New in PJ Media:
Three more games.
There will be three more games at the Oakland Coliseum on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Then the team known currently as the Oakland Athletics will finish out the baseball season with three more games in Seattle, and that will be it. The Oakland A’s will be no more. Born 1968, died 2024. Kaput.
What’s next for one of baseball’s most celebrated teams, or formerly most celebrated teams, is more than a little unclear. They’re slated to move to Las Vegas, but there is no major league stadium there, and the one that the A’s are planning to build won’t be ready until 2028. The team is slated to play the next three seasons in a minor-league ballpark in Sacramento. Given the uncertainty of all these arrangements, and of society in general, anything could happen. The only sure thing is that the Oakland era is over.
There is plenty of blame to go around for this outcome. The team owner, John Fisher, is a billionaire but nevertheless refused for years to pay the salaries necessary to keep the A’s competitive as if he deliberately wanted the team to be bad to ensure that attendance would be low. He also ignored aggrieved entreaties to sell the team, and numerous offers to buy it, from people who wanted to keep it in Oakland.
The city of Oakland, meanwhile, found time amid its efforts to lose the NFL Raiders and the NBA Golden State Warriors to lose the Athletics as well. Like so many major cities today, Marxists who have contempt for sports and for the people who watch sports staff the city administration in Oakland. They stalled or blocked outright all of the team’s attempts to build a new stadium that would be more pleasant than the Coliseum, and in a safer area of town, so they share the blame with Fisher for the team’s absconding.
No one considered continuing to play at the Oakland Coliseum an attractive option. Indeed, the Coliseum has never been loved, except by my younger self. Way back in the early 1970s, when the Oakland A’s were busy winning three world championships in a row, the captain of the team, third baseman Sal Bando, dubbed the place “the Mausoleum,” in view of its gray concrete exterior and sparse attendance even then. But that doesn’t mean that the A’s had no fans. The second great championship team in Oakland was second in the American League in attendance in 1989 and 1990. Field a decent team, and they will come — and so Fisher determined not to field a decent team.
There is more. Read the rest here.