and that’s by design.
It’s all a tragedy, executed by incompetent and/or craven people from start to Thursday’s finish.
It’s all enough to leave you cynical.
Oakland will be fine. It’s used to getting shafted, and it always finds a way to bounce back with something new and awesome. Maybe the Roots, Soul and the B’s can fill the sports void. Maybe the East Bay will become the best college sports area on the West Coast as Cal fans take over the ACC. Maybe this side of the bay is better off without major professional sports — it’s a soulless cash grab these days, anyway.
My daughter won’t remember attending those A’s games the past few years. She’ll just see the photos of the three of us wearing green hats, mine with the yellow “StAy” pin I picked up at Oaklandish the day after I moved to the Bay in 2014, surrounded by unwashed concrete and the lovable and all-too-real unwashed masses, the folks Fisher from which makes sure to keep his distance. Or maybe the little inquisitor will ask about the Rickey Henderson bobblehead on her bookshelf. Who was that guy? Why is he up there?
And when she is finally old enough to ask, I’m going to put her on the phone with Kaval or the commissioner’s office of Major League Baseball in New York. Maybe they’ll conference in Fisher.
Because while I can tell her what happened to the A’s in excruciating detail, but those are the people who should have to explain what happened.
I hope she gets in a few other questions — questions that, after years of asking, haven’t been answered yet:
Why did Fisher buy a baseball team when he clearly has no love for the game or the team itself? I thought the point of a billionaire buying a toy was to have fun with it.
And why would he let someone as grossly incompetent as Kaval — who loves internet fame and quick, shoddy work — run that team on a day-to-day basis? This guy couldn’t land another president job in any other big league. The minor leagues even might find him too amateurish.
And who would ever be so thick as to think the grass will be greener on the other side of this?