Today, Explained - How to steal a team

Episode Date: May 24, 2024

The billionaire owner of the Oakland A’s is trying to move his team to Vegas, and he wants public money to do it. Writer Dan Moore explains how A’s fans are fighting back. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy and Peter Balonon-Rosen, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Rob Byers and Andrea Kristinsdottir, and hosted by Noam Hassenfeld. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There's a war going on in Oakland. On one side, a bumbling multi-billionaire. On the other side, thousands and thousands of furious baseball fans. And this past March, on opening day, those fans did something unprecedented. They threw a tailgate political fundraiser rager in the parking lot. Food trucks, two separate Mexican street bands, carnival games, and of course, throughout the lot, thunderous car-rattling chants of sell the team and exhortations for John Fisher, the A's owner, to keep the A's in Oakland. But the stadium itself was pretty much

empty. A's fans were boycotting their own team. At times, it was louder out in the parking lot than it was inside. And it's not just A's fans. Sports fans all over the country are doing everything they can to stop billionaires from stealing their teams. That's ahead on Today Explained. Bet MGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas.

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to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. It's Today Explained. I'm Noam Hassenfeld, filling in today. And I'm joined by Dan Moore. Contributor for The Ringer, The Atlantic, Baseball Prospectus.

And? East Bay resident, lifelong A's fan. The A's are a historic franchise in sports. This is the home of Reggie Jackson. Broken bat up the middle. Base hit, Reggie Jackson. And Catfish Hunter, and the Bash Brothers,

and the Moneyball A's of the early 2000s. The Oakland A's have set a new American League record with their 20th consecutive win. And this is a game nobody here will ever forget. They are important and central to the kind of epic story that Major League Baseball tells the world about itself. The A's represented something essential about the East Bay's countercultural funk.

They wore white cleats. They have mustaches. Their jerseys are technicolor green and yellow. They're like misfits of Major League Baseball who are also responsible for some of baseball's most memorable dynasties. How do we get from that to more fans outside than inside throwing a middle finger to the owner? Reverse back to the late 1980s. The A's are one of the most not only dominant,

but also successful organizations in sports. They go to three straight World Series from 1988 to 1990. The A's, the world champs and the deserving world champs. They have some of the most memorable and iconic characters in sports in Mark McGuire, Jose Canseco. And I'm Mark. They also top the American League in attendance. They host the All-Star Game. NBC Sports presents the 1987 All-Star Game. They have the highest payroll in the major leagues. They are everything that, down the line, they would not be. And they start that degeneration when the owner, who is responsible for that 1980s dynasty,

sells the team to a comparatively much cheaper ownership group that will not invest in the team, that won't sign free agents, that won't re-sign homegrown stars. By the mid-2000s, this is starting to have a sort of cancerous effect on the organization. Fans are frustrated that they keep watching their favorite players walk out the door anytime their rookie contract is up. Enter John Fisher, who is the A's current owner. Initially, John Fisher was actually sort of a source of hope in Oakland. One important thing to know about him, probably the most important thing to know about him, is that he's very rich. His parents started Gap, so he's the heir to a retail fortune. Forbes puts his net worth at between $2.5 and $3 billion today. The A's had not had an owner like that before, and there was hope around these parts that he might,

by way of his immense wealth, restore to Oakland A's baseball, and by extension, Oakland as a sports town, a level of investment befitting this organization's history and former glory. The opposite happens. John Fisher takes a sledgehammer to the team's payroll. For the entirety of his tenure, the A's payroll has ranked near the bottom of the league. His self-professed singular focus since purchasing the team has been moving it out of Oakland. He tries to move the team to San Jose. He tries to move the team to Fremont. All these efforts fail generally because they're clumsily handled. All the while, he's continuing this process of letting players go out the door,

of not investing any money in the team. By the mid-2010s, the Raiders and the Warriors leave town. So he sees the market opportunity that's available and being the only show leave town. So he sees the market opportunity that's available and being the only show in town. And he also, not incorrectly, perceives the political leverage that's available to him. He embarks at that time on an effort to extract from Oakland roughly $855 million in public funding

for a lavish, privately owned, likely very privately valuable, stadium-anchored real estate development on the West Oakland waterfront. Yeah, he's basically, like, threatening them with a move. Yeah. Like, either give me lots of public funds or I'm stealing the team. That's exactly right. Here is where things start to get bad. When the city council did not consent to Fisher's terms

and requests as rapidly or as enthusiastically as Fisher would have wanted, John Fisher switched tacks again and said, okay, well, I'm going to move the team somewhere else. And then he engages in what I think can probably be described as the most openly cynical and ultimately painful relocation campaign in recent sports memory. Basically, he seeks to prove that Oakland sports is broken by breaking it himself. It makes the blissful before times seem like ancient history.

So we're in 2021. After the end of the 2021 season, the deal in Oakland is proceeding slower than he wants. He announces that he's setting his eyes towards Las Vegas. He wants to build a stadium there. He lets go of every one of the A's good or recognizable players. The A's payroll goes to the last in the major leagues by an order of magnitude. The Oakland Col payroll goes to the last in the major leagues by an order of

magnitude. The Oakland Coliseum, which was already recognized universally as probably the worst stadium in sports and which Fisher owns half of, he allows to degenerate into even worse straits. Possums infest the visitor's announcing booth. Sewage leaks into the locker rooms. The lights don't work. He then raises ticket prices. The idea is to systematically alienate A's fans, drive them away from the ballpark, and manufacture a political and economic pretext for relocating.

Have you ever seen the movie Major League? Of course, yeah. It's basically the plot of Major League. That's the only precedent for this that, yeah. It's basically the plot of Major League. That's the only precedent for this that is available. It's in fiction. Here's to the thrill of defeat, Charlie. And in Fisher's case, it almost works. In the spring of 2023, he announces that he has entered into a binding agreement to build a stadium on Las Vegas Boulevard. A few months after that, he secures $380 million in public funding in Nevada to contribute to the stadium

construction. And then a few months after that, he garners approval from Major League Baseball's 29 other owners for the relocation. And so he has acquired much of what he needs from the powers that be to leave Oakland. There's only one problem, though. A's fans are not inclined to let him leave so easily. This is the birth of what I think is one of the more impressive fan activism movements in American sports history. It starts small. There are two main fan groups here. One called Last Dive Bar. impressive fan activism movements in American sports history. It starts small. There are two main fan groups here, one called Last Dive Bar,

one called the Oakland 68s. Together, they start organizing sort of smaller-scale demonstrations, one at the Coliseum. They call it the Tomato Tailgate. They created effigies of John Fisher and MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred, and they invited fans to come to the parking lot and huck tomatoes at them. I went, and it was quite fun. But then things really increase in scale. A few months later, they organize the reverse boycott.

On a random Tuesday night, they pack the Coliseum, they sell it out full of A's fans, and they actually orchestrate something special specific to the fifth inning. There's a moment of silence that A's fans, and they actually orchestrate something special specific to the fifth inning. There's a moment of silence that A's fans have managed to spread among everybody assembled. And as soon as that ends, we're going to erupt in mass in a sell the team chant. The crowd goes silent and now getting very loud at the Coliseum. Calling for John Fisher to sell the team to someone local who actually gives a damn about it and about Oakland.

And the chants were thunderous. The point being to refute the lie that Fisher had been telling about them and that was central to his justification for relocating, which is that Oakland doesn't care about A's baseball. Oakland doesn't want to and probably can't support Major League Sports. They came out in force to say without any shadow of a doubt that, no, the problem is not us. It is the ownership group that has corroded support for this organization over the years. Slowly, more and more players are speaking out. One is Trevor May, who was a relief pitcher for the A's in 2023.

To the A's organization and every single person part of it, I love all of you. Every single one of you, except for one guy. We all know who that guy is. Sell the team, dude. And that has become kind of a rallying cry for A's fans what is kind of the status of the A's at the moment

like it seems like they've made their point is Fisher still moving them A's fans have made their point it was broadly ignored by Fisher last February Fisher revealed that he would actually be moving the team much sooner than expected. The stadium that he wants to build in Las Vegas would not, under the best of

circumstances, actually be ready until 2028. And so a lot of folks around here had assumed that the A's would play in Oakland until that time. But in February, John Fisher announced that he was actually relocating the team to Sacramento at the end of the 2024 season. Sacramento? They're going to play in the Giants AAA affiliate park, which houses about 14,000 seats. The latest details I've seen stipulate that the A's will be able to play in that stadium without paying rent for the next three years. Cool. Taking just this amazing historic franchise, moving it to Sacramento for three years as a waiting period,

paying nothing, and then taking it down to Vegas. That's the plan. That's the plan. Man. What do you think Oakland's going to be like without the A's? Well, it will be emptier. In losing a sports team, you never just lose the team. You lose the community spaces that that team supported. You lose the shared languages that bond fans together.

You lose the cultural engine of that team, right? And so Oakland will miss all of that. However, fans here and citizens here are right now in the process of building what's going to come next. And fans are rallying around certain new independent professional teams that are setting up shop in the city. There's a soccer team, the roots that many A's fans have adopted and now love and dedicate their energy to. Oakland is also, if nothing else, a very resilient place. And so it will bounce back. But for now, it hurts. Oakland's not the only city that's had an owner threaten to steal their team.

Coming up, how fans in other cities have fought back. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp.

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ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained. Cards are issued by Sutton Bank, a member of the FDIC, and terms and conditions do apply. We're back with Dan Moore, writer for The Ringer and The Atlantic. Today it's played! We're back with Dan Moore, writer for The Ringer and The Atlantic. Before the break, you were telling us how Oakland fans are just really trying to get their team to stay, even if it's not possible. But I'm just curious if there are examples of fans ever successfully stopping the move of a team or getting a team back? Yes. You saw it in Cleveland, where there was a citywide uprising in the mid-1990s

when then-Browns owner Art Modell decided to relocate the Browns to Baltimore. Money talks and nothing is sacred, such as the state of pro sports in the 90s. The Browns are indeed moving to Baltimore. Where he's been offered a brand new, totally publicly funded football stadium, along with free rent. And what amounts to a $50 million signing bonus to Modell for moving. CNN's Mark Moore has more.

Fans, all of Cleveland, it seems like, rises up in resistance against this move. The city of Cleveland is not giving up without a fight. There are protests across the city. On Sunday, in the stadium parking lot, they will hang Art Modell in effigy. Fans organize caravan protests where they protest outside of Monday Night Football games. It makes me sick. I was just telling them, it makes me sick to my stomach. It hurts. The guy's ripped my heart out. The mayor gets involved. Comedian Drew Carey gets involved and leads rallies.

Ultimately, their voices are so loud and resonant that the commissioner of the NFL persuades Modell to agree to leaving the Browns likeness, their history, the team name, their colors and logos. Modell would still be able to move his personnel and his team to Baltimore where they would become the Ravens but Cleveland did keep the Browns. Ladies and gentlemen, it's my pleasure to introduce to you the 1999 Cleveland Browns! It's exciting. It's like everything's back in place. Everything's as it should be again. If I were to just put that in context, it sort of feels like the A's fans came out in a show of force.

They showed everyone who they are. Maybe they've lost this iteration of the team. Probably. Does Vegas at least want them? No. Okay. There seems to be very little enthusiasm for bringing the A's to Vegas in Vegas. A public schools advocacy group has filed a constitutional challenge all against the

Nevada bill that paved the way for the A's ballpark stadium. This has to be done in a way that actually benefits the people that live here. $380 million to a billionaire is not the priorities that are needed for our children and for education. Schools over stadiums, which represents teachers in Nevada, they see the allocation of nearly 400 million dollars in public funding for a stadium for the A's of all organizations as a gross misuse of public funds. And the governor there, Joe Lombardo, in the same legislative session vetoed a bill that would have extended a free school lunch program for students. Wow. Okay. So let's give $400 million to billionaires and no free lunch to kids.

You could see why there might be some people who are upset about that. But the arguments that the owners usually make is that these stadiums are going to be economic boons for the cities, right? That's right. And how does that stack up with reality? It does not. For 30, 40 years now, economists have been looking at these massive stadium projects. And the overwhelming amount of evidence is that they do not spur economic development or increased tax revenues that come anywhere close to justifying the kind of public investment that is right now being dedicated to these stadiums. The jobs that they create are seasonal and low-wage. The economic activity that they do encourage is just substituted economic activity that would have been happening at a different place somewhere else in the city. It is categorically a bad investment for taxpayers and for cities. About this, economists are unequivocal.

I mean, if economists are so unequivocal about this, are cities learning the lesson at all? Are other stadiums being built? These deals are still happening, and they're in fact getting worse. Over the last few years, in Buffalo, the Buffalo Bills were given a public subsidy to replace their stadium. That's going to cost the public more than a billion dollars when it's all said and done. Nashville last year approved a $1.26 billion subsidy for a new stadium for the Tennessee Titans. Anywhere from 1,600 workers in a day will be working on this project, except on Sundays, of course.

So these things are still happening, and we are on the precipice, actually, of many more happening. Browns have made their thoughts known on what they're looking for when the stadium lease expires at the end of 2028. So today we're going to be talking about the Carolina Panthers' current stadium situation. The Cincinnati Bengals have announced a major investment in the Pei Corps Stadium. Let's talk about it. Across the country, owners are right now asking cities, taxpayers, for hundreds of millions of dollars in public funding for these new projects.

And in many cases, politicians are amenable to it, at the very least, in spite of the overwhelming evidence suggesting that these are bad deals. This is the thing that gets me so, I would say, riled up and confused, because we have tons of evidence from economists saying that these new expensive stadiums don't give cities economic benefits. And then we see what happens when cities actually stand up for themselves. And you have like the Oakland mayor not wanting to give John Fisher 800 whatever million dollars for his stadium. And then he steals the team. Well, team owners and leagues are given license to operate as effective monopolies, right?

They control the number of teams that are able to play in a league at any given time. They determine which cities get to keep or adopt teams. Team owners extort cities for public funding, plunder and weaponize public sentiments and loyalties for their team, and ultimately, if need be, rip their team out of their city to go to somewhere more fortuitous for them if there's an availability. Yeah, so that seems bad. Is there anything we can do? How do we get past this tension here? Recently, there was a bill I believe called the Moneyball Act. How can you not be romantic about baseball? That was put forth by Representative

Barbara Lee, who represents Oakland. It would require the owners of any professional baseball team seeking to relocate more than 25 miles away to compensate the state and local authorities they move away from. So like if you take a team out of a city, you owe that city a bunch of money? Effectively, yeah. Okay. Every team that plays in the three most popular and the three most heavily subsidized major leagues is worth more than a billion dollars. Most of these owners are billionaires themselves.

They don't exactly need this public funding and when subsidized stadium projects are put before the public, say by a referendum or on a ballot initiative, they most of the time fail. Plans to renovate Arrowhead Stadium where the Kansas City Chiefs play, they have hit a wall there after the community voted against a tax to pay for it. That's what happened recently in Kansas City, that's what happened recently in Kansas City. That's what happened in Arizona. And I cried like a baby. I cried like a baby with such gratitude for 10 million voters.

So one potential solution here is for fans, taxpayers, to make known to their representatives that they expect these kinds of decisions to be made by the public. And in the instance when taxpayers agree together or a majority of taxpayers agree to give John Fisher $380 million, then so be it. But we're still in a world

where we have a limited supply of sports teams. We have fans that desperately want their team to represent their city. The A's fans, that desperately want their team to represent their city, the A's fans, maybe they've shown MLB that they could one day get another team to come back to Oakland. If Major League Sports do return to Oakland, it will be a product of nothing other than

the efforts of these fans and the activism of these fans, which, yes, was designed to convince John Fisher and the people he needed approval from to stop what was happening, but it has also proven that this is a major league sports town and that there are fans here who want a baseball team to root for and that this is a viable market. And so, right, that should be counted as chief among A's fans' accomplishments in this effort.

Next season, when they're in Sacramento, are they going to be the Sacramento A's? Is that the deal? No. John Fisher has come out and said that they are going to just be the athletics. No city. Oh, my God. That's such a middle finger to Oakland.

Yeah, I know. Oakland Athletics. Oakland Athletics. Oakland Athletics. Oakland is in the house, dog. Oakland Athletics. Oakland Athletics. Oakland Athletics.

Sports writer Dan Moore. This episode was produced by Abhishek Artsy and Peter Balanon-Rosen. It was edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and engineered by Rob Byers and Andrea Christen's daughter. I'm Noam Hassenfeld, and this is Today Explained. We'll be right back.