New in PJ Media:
It’s the last stand of the Oakland Athletics. Fans of the alleged major league baseball team are planning to take a public stand Tuesday night at Oakland Coliseum against the rich and powerful elites who have set the franchise on the path to destruction. They’re staging a fan-organized “Reverse Boycott” to send a message to those who are intent on getting the team out of town: “We’re still here.” This is bigger than the story of a baseball club: if the little people can strike back here, there’s hope for America as a whole.
Oakland A’s fans? Such people actually exist? Many will find that hard to believe, as the 2023 Athletics haven’t been drawing flies, and there is a good reason for that: they are a terrible team that plays in a dilapidated stadium in a bad area of a dying Leftist-run city. On Sunday, the A’s won their fifth game in a row, but don’t buy playoff tickets just yet: the victory brought their overall record to 17 wins and 50 losses. They still could end up being the worst major league baseball team since the Cleveland Spiders won 20 and lost 134 in 1899 and were dropped from the National League.
The nauseatingly awful 2023 team is just the latest manifestation of years of neglect by the team’s owners and management. The ownership’s tendency to pinch pennies until they scream for mercy was given a charming patina in the book Moneyball, which was later made into a movie starring Brad Pitt; the idea was that the cash-strapped A’s fielded good teams year after year because of the genius of general manager Billy Beane (Pitt in the movie), who managed to find diamonds in the rough at bargain-basement prices to keep the team in contention.
That was true for a while, but over the years the team gained a reputation for developing a contending team and then letting the players go elsewhere just when they were reaching the prime of their careers rather than paying them competitive salaries. And in the last few years, the roof has caved in: management stopped doing anything at all to improve the team, and now fields what is essentially a minor-league team that plays the Washington Generals role for the rest of the league. Clearly, they wanted to leave town, and now the last act is approaching.
The central assumption for years has been that the A’s couldn’t play the big-money game that other teams played because Oakland was a small market and thus made less money than its competitors. But this was never true. Oakland is in the San Francisco Bay area and could, with a decent ballclub and a pleasant stadium, draw just as much or more than the San Francisco Giants, who are doing wonderfully.
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