Rotten in Oakland: How the A's Trashed Their Roots and Became MLB's Laughingstock

https://bleacherreport.com/articles/10078816-rotten-in-oakland-how-the-as-trashed-their-roots-and-became-mlbs-laughingstock

In 1995, part of a briefly successful effort to lure the Raiders to the Coliseum, the city of Oakland borrowed $200 million to build "Mount Davis," the impossibly ugly block of seats and suites that towers over what was once a nice baseball stadium.

This was a great deal for Raiders owner Al Davis but an incredibly bad one for the city and county, and one that they are still paying off long after the Raiders left town. Taxpayers still owe $13 million a year through 2025 for the same 30-year-old renovations that made the Coliseum obsolete, with the overall price tag nearly doubling to $350 million just from interest payments. It was a catastrophe that wrecked the city budget for years.

Later that year, Haas died, and his family decided to sell the team.

Right before the explosion in media revenue that would lift the boat of every MLB team and allow cheap owners like Fisher to operate at a profit, the Haas family sold the team for $85 million to real estate developers led by Steve Schott, who would in turn sell the team to Fisher and Wolff in 2005. The team's cost-cutting approach you see today has been in place since, with handing taxpayers the bill on a real-estate deal just like Davis did as the transparent goal.

Through this lens the team's repeated failures to make a deal happen in Oakland become clearer.

The Mount Davis deal ruined the Coliseum, permanently soured Oakland on public financing and made voters and politicians broadly suspicious of any dealing with the team to begin with. Every day, the A's in the Coliseum showed just how badly publicly funded projects can fail, while the team's owners carried on for 25 years pursuing a deal just like it and wondering why they kept striking out.

Across the bay, the Giants built their stadium without any public money, opening a lovely park on the water in 2000 for $357 million, about the total cost it ended up taking to build Mount Davis.

While the A's never committed seriously to a privately funded stadium deal and a series of half-baked attempts ran into basic land rights and infrastructure problems, Giants attendance soared as they strung together three World Series titles in the early 2010s, putting a bigger dent in Oakland's fanbase each time.

Stuck blowing up winning teams while ownership prioritized a real-estate handout, turning off more fans for good each time they sold star players, the A's gradually stopped trying to compete altogether.

Fans lived the whole cycle over and over, each time having to explain to your kid that their favorite player was going to go play for some other city, with each sell-off increasing the certainty of more to come in the future.

In spite of this all, Oakland still loved baseball. Less than a decade ago, multiple teardowns into the Fisher era, the Oakland bleachers were still a maelstrom that had Stephen Curry wishing their energy could transfer to Warriors fans. They now sit mostly empty, draped with signs insulting Fisher, signs warning Las Vegas and little else.

You can't blame fans for not buying it anymore. This current "rebuild" and this 2023 A's "team" have ditched the idea of a pretext, or a selling point, or even a slogan.

Marcus Semien was the first of Oakland's latest core to come up for free agency, hitting the market after the pandemic season in 2020. The A's never made Semien a real offer, "floating" him a one-year offer of $12.5 million with a nearly unheard-of deferral that would have spread it out over 10 years, a grim indication of how short on cash the organization was.

Semien signed an $18 million deal with Toronto. One of the first things he noticed, he said, was that the Blue Jays invested actual resources in their players. In his first season after leaving Oakland, he hit 45 home runs.

After a lifeless 2021 A's team collapsed down the stretch, they traded stars Matt Olson and Matt Chapman, netting nearly nothing in return in moves that are already busts. The 2022 A's were even worse, and they responded by selling even more, trading Sean Murphy for another paltry return.

The 2023 A's are historically terrible, on pace to finish 41-121, and show few signs of life, with nothing to show for the core of stars they developed in the 2010s.

Let's be fair. Even after so many mistakes, you can call some of their circumstances bad luck. A lot had to go wrong to make the A's this horrible.

For starters, none of the Giants teams in the early 2010s stacked up in a historical sense. The fact that the local competition maxed out at 94 wins, but won it all three times, was a tough break.