A’s fans share anger over team’s departure — and unite in their love for Oakland
OAKLAND — For years, everyone could spot Daniel Real on the road by the big white Oakland Athletics sticker he had plastered on his truck.
Real said his family roots in Oakland date back roughly 150 years, so growing up to become a “die-hard” fan of the baseball team just came naturally.
“I’ve been out there so much. That place means a lot to me,” said Real, speaking of the Oakland Coliseum, where the A’s play, while pouring drinks from behind the counter of George & Walt’s, a bar on College Avenue where the TV is usually tuned to baseball during the season.
But the hometown team Real grew up with is a shadow of its former self. The roster, once top-notch, is now hardly the same caliber as decades past. Attendance by the raucous fan base has dwindled.
Soon, the team will be gone from Oakland entirely.
In a decision that has been years in the making, Major League Baseball owners last week unanimously approved relocating the A’s — Oakland’s last professional sports franchise — to Las Vegas. The Seals, an NHL team, left in 1976. The NBA’s Golden State Warriors made San Francisco their home in 2019 and the NFL’s Raiders headed to Sin City three years ago.
The Athletics franchise will be the first in major league history to have been based in four cities, and it is the first time an MLB franchise will move since 2005.
Many A’s fans see the decision as a callous and greedy business play by the team’s majority owner, billionaire John Fisher. Grieving A’s supporters argue Fisher sabotaged the team by trading good players, raising ticket prices and halfheartedly working with city officials to keep the A’s in Oakland while planning to move the team all along.
“Fisher is a billionaire. He doesn’t need to be doing this,” Real said. “I’m just bitter about the whole thing. I might not even watch baseball that much anymore.”
For loyal fans, who have seen team after team leave Oakland for financially greener pastures, this latest move feels personal, as though it’s an affront to the city itself.
Yet even in their resentment and grief over losing their beloved A’s, fans are uniting in their love for Oakland. The team’s blue-collar fans have remained loyal while the city desperately tries to maintain its steely grit despite the tech wealth spilling over from across the Bay, displacing longtime residents and diluting its character one million-dollar renovated home at a time.
“We were kind of always the bastard son of San Francisco,” Real said. “That was something that we could be proud that was Oakland. We had the Raiders. We had the A’s. They were the Golden State Warriors, but they were playing here. And so that was just part of Oakland.”
The billionaire owner of the Oakland A’s ripped off his home-team fans and is staging a ripoff of Las Vegas, showing that civic leaders never learn that stadium subsidies never pay off.
Jorge Leon, founder of the nonprofit organization Oakland ‘68s, a fan club whose name refers to the year the A’s moved to Oakland from Kansas City, grew up near the Coliseum and spent many days at the ballpark with his dad. He kept going to games — cutting school and sneaking into the stadium — long after his father left the family when Leon was a preteen.
“You’ve got lawyers, you’ve got garbage men, from all walks of life, everywhere,” he said. “And we all hang out together. We all are friends, and we all are family when we are at those games.”
Leon has spent decades fighting to keep the team in Oakland, ever since rumors of its departure to other cities started swirling in the ‘90s. Leon said he once wrote a high school essay arguing that Oakland is the rightful home city for the A’s.
Leon traveled in a small group to Arlington, Texas, ahead of MLB’s relocation vote on Nov. 16, in a last-ditch effort to convince owners to reject the team’s relocation. The coalition chartered a plane to fly over the area with a banner that read “A’S BELONG IN OAKLAND,” hoping that the owners would take the message to heart.
The decision to move the team is about more than baseball, Leon said.
“Oakland gets a bad rap,” he explained. “It’s just like any other major U.S. city. It has problems. It has its beauty. It has its culture. It’s one of the most diverse cities in America. And I think that’s what keeps me fighting, because I think that green and gold are synonymous with the city.”
The Vegas relocation plan has incited outrage even among those in the Bay Area who don’t claim themselves passionate A’s fans.
With the Oakland Athletics moving to Las Vegas, civic leaders wonder if team owner John Fisher will quickly sell his Oakland Coliseum stake.
“[Fisher is] betraying a lot of people, a lot of hardworking people who live and die for the A’s,” said Daniel Hennessey, a self-proclaimed Giants fan and bartender at the Kingfish Pub & Café in North Oakland. “Maybe not a lot of people who are millionaires or billionaires, but people who work their ass off, work for a living and care about their team.”
With the A’s leaving, Hennessey said, “It just feels like maybe something that was part of the heart of Oakland being ripped out.”
At one game in June, fans flocked to the Coliseum for what was dubbed a “reverse boycott,” an effort to pack the stadium and show that the team still has supporters. Many fans wore shirts reading “SELL,” a clear message urging Fisher to find a buyer that would keep the team in Oakland. Now, with the impending transfer, fans are trying to decide how they move forward.
The team has at least one year left on its Coliseum lease, meaning it will stay in the Bay until the end of 2024. The new stadium that Nevada lawmakers approved funding for won’t be ready until 2028.
Real removed his A’s sticker from his truck last week, saying it had gotten too hard to maintain his support. He’s still keeping the door open to future Vegas trips to see the team play.
“What am I going to do with all this A’s gear I’ve been collecting all my life?” he said.
As he spoke, a man next to him nodded his head, occasionally jumping in with his own Oakland A’s memories.
Derrick Blue said his father was the former A’s pitcher Vida Blue, a key member of the clubs that won three consecutive World Series championships in the 1970s. Vida Blue died in May, but his legacy runs through the East Bay and into San Francisco, where he also played for the Giants.
Derrick Blue said that although he didn’t necessarily agree with the A’s transfer to Las Vegas, he knows baseball is a business — one that’s different from when his dad was in the game.
“It’s bittersweet for me, because I know I’ll still be part of the organization in some way,” Blue said. “But it’s definitely hard because my friends and the fans were definitely hurt.”
Oakland, the only major league city on the West Coast with a large Black community, is about to lose the A’s and that doesn’t sit well with former players.
Leon said he’s not going to let his team leave so easily. His group is looking at more protest actions against Fisher and the club, including encouraging fans not to show up for the season’s opening day. He wants to “hit their pocketbook” on the way out, he said.
But he also wants to use his advocacy to show other fans across the country what’s at stake. He sees MLB’s vote as a warning that other cities could lose their beloved teams and leave grieving supporters behind. He said it’s important for other fan bases to mobilize and organize.
“Regardless if the A’s are here or not, I think that the people of Oakland are pretty resilient,” he said. “I know somehow, some way, we’re not going to let MLB dictate the end of professional baseball in Oakland.”
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