Good Time To Remember Warriors Owner Joe Lacob Was Denied Buying The Oakland A's Years Ago Because Bud Selig Wanted To Sell The Team To His Scumbag Friends
The inevitable has happened. The Oakland A's are officially moving to Vegas on the shoulders and will of scumbag owner John J. Fisher. Carl blogged it when it first broke here.
Just past midnight on the East Coast, a report leaked from Vegas that the Oakland A's had finally purchased their land to build their new billion dollar stadium. Of course they had to break the news that way.
It's a series of reports Oakland sports fans had long dreaded to see. A death sentence if you will. In the not too distant future they'll have seen three professional teams ripped away from them in less than 10 years (Raiders, Warriors, A's).
There were several events that led to this happening. The Giants not moving to San Jose hurt bad, but Bug Selig rejecting Joe Lacob's deal to buy the team in 2005 just so his friend could swoop in was a killer. There were other people who wanted to buy along the way, but based on what he's done with the Warriors, it seems like his purchase really would have saved them.
(source) Well, according to Golden State Warriors owner Joe Lacob, he would already have built the ballpark at Howard Terminal if his deal to buy the team from former A’s owner Steve Schott hadn’t been rejected by then-MLB commissioner Bud Selig in favor of his friends John Fisher and Lew Wolff.
Lacob even recently tried to get Fisher to buy into the Howard Terminal idea. No luck.
Lacob said he tried unsuccessfully to sell Fisher—also a friend—on Howard Terminal in the past, and that had he been the team’s owner, he’s confident his vision would already be realized because he would have simply put up all of the funding required himself rather than negotiating with the City of Oakland for hundreds of millions of dollars in public infrastructure dollars. Lacob said he doesn’t think it’s unfair for the A’s to seek the funding, but that he would have recouped the added investment expense many times over by now in completing a waterfront ballpark to rival the Giants’ Oracle Park “a long time ago.”
The last part is great
Lacob continued that his failure to acquire the A’s taught him that he needed to build stronger relationships to pave the way for success in the business of professional sports
Translation: Joe realized not being in bed with the commissioner was a big mistake. That's all this business is about.
While ripping Oakland's last pro sports team away from them is genuinely sad, the process of this all has been even more dirty. John J. Fisher has plenty of money to spend. He was born on 3rd base as the son of the founder of the Gap. There is no reason Oakland should have close to the payroll that they do.
Watching the A's trade all their players from a 97 win team as recent as 2019 has been depressing to watch. They won 60 games last year which might look like a dream season compared to what's taking place right now. Have you checked in on them in 2023? This might be a historically bad team. They're currently 3-16 with a -86 run differential. The next closest are both the Royals and Rockies at -51. We're basically watching a Triple A team compete on the big league level.
John Fisher is getting his way here because he tanked the team into irrelevancy and drove fans out of the ballpark. They've got opossums running around the stadium for Christ's sake. Allowing a terrible owner to get his dream relocation after years of being dirt cheap is bad business while also setting a terrible precedent.
There's also this article from SF Gate about Fisher growing up a huge Giants fan and doing whatever he could to keep them from moving to Florida, prior to buying the A's.
Donald Fisher recalled John was anxious about rumors in the early 1990s that the Giants could move to Florida. Like his grandfather, John was an avid fan.
"I think we ought to try to put a deal together to keep the Giants here, " John told his father, after attending a meeting with real estate magnate Walter Shorenstein and financier Warren Hellman. "Warren Hellman's interested in it, and so is Walter Shorenstein. We should be interested."
It's no wonder that kind of man has no problem moving the team to Vegas. These opening few lines provided us all with a glimpse of Fisher working behind the scenes to screw over the city of Oakland.
Major League Baseball approves the sale of the Athletics to a group headed by Lewis Wolff. Fans hope he'll be willing to keep the team's top players -- and keep the club in Oakland..
Lewis Wolff is known as the Oakland A's newest owner.
But it's John J. Fisher, son of Gap founder Donald Fisher, who is quietly putting up most of the money.
It's taken him almost 20 years, but John J. Fisher has ruined this franchise in every way possible so he could get what he's always wanted, a relocation. It's the movie Major League in real life, except there's no happy ending.