Las Vegas Deserves This Team (And Vice Versa)
The relocation was painful. Oakland's grief is real. And Las Vegas still deserves major league baseball. Both things are true at the same time.
I want to say something that Oakland fans -- real ones, who cried when the last game ended -- are sometimes reluctant to say: Las Vegas deserves this team.
Not because of what Fisher did. Not because the relocation was handled well, or fairly, or with any particular care for the Oakland community that got left behind. It wasn't, and we all know it wasn't.
But Las Vegas itself -- the city, the people who live there, the community of sports fans who have built something real with the Golden Knights and the Raiders -- Las Vegas deserves to have baseball. It deserves a team it can call its own. The 2.3 million people who live in the greater Las Vegas area did not negotiate the A's departure from Oakland. They just woke up one day and found out they were getting a baseball team.
You don't blame the new neighbors for the landlord's decisions.
Two Things True At Once
The grief is real. Oakland deserved better. John Fisher's ownership was inadequate. The Oakland community's investment in five decades of A's fandom was not met with equivalent care from the franchise. All of that is true.
And: Las Vegas is a legitimate sports market with legitimate fans who deserve legitimate sports. The Golden Knights proved that. The Raiders are proving it. The A's are about to test it.
Both things are true at the same time, and holding both without collapsing one into the other is actually important for the fan community we're trying to build here.
What Las Vegas Brings
Las Vegas brings something that Oakland, in its final years, could not provide: a clean slate. A new building. A city that hasn't already processed twenty years of broken promises and deferred maintenance and ownership that treated the fan base as an obstacle.
Las Vegas fans come to this franchise without the scar tissue. They can fall in love with it cleanly. That's actually something worth rooting for.
The A's deserve fans who are excited about the future. Las Vegas fans get to be those fans. Oakland fans get to carry the history. The migration doesn't have losers and winners -- it has different roles. Oakland built something. Las Vegas inherits it and gets to build something new on top of it.
We followed the team here. That's not failure. That's loyalty. And loyalty, even complicated loyalty, is what makes a fan community worth belonging to.
Green and gold. Wherever they play.
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