These were the A's of our lives
Baseball is leaving Oakland, which is old news now but still kind of unbelievable
The thing I will always remember about the Oakland A’s is that they were terrifying.
This might seem like a weird thing to note about a team that has lost more than 300 baseball games over the past three seasons and has made it to the American League Championship Series just once over the past three decades, but in the same way that people tend to like the genre of music that they were into in their teens, the A’s remain a little frozen in time for me.
The A’s of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s were nuts. Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco, true mashers of the baseball who became somewhat less awe-inspiring when it turned out they were doped up to the gills. A collection of eccentric baseball guys like Carney Lansford, Terry Steinbach and Dave Parker, each different in their own way and not much like the players of today who often seem to have been grown in a lab. Dave Stewart and Dennis Eckersley: frightening. And the scariest of them all, Rickey Henderson, at a time in his career where he seemed impossible to get out. In the 1989 ALCS against the Blue Jays, I remember very distinctly that fans at the SkyDome booed him and it really felt like we just made him mad, where he took it out on the Jays. In five games, he had six hits, seven walks and eight stolen bases, and an OPS of 1.609. (lol.)
That was, obviously, a long time ago. As the economics of the sport changed and the A’s morphed into the poor cousins of the Bay Area, they became the gold-standard of staying competitive on the cheap. Billy Beane. Moneyball. “You get on base, we win. You don’t, we lose.”
Eventually, after the team was bought two decades ago by the family of John Fisher, billionaire heir to the Gap retail fortune, they stopped being even that. Now they are just cheap. The Oakland Coliseum has long since started to fall apart, home now to feral cats and possums. And Fisher, though he claims to have tried for years to find a way to keep the A’s in Oakland, really only wanted to keep them there if he was able to secure a sweetheart new-stadium deal. He eventually found one in Las Vegas, where the A’s are theoretically going to move into a new ballpark a few years from now, after a detour in Sacramento.
Thursday night was the last game in Oakland. They beat the Texas Rangers, 3-2. The team, in A’s colours, has just three more games to go.
On a certain level, I get it. These franchises are owned by wealthy people who have a right to run the business as they see fit. If some other city wants to offer them a fantastic deal to relocate, that is their call. The fellow owners will fall in line to support the relocation, because they all know that the threat of departure may eventually be a tool they want to deploy.
But it also kind of amazes me that this kind of thing keeps happening. The A’s in Oakland were a bedrock baseball franchise. They won three straight World Series in the 1970s, had those amazing teams of the early 90s, and then became the franchise that revolutionized baseball, even if the championship success didn’t quite follow. (“My shit doesn’t work in the playoffs.”) They are the team of Reggie and Rollie, of Catfish Hunter and Rickey and Eck and, more recently, of Jason Giambi and Miguel Tejada and Matt Olson.
And now they are (almost) gone, because the owner suckered Vegas into a better deal than was on offer in Oakland. It sure seems like a massive net loss for baseball. A storied franchise, uprooted to spend who knows how many seasons in northern California before possibly landing in Vegas, where it is hard to imagine baseball competing with the town’s many other attractions. Who is going to give a shit about the Sacramento A’s, or whatever they will be called, as they play in a minor-league park? Why did baseball allow this to happen?
It’s possible that MLB, having seen the NFL successfully relocate several teams in recent years, figured they could just go and do the same. But the NFL is different. Two of those teams, both in Los Angeles, barely even have local support, but they have no problem selling tickets because the fans of visiting teams flock to the place. The same is true, to a lesser extent, in Vegas with the Raiders. The NFL is a behemoth that could move the Green Bay Packers to Oklahoma and everyone would get over it in a week or two.
Baseball will survive, too, but destroying a foundational team in pursuit of better luxury-suite income, in a sport that is much more reliant on regional interest, is incredibly … gross.
It was probably never going to go another way. But it is sad. Pour one out for Oakland.
Sid, McJesus, George Springer and the challenges of running a Canadian team
It's hard to not look at the scoreboard, where Canada's Stanley Cup drought rolls past 30 years and neither the Jays nor Raptors look close to contention, and wonder if financial pressures haven't made an already tough job that much harder.
My latest for theScore considers the unique problems faced by Canadian franchises operating in leagues that are primarily American.
Bike lanes are good, actually
The Ontario government seems intent on banning the construction of new bike lanes in the province, which is bad policy for a bunch of reasons. I wrote about it for the Toronto Star.
(The part about Doug Ford being wildly pro-car, it turns out, was prescient. Days later he announced the plan to build a giant tunnel under Highway 401. I will likely have more to say about that later.)