Notes on Relocation, Bad Owners, and Loyal Fans

I have not returned to baseball this year. The Royals are truly terrible – on pace for their worst season ever – and have given me no reason to drop my boycott of the sport, prompted when the dishonest and corrupt combination of MLB ownership and commissioner Rob Manfred manufactured last year’s labor strife.[1]

I don’t have much idea what’s going on in the sport right now, other than the Royals sucking. I have enough Reds-fan friends to know they are on a historic winning streak. But I haven’t turned on one of their games either, something I used to do quite a bit.

(A big downside to my boycott: I LOVE the Royals’ City Connect collection, but refuse to give MLB a dime, let alone $30–40 for a new hat or shirt.[2] I may crack on this one, but for now I’m holding firm.)

Despite my boycott, I read this excellent, lengthy piece about the Oakland A’s relocation. It brought back some memories.

The Long, Sad Story of the Stealing of the Oakland A’s

My high school year in California was spent one BART stop away from the Oakland Coliseum. The Royals and A’s were rivals at the time – the A’s had abandoned Kansas City for the Bay Area 20 years earlier for crying out loud! – and I would argue with my classmates about how the ascendant A’s would never catch my beloved, but aging, Royals.

At lunch I would sit with other sports fans as we would pass around the sports sections from the San Francisco Chronicle and Oakland Tribune. I would focus on the national stuff, or on my teams from back in KC, while listening to the A’s and Giants fans bicker, the A’s fans gush about the young Jose Conseco and Mark McGuire or how they were building a dominating starting rotation.

The thing I picked up in my 11 months in California was that Oakland fans had an immense, almost defensive, pride in their teams. I think it came from the collective chip on their shoulders about being the city across from The City. They all still loved the Raiders, who had left Oakland for the first time a few years earlier, because they couldn’t bring themselves to root for the 49ers. They knew the Warriors had no chance to beat the Magic-Kareem Lakers, but went crazy the night Sleepy Floyd went off and stole a game from the mighty Lakers in the 1987 Western Conference semifinals.

And the A’s were their team, even if they had been mostly horrible since the end of their early ‘70s dynasty.

There’s always been that small, intense core of fans in Oakland. Through various ruinous ownership groups that often seemed more focused on finding a way out of town, that group has held on.[3]

I don’t know that any city deserves a team. The Bay Area might be massive, but perhaps having the Giants is enough. Still, I feel for A’s fans. They’ve put up with a lot of shit in the nearly 60 years the team has been based there. And, despite playing in a dump of a stadium, they’ve always come back when the team gave them a reason to believe.

I think we can agree that the A’s ownership group is terrible and have treated their fans like crap. Good luck making money in Las Vegas, with your tiny stadium and disinterested local fan base.

History—and hell, too, probably—reserves a special place for people who relocate pro sports teams. Every sports fan knows Art Modell, for example, as the guy who wrenched the Browns out of Cleveland. And we know Clay Bennett as the Oklahoman who stole the Supersonics out of Seattle. We remember these men for the damage they caused, which extends beyond the fan bases they forsook. Rather, it corrupts the foundation of faith on which fandom depends. Fans everywhere are poorer for it.