Requiem FoR the oakland a’s?

Maybe the news skipped past you amid a thousand other headlines, but John Fisher intends to bring the Oakland Athletics to Las Vegas.

And baseball would be far poorer for it.

Few franchises, in any sports, carries the unique history of the A’s. They started in Philadelphia, ruled for half a century by Connie Mack, who built two dynasties and always managed in a shirt and tie, into his late 80s.

Then there was a sojourn in Kansas City, mostly defined by trading young stars (think Roger Maris) to the Yankees until Charlie O. Finley showed up, outlandish and outrageous, and eventually brought the A’s to Oakland.

Once there, players fought Finley and each other, grew long hair and mustaches, wore green and gold uniforms instead of the usual gray and white and, oh by the way, won three World Series in a row.

More history followed, from Billy Ball to the Bash Brothers to Billy Beane and other things that did not include the initials of BB, including the “Moneyball” era memorialized by Brad Pitt on the big screen.

Yet the A’s could never put together just the right plan to put up a real ballpark, whether in different spots in Oakland or in nearby San Jose.

Thus, the call of Vegas, where, and this is all important to John Fisher, land is plentiful and public officials are more willing to fork over taxpayer dollars for a new ballpark.

If it happens (and it’s no guarantee yet), then Oakland, a city of serious sports history, home to Frank Robinson, Bill Russell and so many others, will have no major pro teams left. Gone are the Raiders to the same Vegas playground that the baseball team wants to relocate. Gone, across the Bay, are the Golden State Warriors, now with the rich folks in San Francisco.

Even if we, as sports fans, grow numb to the eternal conflict between owners who want pleasure palaces and the fans of the teams they possess, we can’t let rich men (and they are almost always men) get rewarded for their mistakes.

Look what happened in Washington. For two-plus decades of ruining one of the

NFL’s landmark franchises with one of its most passionate fan bases, Daniel Snyder will get $5 billion for his troubles and close to zero accountability.

By no means is Fisher close to Snyder in terms of really bad behavior. His main fault is either incompetence or, worse yet, a refusal to use his riches to actually build a winning team.

For a generation now, fans in Oakland have grown used to seeing any player that achieved any sort of status get moved out in a trade or get lost to free agency the moment they had any chance to make a real salary.

True, that also happened in other places (Pittsburgh, Kansas City, Cincinnati, Cleveland), but in all those cases they had newer or refur- bished ballparks to take the sting off things if the product on the field was inferior.

That, safe to say, is not the case with the Oakland Coliseum. Once a fine venue, it’s turned into a nightmare with stories of sewage backups and (really) possums in the broadcast booth.

So yes, the A’s aren’t wrong in a desperate need for a new venue. They’ve just got the wrong owner on hand, who would much rather leave the hard work and expenses to someone else, somewhere else.

But Vegas is not a given. Any hang-ups there could leave Major League Baseball exasperated enough to force Fisher to either move his team or sell it, and there’s no shortage of rich folks in the Bay Area who, you know, just might be more inclined to keep the A’s in Oakland, whatever the cost.

What is not in dispute is that, if this move happens, the Athletics move further away from its quirky, unique brand of baseball history and turn into just another thing to bet on in a town where wagers are everything.

Funny, though. In the movie version of Moneyball, Billy Beane talked about changing the odds while playing at the casino. It’s more difficult to do when the casino is right down the street, the house always winning.

Phil Blackwell is sports editor at Eagle News. He can be reached at pblackwell@ eaglenewsonline.com.

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