It Should Be Simple for A’s Ownership

John Fisher should stay in Oakland and do the heavy lifting to finalize the Howard Terminal ballpark. Or sell to someone who will.

It should all be so simple.

But when it comes to A’s ownership’s decades-long search for a new ballpark, John Fisher and the team’s front office insist on making it hard.

So, I have to ask:

John, what the hell are you doing?

It’s an unpleasant but fair question. Fisher paid $180 million for the A’s in 2005. Today, the A’s are now worth $1.18 billion, according to Forbes.

That is $1 billion more than what Fisher paid to buy them. So, after 18 years of running the franchise on the cheap, Fisher is guaranteed at least $1 BILLION in profit – and that’s not even counting the millions he received each year before the pandemic hit in 2020. Nor is it counting the billions of dollars that Fisher, his two brothers, and their mother are each worth after adding to the inheritance that Gap founder Donald Fisher left them when he died in 2009.

Not bad work if you can get it.

Moreover, a new Oakland ballpark would push Fisher’s profit from his A’s investment into the stratosphere, netting him an extra billion dollars or two over the next decade in increased team valuation.

That’s one reason why it’d be worth it to Fisher to merely pay the infrastructure funding gap to push Howard Terminal over the hump.

Warriors owner Joe Lacob gets it. He understands that a relatively small expense would guarantee the A’s owner a multibillion-dollar return of his investment. That’s why Lacob told the San Francisco Chronicle’s John Shea last summer that he would just pay the Oakland ballpark funding gap himself if he were allowed to buy the A’s. (So far, Lacob’s offers have been rebuffed by Fisher.)

If Fisher did what Lacob suggests, he’d be a hero. Fisher could end the seemingly intractable A’s stadium woes and still claim that he believed in Oakland at a time when other team owners, including Lacob, had deserted the East Bay.

Fisher would be cheered by fans and media for the first time in his otherwise unpopular ownership. That positive spin, arriving after years of criticism, could be the best inheritance Fisher, 61, could leave his children and granchildren.

It’s such a simple concept. Yet, for some reason, Fisher still doesn’t get it.

In light of all that … among the many issues surrounding Fisher and his team’s historically terrible performance thus far this season, I keep returning to the simplest question I would love to ask him:

John, what the hell are you doing?

And I’m not talking about the Athletics’ awful start, in which they’re playing .200 ball. Meaning, for every 5 games played, they lose 4.

Off the field is where Fisher has been most bewildering and disappointing.

The A’s owners over the past three decades have been whining about being “stuck at the Oakland Coliseum” and have tried ad nauseum to leave the proud old yard for several sites in multiple cities. Proposals in Fremont and San Jose have gone nowhere.

But they’ve made great progress at Howard Terminal, along the Oakland waterfront just north of Jack London Square. In fact, Fisher’s A’s have never been closer to finalizing a ballpark deal than the one they have brewing at Howard Terminal.

That’s the good news.

At this point, the A’s have an approved environmental impact report from the city. All CEQA lawsuits have been expedited and ruled on – with decisions almost entirely in the Athletics’ favor, clearing the way for the A’s to strike a deal and build on the waterfront site if they want to.

Also, the city of Oakland has protected city taxpayers yet still creatively worked to come very close to meeting the team’s initial price tag for infrastructure costs. Oakland officials have done this by cobbling together more than $320 million in state and federal resources for infrastructure upgrades.

Although the project was not awarded the $180 million grant that it applied for, city officials have said they will vie for another $140 million in regional, state and federal grant funds, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Nearly all of the original obstacles that the A’s faced when they announced their Howard Terminal proposal have been cleared. As a result, the A’s have never been closer to finalizing a ballpark deal in Oakland than they are right now.

That fact is so easy to forget because Fisher and the A’s keep reminding people that they’re “exploring parallel paths” for a stadium in Las Vegas.

Is the Vegas talk real or a leverage play for negotiations with Oakland?

We don’t know.

What we do know is that the only obstacle left in the East Bay appears to be that of Fisher’s own doing. Reportedly, the sticking points preventing a final development deal between the A’s and Oakland involve the increasing estimated infrastructure costs and the percentage of affordable homes that will be included among the 3,000 housing units the A’s plan to build in The Town.

Again, given all the profit that will come to Fisher and the A’s from building a new ballpark, why isn’t ownership following Lacob’s advice and just paying the freight to get this done?

Like most baseball fans, I’m frustrated and perplexed because it was just two years ago that A’s executives announced they’d run out of patience with Oakland leaders and suddenly were considering a move to Las Vegas.

At the time, I was shocked.

Never mind that this was the spring of 2021 and the world was still grappling with the coronavirus and cities were still bruised, battered, and reeling from the economic effects of Covid-related closures. (Many cities still are.)

Never mind that this was the same Las Vegas to which stumblebum failure Mark Davis had just moved the Oakland Raiders. (Davis and the Raiders have been failing miserably ever since.)

And never mind that in early 2021 Fisher had only spent three Covid-interrupted years on Howard Terminal before making threats to Oakland. That behavior starkly contrasted the 2005-2015 era, in which Fisher wasted an entire decade letting Lew Wolff bang his head against the wall several times in his quixotic, never-ending attempts to move to San Jose.   

Let’s repeat that:

Fisher gave the dead-on-arrival San Jose plans 10 years to fail and fail again. But the Howard Terminal plan had only three Covid-interrupted years before A’s executives loudly began threatening to move to the same desert where Mark Davis’ floundering franchise has become a national punch line.

The double standard is obvious and insulting to home fans in Oakland. Perhaps most important, that double standard is destructive to Fisher’s stated goal of building a new A’s ballpark.

None of it makes any sense.

If the gap in infrastructure funding for Oakland’s Howard Terminal ballpark site truly is only $250 million — the figure A’s President Dave Daval gave last August — then this this deal should have been wrapped up last summer.

Seriously. While $250 million is an absurdly high number to you and me, it’s like pocket change to Fisher and his family. But instead of closing the Oakland ballpark deal AND saving himself money from the inflationary construction costs that rise every year, Fisher has dawdled and deferred, hurting his own attempts at striking the stadium deal his team says it needs so much.

More importantly, it damages an already tortured A’s fan base that deserves far better than what this ownership has delivered for nearly 20 years.

An A’s fan at the Coliseum was recently photographed holding a sign that said, “StAy & $ell!”

John, the next time somebody mentions Howard Terminal and then asks you, “What the hell are you doing?”, please know that either answer is acceptable.

Stay or sell. At this point, those are the only sensible options for the Oakland A’s.

---

Timeline Cleanser

Was it Connie Mack or Lauryn Hill who once said … ?