If the saga of the Oakland A’s potential move to Las Vegas was a network series, this would be sweeps week.
On Monday, the Nevada State Legislature is set to resume a special session on whether to approve legislation that would fund a new A’s stadium in Las Vegas. The next day, MLB owners will convene for owners’ meetings, where presumably the A’s relocation efforts will be a big topic of discussion. And that night, A’s fans will make their voices heard with a reverse boycott at the Oakland Coliseum designed to send one simple message: “We’re still here.”
June 13th. #SELL #FisherOut pic.twitter.com/sZJ4t5txJP
— Oakland 68s (@Oakland68s) June 10, 2023
“It’s not easy being green” may be Kermit the Frog’s personal motto, but it could just as easily be the lament of the Oakland A’s maligned fan base. For much of the team’s 55 years in Oakland — with the exception of the Haas era — A’s fans have been treated with at best indifference and at worst contempt by various ownership groups that have always seemingly had one foot out the door. But no time in Oakland A’s fan history has been more difficult than the past three and a half years.
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On Oct. 2, 2019, the A’s hosted a record-breaking crowd of 54,005 fans for the American League wild-card game. The A’s would lose that game to the Rays, and nothing has been the same for A’s fans since. The pandemic prevented them from being in the ballpark for the team’s first playoff series win since 2006 when they beat the White Sox in the 2020 AL Wild Card Series. Then A’s fans suffered the indignity of watching the team dismantle that core, one star player at a time, all while ticket prices went up, the Coliseum crumbled and the team’s ownership group, represented by president Dave Kaval, began openly flirting with a new home. The A’s lost 102 games in 2022 and, despite a recent five-game winning streak, are on a historically bad pace in 2023 with a 17-50 record heading into Monday’s series opener against the Rays.
Not surprisingly, many A’s fans have been protesting the direction of the team with their wallets. Attendance numbers have dwindled and photos of the nearly empty Coliseum have gone viral.
“It seems like the A’s kind of get s— on in every facet,” A’s fan Turner Hoenig said. “It’s just unbelievably frustrating when they would look at it and say, oh, yeah, the fans aren’t there. Well, the owner has never invested a dime in the franchise or the ballpark and we’ve seen countless players (leave). If the A’s cared at all, if (A’s owner John) Fisher cared at all, we would have multiple World Series.”
Fed up with John Fisher’s stewardship of the franchise, lifelong A’s fan Jeremy Goodrich launched the Twitter account @OaklandRooted with the sole focus of trying to get Fisher to sell the team. He even created a change.org petition at the start of the season. Lifelong A’s fan Stu Clary signed the petition and tweeted an idea: What if fans staged a reverse boycott to fill the Coliseum on a random weeknight to show the baseball world that the supposed lack of fan support in Oakland isn’t accurate?
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“I just thought we should do this outrageous thing and go on a night when nobody else typically would go, and let’s see if we can get some attention out of it and raise awareness to our plight,” Clary said.
The idea took off on social media just as A’s ownership made its announcement on April 19 that it intended to build a stadium in Las Vegas. That was when the idea went from being a potential statement to a potential last stand. A group got together to start planning the reverse boycott and landed on June 13. It was no coincidence that it also happened to coincide with the MLB owners’ meetings. Last week, during the start of the special session, A’s-funded Nevada lobbyists Steve Hill and Jeremy Aguero pointed to low attendance numbers in Oakland as proof there wasn’t support for the team, statements that riled up the Oakland fanbase even further.
"They have been good very recently. When they were good, attendance was not great."
Steve Hill touting John Fisher's poor job as A's owner a reason why they're leaving Oakland.
The A's set a Wild Card Game attendance record in 2019 with 54,005 fans pic.twitter.com/Dh7Nt88Qtx
— The Rickey Henderson of Blogs (@RickeyBlog) June 8, 2023
“I think John Fisher and Dave Kaval have really done exactly what they wanted to by making the narrative seem like it’s the fans’ fault,” Goodrich said. “Clearly, if I didn’t know anything about the A’s, I would be blaming the fans as well, because it does look like nobody’s going to the games. But at the same time, most people don’t understand the true reason why we’re not going to the games. And I think that’s a big reason why we’re doing this June 13 event.”
Support for the reverse boycott has spread among baseball fans around the country. The Oakland 68s, an independent fan group that includes A’s fans in the right-field bleachers, are hosting a reverse boycott tailgate with live music, food and games ahead of Tuesday’s first pitch. The group created a fundraiser to raise money to print Kelly green shirts with “SELL” across the front, which they will give away to fans for free before the game. The group has raised more than $30,000 and plans to hand out at least 7,000 shirts before the game.
“Wow, just the way it’s taken off,” Clary said. “Now I’m seeing that there’s fans all around Major League Baseball that are going to be wearing A’s gear to their games on Tuesday. And I totally get the other teams’ (fans’) reactions, too, because I remember when the Expos left Montreal just thinking, ‘What a raw deal these people are getting. All they do is love their team, and they get saddled with this crook of an owner,’ and now history is repeating on us.”
We #Athletics fans are calling for solidarity with the Baseball world. This Tuesday the 13th, please #OAKtogether across MLB, MiLB, or ANY game you're near.
Make a sign or "Sell" shirt, or just wear that old A's hat you have laying around and tagging us in a photo.
Thank you.⚾ pic.twitter.com/BJxWRuXhAe
— #OaklandForever – Save The Oakland A's (@Oakland_Forever) June 10, 2023
Goodrich, a native of Santa Cruz, is currently a student at DePaul University in Chicago. He’s managed a lot of the publicity for the reverse boycott through his Twitter account, and says the energy on A’s Twitter for the event has been incredible.
“I think people are really, really motivated to be able to voice their opinion in any way that they’re able to at this point,” he said. “I think the environment’s just going to be really good no matter how many tickets are sold.”
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The reverse boycott isn’t the only way A’s fans are making their voices heard. Wendy Nathan, a longtime A’s fan from the Sacramento area, recently sent letters to the 29 other MLB owners, outlining why it is important to keep the A’s in Oakland. For years, Nathan would drive to the Coliseum with her family to support the A’s. She says the last game at the Coliseum she went to was roughly three years ago and she spent hundreds of dollars for her family of five. One of their seats was broken and the trip in general was, as she described it, “a disaster.”
After that, she decided to support her team by going to games on the road rather than “giving John Fisher any of my money.” She was in Miami for the A’s recent road series and was wearing a homemade “SELL” t-shirt in the same section with two other A’s fans wearing “SELL” shirts. At one point, she says, a part-owner of the Marlins came to her section to ask her what the “SELL” shirts were referring to, so she filled him in. Afterward, she decided to write a two-page letter that carefully laid out what the A’s mean to the Oakland fan base and why they should stay. She concluded the letter with “Oakland Athletics fans are here. Oakland Athletics fans are ready to support Oakland baseball. It’s him. Not us.”
I decided to take that spare time and contact every team owner and share my thoughts on John Fisher! #FisherOut #StadiumScam #SellTheTeam pic.twitter.com/zzujeemccv
— AthleticsGirl (@AthleticsGirl) June 9, 2023
“This whole notion that Oakland doesn’t support baseball — and I don’t even live in Oakland, I live in the Sacramento area— but it just really bothered me,” she said. “I want these people to know that there are fans in Oakland, they are here. You can only destroy your product for so long before people are like, yeah, we’re done.”
Hoenig, a lifelong A’s fan and Hayward native, now lives in New York City, but he jumped on an early-morning flight on Sunday and will be at the game on Tuesday. Hoenig says he attended a Yankees–Red Sox game over the weekend and ran into another fan who was wearing an A’s hat who said he, too, was heading to Oakland for the reverse boycott.
For Hoenig, the A’s being in Oakland is part of his identity.
“I love that I am from the East Bay,” said Hoenig, who says he became an A’s fan at age 10 when the Jason Giambi-led A’s won the AL West in 2000. “I feel kind of akin to that underdog spirit that the A’s have literally always had.
“It’s kind of that you can’t keep the Oakland A’s down, and it feels like the owner has done everything he can to do so, and they still field a competitive product, and there’s still a fan base that truly obviously cares.”
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Goodrich grew up in an area filled mostly with Giants fans, and he believes that it isn’t just A’s fans who will lose out if the team leaves the Bay Area. Many of his favorite memories growing up were going to Bay Bridge Series games at the Coliseum or at Oracle Park.
“It’s just really cool to see that rivalry, and I think that’s a rivalry that needs to continue,” he said. “It’s just a really special thing about the A’s and the Giants specifically, and you won’t get that if you move the team to Vegas.”
Family is a big part of what drives these fans to want to save an organization that has, for all intents and purposes, left them behind. Clary is a baseball coach at Vacaville High School who has shared his love of the A’s with his wife and two sons, but worries he won’t be able to do so with any future grandchildren. Goodrich laments that he won’t be able to raise his kids as A’s fans when he becomes a father one day. Nathan made it a point to tell the Marlins part-owner how much it hurt that she will never get to take her new grandchild to an A’s game.
“If you’re a baseball fan, baseball goes beyond just the game. It’s the camaraderie, it’s just everything,” Nathan said.
That unique A’s fan culture has always been best represented in the Coliseum parking lot, where tailgates have long been a staple.
“We want the whole thing to be like kind of one last party at the Coliseum,” Goodrich said. “Because I think everyone who’s been there knows that when the Coliseum is crowded, it’s an environment that can’t be beaten by really anywhere else. So I think that’s our main intention. It’s also, of course, to advocate for hopefully having John Fisher sell the team.
“It could be one of the last events at the Coliseum, so we really want to emphasize the aspect of having a good time.”
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Clary doesn’t harbor any illusions that Fisher will be swayed by the reverse boycott on Tuesday, but he’s hopeful the rest of the baseball world will see what they’ll be missing if the team leaves Oakland.
“The media has taken notice both locally and nationally, and if it’s like I think it could be they’ll the run with it,” he said. “And I think it doesn’t hurt us that the owners will be meeting. I think they’re going to be looking at Fisher cross-eyed potentially and just say, ‘Why are we waiving this relocation fee? Why are you leaving? What are you doing?’”
Hoenig has similar hopes for the event.
“This franchise has given us no room for optimism, and so it feels almost silly to have optimism that anything would happen from this,” Hoenig said. “We know John Fisher won’t be watching, Dave Kaval will not be watching this. But my hope would be that fans around baseball see that this is a game that people went to on a random Tuesday against the team who’s one of the best in the MLB. It would be my hope that owners, if (the Nevada legislation) does pass, and they’re looking at a relocation fee, they’re wondering why are the A’s being given such a sweet deal when clearly people care? That’s the optimistic side of it.
“It’s just going to feel very cathartic-ly amazing to be with a bunch of A’s fans, and just basically give John Fisher and Dave Kaval and Rob Manfred the middle finger.”
Added Clary: “If nothing else, it’s gonna be a fun party. It is gonna be a bash, it’s gonna be people who can get it off their chest a little bit. I just hope it’s fun and safe for everybody.”
(Photo: Kelley L Cox / USA Today)
