Losing everything
“But if we learned how to live like this
Maybe we can learn how to start again
Like a child who’s never done wrong
Who hasn’t taken that first step” — Car Seat Headrest | Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales
I spent Wednesday night wrecked, disconsolate, and bleeding in my bathtub.
These things are connected, but not in a way that should scare you about my physical or mental health, both of which I’d currently rate somewhere just shy of “passable.” The wounds from which I was bleeding were self-inflicted, but not intentionally so. They were the result of two spills off my bike on Sunday, during a gravel ride, the second more brutal than the first, skidding out on a particularly rocky, steep, loose descent, during which I landed on the same spots on my wrist and shin that I did during the lesser mishap.
“I’m OK, but I am pretty beat up,” I texted my wife after getting treated at the event. Once I’d finished an increasingly uncomfortable, nearly two hour drive home and limped up my front steps, I amended my assessment.
“Actually, I don’t think I am OK.”
That was the beginning of an ominous week.
The falls themselves didn’t really hurt that badly. I avoided any real damage to my torso and didn’t hit my head or break any bones. I felt more ashamed than anything. I only participated in this particular event because it wasn’t a race, so I figured I’d be less likely to have any major issues. With a very pregnant wife at home, the last thing I wanted to do was incapacitate myself in any way. My only consolation: seemingly everyone else visiting the medic after the ride had gone down in one of the same two spots. One of them had both bashed his helmet and broken his collarbone, and was being transported to the hospital.
Still. I’m supposed to be the one helping out with the extra tasks around the house, and instead I’ve been slowly limping around, needing my own extra care all week. And then everything else happened.
I’ve always been an East Bay sports fan. When the Oakland Raiders left, again, I was more annoyed than anything. They hadn’t been in Oakland when I was young. They were my dad’s team, so they became my team, but I wasn’t emotionally invested in them in anywhere near the same way as I was in my other teams.
When the Golden State Warriors announced they were moving to San Francisco, even though they were staying in the Bay Area, it hurt worse. They’d been terrible for most of my life, but still fans packed the Coliseum Arena to deliver the best home court advantage in the NBA. The We Believe team was an iridescent shooting star that revived the franchise. Then, an undersized point guard from a tiny North Carolina college flipped the sport on its head, becoming the engine driving the most entertaining and greatest basketball team of our generation. And then, at the height of it all, they left their blue collar roots behind for a shiny new arena in the big city that didn’t (and still doesn’t) care about them anywhere near as much.
I’ll still root for the Curry core as long as they’re around. But that’ll probably be the end for me. Which I’ve told myself is OK, because the only team that’s ever really, truly mattered to me, that has shaped me to my core, is the Oakland A’s.
When detailing my professional history, I often tell people that I worked in baseball for six years, for four organizations, at three different levels of the game. I interned for the Cubs for a year; I was the PR Director for the Padres-affiliated, Double-A San Antonio Missions the next year; I held the same role for the Giants’ Triple-A Fresno Grizzlies the following two years; that led me to Washington, where I ran publications and social media for the Nationals the two years after that. But my first “job” working for a baseball team actually came years earlier, as an unpaid intern for the Oakland Athletics website, paid only in terrible press room food and popcorn, prior to the team sites merging under the MLB.com umbrella, in the summer of 2001, between high school and college.
My very first story to appear online on the team’s website, with my own byline, was a feature about the drummers in the bleachers. It has been long since scrubbed from the web, the only proof being a printed copy buried somewhere at my parents’ house in the East Bay. Before that, the A’s were just my team. I chewed my nails to the nubs watching Gil Heredia outduel Roger Clemens in Game 1 of the 2000 ALDS, basking in the postgame booms of “Fuck the Yan-kees!” that rushed down the ramps from the upper deck to the parking lots. Before that, I watched Barry Zito’s first big league start on the first iteration of the Gameday tracker, from an unairconditioned cinder block dorm room in a summer program at Northwestern. Before that, I sat in the lower bowl while construction crews, mid-game, rushed to finish Mount Davis, the thwunks and tonks of nail guns and whirs of power saws bouncing around the bowl. Before that, I watched my mom, who was never one to make predictions, call a Rickey Henderson, extra-inning walk-off homer in a game that stretched well past my bedtime. Before that, we played hooky to go watch Nolan Ryan pitch when he was in town, only to have the Rangers skip his start, settling for seeing him toss a football around the outfield before the game. Before that, we watched Mark McGwire walk off Jay Howell with a blast to left field for the only win the A’s would notch in the 1988 World Series.
Since all that, I watched Scott Hatteberg’s movie moment from the final section in the second deck down the right field line, springing from my seat as the ball left the bat, arms up, delirious, as it sailed past me into the bleachers. I sat behind the visitors bullpen, cackling with my friends, as fans made turkey noises every time Royals reliever Jimmy Gobble threw a warm-up pitch on a Dollar Wednesday matinee. I watched, from field level, about as close to third base as you can be in Oakland, as Jason Kendall scrambled home to the eternal embarrassment of Francisco Rodriguez, for the walk-off drop. (After some Zaprudering, I’m fairly certain that’s me in the front row in the gray hat and A’s shirsey, right arm raised, in the screenshot below). I sat bundled, in the cold, in the upper reaches of the left field bleachers and finally exhaled when Marco Scutaro cleared the bases with the double in 2006 that pushed the A’s past the Division Series. And I watched Shohei Ohtani’s big league pitching debut get Tungsten Arm O’Doyle’d, from the upper deck behind home plate, by a late rally and an extra-inning walk-off.
More recently, I also watched, in horror, from the stands on the south side of Chicago, as a comebacker screamed off Chris Bassitt’s head, sending him crumpling to the ground. Beyond the immediate concern for his health and well-being, I felt a deep despair set in amid the on-field delay, understanding that this was the end of that cycle’s competitive window, that only uncertainty remained, with every aspect of the franchise.
On March 18, 2012, I found myself sprinting through the tunnels underneath Space Coast Stadium out toward the right field foul pole, knowing I had mere seconds to catch an understandably upset teenager before he hopped in his car and left the park. He’d been sent back to the minors during spring training, and would start the season in Triple-A, but I and the rest of the world knew it was only a matter of time before he’d be called up to make his big league debut. After all, he was Bryce Harper. And, as I was the one in charge of writing the feature for the team magazine when he did, I needed to get him right then for his thoughts — there would be no time whenever the moment actually happened to get everything in print.
Harper is Las Vegas’ foremost baseball representative. Born and raised in the Southern Nevada desert, he has lived and breathed baseball his entire life. If anyone should be excited about a big league team’s arrival, it should be him, right?
Yeah, uh, well, about that.
“I feel sorry for the fans in Oakland,’’ Harper told USA TODAY Sports. “It’s just not right. They have so much history in Oakland. You’re taking a team out of a city. I’m pretty sad because of all of the history and all of the greatness they’ve seen there.
“I see the A’s as Oakland.
“I don’t see them as Vegas.’’
Las Vegas is, in many ways, a truly awful place for baseball. But despite the blazing summer heat, it has played home to a Triple-A for as many years as I’ve been alive. And minor league baseball is wonderful. The provenance of small towns and mid-sized cities across America, it is the purest distillation of the sport at the professional level. Players sign autographs, spectators can sit close to the action, and the entire operation is loaded with promotions and extras to bolster the fan experience.
More than anything, the tickets are cheap. That used to be true of Major League Baseball, but no more. According to Team Marketing Report’s MLB Fan Cost Index, it cost a family of four $256.41 to attend an MLB game in 2022. The most recent minor league survey, from 2019, put the same average cost of attendance for a family of four at just under $70. Even accounting for our recent spate of inflation, that still comes out to less than $80 in 2023, less than a third the cost of their big league counterparts.
Las Vegas’ Triple-A club is now called the Aviators. An affiliate of the Oakland A’s, they play in a new park, built in 2019. They drew 6,910 fans per game last season, second-most in the Pacific Coast League and eighth-best overall in Triple-A. Situated in the Summerlin neighborhood, on the western, residential edge of the city, it serves the people who actually live there, rather than the tourist-driven Strip. Las Vegas Ballpark has been named the Ballpark Digest Triple-A Best of the Ballparks in three of the four years since opening.
Despite the good thing the Aviators have going, this week, Nevada lawmakers twisted their way to voting for a rushed, half-baked, entirely unnecessary proposal to build a major league stadium on a laughably small piece of land on the Las Vegas Strip. In turn, they voted to effectively poach the Oakland Athletics to fill that stadium. But as anything else with the A’s, the twists and turns to get there were both melodramatic and heartbreaking.
On Monday, the senate committee first tasked with deciding on whether to put the bill up for a vote stalled, as they very clearly did not have the votes to move to the bill to the entire legislative body. Amendments were tacked on to appease enough legislators to flip their votes, but the special session dragged on for another day, into the scheduled date of the fan-led reverse boycott in Oakland.
On Tuesday, Using the only power that fans have, the Oakland faithful screamed truth to power, at the top of their lungs, through hours of tailgating and nine raucous innings as the baseball world watched on. The chants were unavoidable on the broadcast, drowning out the action on the field, and so loud in the fifth inning that Hunter Harris could no longer hear his pitchcom.
How can you not be romantic about baseball?
One Defector commenter likened the thumping “Sell The Team” chant to the “One Way Out” mantra from the prison break episode of “Andor,” a fitting comparison of uprisings against oppressors in the face of almost certain doom. (We don’t need to extend the analogy any further, to think about who the two survivors of Oakland’s massacre are.)
The team, incredibly, won its seventh straight game, scratching out two late runs to beat the best team in the sport, 2-1. It marked the longest winning streak by a team as bad as the A’s had been since 1895. At the same time, the stadium bill was advancing out of committee and into the senate. One by one, Nevada’s legislative bodies made the tweaks to satisfy individual lawmakers with the carve outs and ass-coverings they wanted or felt they needed, without ever questioning the much larger issues on the table.
On Wednesday, the script for “Moneyball 2: Electric Boogaloo” was officially scuttled. After taking an early 3-1 lead, the A’s bled out five runs over the final five innings to lose 6-3, watching the win streak come to a quiet end in front of a paid crowd of just over 7,000. The legislators who stood in the Nevada State Assembly in support of the bill gave fantasy-based reasons for their endorsements, claiming economic benefits from stadiums that no actual economist (that I’ve yet seen) supports, echoing the lobbyists (who are not economists) hired by the team for their presentations. Barring an unforeseen roadblock on MLB’s side, the team is moving.
Speaking of “Moneyball,” Saturday marks a stark anniversary — 20 years since the publication of Berkeley resident Michael Lewis’ paradigm-shifting book about arbitrage and emerging measurements of efficiency in baseball player evaluations. The narrative centered around the Oakland A’s, the small market team that could, and how they used an innovative approach to compete with teams spending several times as much as them on payroll.
The book, and the Oscar-winning movie based on it, transformed the game in ways first exciting, then depressing, and now grotesque. On the field, chasing strikeouts and home runs led to less contact, fewer balls in play, and a more boring sport. Off the field, front offices full of analytics quants slashed payroll and sold losing as a form of winning, providing cover for skinflint owners across the league to pocket escalating profits, alongside skyrocketing team evaluations, while not even trying to uphold their end of the social contract by trying to compete. Now, such an owner has assumed his final boss form, right back where it all started.
Maybe John Fisher is trying to get away from the ocean. After all, strange things have been happening there recently. Orcas, also known as killer whales, are sinking yachts. This has happened several times, and scientists believe the animals are actually teaching others how to do the same. They are tearing off rudders and reveling in the destruction.
This week, an enormous pod of orcas was spotted just off the California coast in the Monterey Bay, leading some to declare that they were “orcanizing.” Perhaps they’re coming for the oligarchs.
Those of you who follow me on Twitter know my pinned tweet has been there for quite some time. It’s never felt right to replace it, with seemingly more reasons every day to keep it right where it is. Of course, it doesn’t have to be like this. We don’t need to live in a world in which those in charge of community assets treat them this way, while people cheer them on for squeezing more money out. We know, because we lived the alternative.
Walter Haas (disclosure: a family friend) bought the team from Charlie Finley to keep the A’s in Oakland. He had the highest payroll in the game, built great teams, and sold more tickets than most clubs. When he sold the team, in failing health, he again did everything he could to keep them in Oakland. The ensuing ownership groups’ continued negligence and apathy toward the product and the fans has only gone to underscore the obvious, that as a sports owner and their fan base, you get what you pay for.
Fisher — a nepo baby if there ever was one, having done nothing of any note between childhood, attending Stanford Business School, and inheriting his family’s Gap fortune — has, progressively, become the worst owner in baseball. On Thursday, Rob Manfred took up the water buckets for Fisher with this whopper of a lie.
“I think that the real question is, what is it that Oakland was prepared to do? There is no Oakland offer, OK? They never got to a point where they had a plan to build a stadium at any site.”
It’s not just that the statement is plainly false. It’s that the A’s got — and insisted upon — so much less in Vegas than they ever did in Oakland. After years of refusing to rebuild at the Coliseum site (a place that could actually use some of the urban renewal stadium advocates are always touting), stating resolutely that a waterfront ballpark was the only thing they’d accept, they jumped at the first opportunity for a roofed, artificial-turfed facility — without any of the $12 billion accompanying real estate investment opportunity — along a stroad in the desert.
I’m not naive. I understand sports runs on money. But that’s the craziest part of all of this — the Las Vegas deal isn’t even a good one for baseball. It uproots a team from one of the largest media markets in the country and places it in what will immediately become the smallest in the league. The league is reportedly willing to waive the $500 million relocation fee, costing the other owners serious money. The result will almost certainly leave the A’s remaining as a revenue share taker, again costing other owners. The team will be fighting against an unprecedented-for-baseball bevy of alternate entertainment options. You think the big money-making Friday and Saturday night games are going to compete with Las Vegas? Meanwhile, they were granted a golden, generational opportunity to own the East Bay entirely to themselves. And they blew it.
In his recent commencement speech at Northwestern, the same place from which I tracked Zito’s first start more than half my life ago, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker talked similarly about the way that cruelty from the powerful has become a cudgel. And he had this to say:
“The best way to spot an idiot: Look for the person who is cruel.”
Let’s look at what Commissioner Rob Manfred had to say about the A’s reverse boycott on Thursday, which drew nearly 28,000 fans on a Tuesday night after years of neglect of both the on-field product and fan experience amid skyrocketing ticket prices:
“It was great. It’s great to see what is, this year, almost an average Major League Baseball crowd in the facility for one night.”
First lie to our faces, then spit on our graves. This is the idiot in charge of the sport.
Hilariously, the A’s tried to soften the PR blow of the reverse boycott by donating the ticket revenue from Tuesday’s game to local charities. In doing so, they also revealed the amount: More than $811,000. Whether this was a subversive move by a knowing member of the front office, or another in a field of rakes stepped on by ownership and management, I can’t be sure. But that number admits that, if the A’s averaged what they did Tuesday night (and remember, they drew more than 28,000 per game every year at the Coliseum from 1988-92), they’d make about $65.7 million in gate revenue alone, before parking, concessions, sponsorships, or the roughly $100 million each team gets from TV revenue. All while ownership pleads poverty and rolls out the lowest payroll in the sport.
Maybe the killer whales have it all right. I’ve seen it floated that if Oakland gets a baseball team of some sort in the future, they should bring back the Oaks. Perhaps the Orcas, instead?
The final lawmaker in the Nevada Assembly to speak before the vote, Shannon Bilbray-Axelrod (D-34), stood up in favor of the bill. Her reasoning? The tickets, as low as $12, would allow her to take her daughter to see baseball in Las Vegas. For someone who cares so much about the idea of affordable, family entertainment, somehow Bilbray-Axelrod didn’t notice that the Aviators were playing a home game 15 minutes away from her office that very night, with tickets starting at $13, plus undoubtedly cheaper parking, hot dogs, beers and soda, souvenirs, and no four-year wait for construction of a new ballpark costing $380 million+ in taxpayer money.
Now, instead, my daughter will grow up never understanding what it meant to hear the echoes of Oakland reverberate through the concrete walkways of the Coliseum, or Howard Terminal, or whatever might have been. She’ll never walk over the bridge from BART, watching the back of Mount Davis rise impossibly high above her; never tailgate in the north lot; never exclaim “Oh no!” after the announcement of each umpire; never stomp along to the drums; never dance to Kool & the Gang; never experience the euphoria or the heartbreak of a franchise that always punched above its weight, even if it was rarely good enough to make shit work in October. She’ll never get to experience the great years, like we did under the Haas family, nor the middling years, nor even these last years, when at least you could voice your displeasure at the rotten faith with which your team has been treated. She’ll never know what I mean when I say that 10,000 A’s fans were louder than 40,000 Giants fans. It breaks my heart to know that she probably won’t understand any of it.
Because how could you, if you didn’t grow up with it? Have you ever tried to explain what ties you to this beautiful, profoundly weird, bottomlessly stupid game to someone who was never charmed by its endless idiosyncrasies? They look at you like a crazy person.
But that’s the thing — if you did grow up with it, you know. We knowingly let those who run the game get away with extortion because it means too much to us not to. Because it’s such a foundational part of who we are. Taking that away isn’t just about removing the daily outlet of the sport that marks our evenings in the warm months and keeps us company when we’re stressed out, or lonely, or just too exhausted by the horrors of the world to do anything else but think about burying a 1-2 slider in the dirt. It’s taking away a piece of our childhood; for some of us, one of the most important pieces that we can pass down to our kids. I can and certainly will bond with my daughter over any number of her future interests. But now, that won’t ever include the A’s.
It’s why, even more than my own grief, I’m grieving for every kid, every young person who was me, right now, at any link on that chain of memories, who had baseball grab them by the heart and allowed themselves to surrender to its charms only to now be staring at a betrayal like this one, one from which they’ll never recover.
I knew the second I crashed my bike that I’d lost a lot of skin. Painful as it is, scarring that may be, skin grows back. Surface wounds are like playoff losses, something about which I know all too well. They sting for a few weeks, and though you may carry memories of the trauma both psychologically and physically with you, time heals them. I figured the physical pain this week would be the worst thing I had to deal with. I was wrong.
Some friends of ours asked if we wanted to join them at a minor league game this Friday night. There will be hot dogs, and silly, mid-inning promotions, and fireworks. Normally, we’d have said yes, even though it’s our anniversary. We love baseball, especially the minors. But I don’t feel much like going to a game right now. I don’t honestly know when, or if, I will feel that way again.
A few years ago, I could never have imagined baseball not being a part of my life. But if this is the way the sport is going to operate, frankly, I’ve got better things to do with my time and energy. And I know I’m not alone in feeling this way. But if you can lose me — someone who grew up steeped in the sport, who watched and pored over it religiously, who aspired to be a broadcaster, but settled for grinding his way through front offices, then covered it from an arm’s reach for the last decade, a lifelong fan by the very definition of the term — you can lose anyone.