After All Is Said and Moved, It’s Just a Game : Raiders: Working-class fans can afford the price of a ticket only when there is work.

Outside of The Times’ sports department, I may be the biggest Raider fan at this newspaper. So the fact that I am not unhappy--and even a bit relieved--that “our” pro football team is leaving Los Angeles after 13 years to return to its roots in Oakland presumably says a lot about why the Raiders never caught on here.

I’m part of the problem, as Raiders’ owner Al Davis and some of his current and former players would define it. I am one of those apathetic L.A. natives who has never put my heart and soul into supporting any sports team because they all came here from somewhere else, whether Brooklyn, Minneapolis or Oakland. That isn’t true, as anyone who has watched me suffer through the Raiders’ defeats of recent years can attest. Still, I learned long ago that it is a waste of time to argue against all the “laid-back Angeleno” cliches. But before I let the Raiders head north unlamented, as most other Angelenos seem willing to do, some clarification is in order.

First, the Raiders did catch on in L.A. But the L.A. they caught on with is not the city of popular image: the sun-drenched land of surfers and starlets. As I remember writing when the Raiders went to the 1984 Super Bowl (still the only one a Los Angeles-based team has ever won) the L.A. that rooted for the Raiders is a working-class town like Oakland, where the team was founded in 1960 and played until 1982. Raiders fans are in the kinds of places that visitors rarely see, like Sylmar, Compton and South Gate.

Second and more important, the Los Angeles that rooted for the Raiders lives in those parts of town that have taken the hardest hits as the California economy has gone through gut-wrenching changes since the end of the Cold War, with the downsizing of the local aerospace and defense industries and the emergence of a new international economy.

Those changes hit Southern California so hard that for several years in the early 1990s, the statistics for joblessness, mortgage foreclosures and other indicators of economic distress were the worst since the Great Depression. Those years also saw big local factories like General Motors’ plant in Van Nuys shut down.

The same edition of The Times that carried news of the Raiders’ departure on the front page last Saturday played another story even bigger: the vote to shut down the Long Beach Naval Shipyard and eliminate 3,000 more blue-collar jobs.

Lots of those soon-to-be unemployed shipyard workers are Raider fans. And as the Pentagon’s budget-cutting ax has hung over their heads these last few years, I’ll bet more than a few of them opted to watch pro football games for free on television rather than in the Los Angeles Coliseum, no doubt contributing to Davis’ perception that L.A. did not support his team.

I tried once to discuss with Davis the sad state of the local economy and its effect on his team. I got no sense he understood. But that is not to fault a quirky owner who gets more than enough bad press elsewhere. Davis only suffers from the same myopia other people in pro sports do: If it doesn’t contribute to a winning season, what does it matter?

In fact, I would argue that a blue-collar fan’s decision to save money for tough times by not buying Raider tickets makes as much sense as Davis’ decision to return his team to Oakland even though it would be more profitable in the long run for him to be patient and stay in the bigger Los Angeles market. When the wolf could show up at the door at any moment, you think short-term.

And speaking of the short term, for the next couple of years--until a new pro team moves here to exploit the nation’s second-biggest media market--at least we Raider fans will be able to watch the televised games from Oakland. That is, after all, how so many of us first came to know and root for the Raiders.

Life could be worse. Just ask anybody who works at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard.