Who Is Really to Blame for the A's Leaving Oakland
Assigning responsibility: John Fisher, the city of Oakland, the fans, MLB, the media. An honest accounting.
Every bad outcome in a complicated situation produces a corresponding argument about who caused it. The A's departure from Oakland has generated one of those arguments, sustained over years, involving a cast of institutional and individual actors each of whom bears some portion of responsibility and none of whom bears all of it.
The honest accounting requires taking each of the major actors seriously and assigning fault where it actually exists, not where it is emotionally convenient to put it.
John Fisher
Start here, because this is where most of the blame belongs.
Fisher inherited significant wealth from his parents' Gap clothing empire and became the principal owner of the A's in 2005. His ownership has been characterized, across twenty years, by a consistent unwillingness to invest in the franchise at the level that competitive baseball requires. The A's were consistently among the lowest-payroll teams in baseball under his tenure. The organization became expert at developing young talent through the draft and trading those players when they became expensive, essentially running a perpetual rebuilding cycle that produced interesting teams but not championships.
Fisher did not build a ballpark in Oakland. He had the resources to do it. The most straightforward comparison point is Steve Ballmer, who purchased the Los Angeles Clippers in 2014 and subsequently committed to building the Intuit Dome with primarily private funding. Or Dan Gilbert, whose Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse renovations in Cleveland were substantially privately financed. Or the various NFL ownership groups who have contributed hundreds of millions to stadium projects in recent years.
Fisher's position, consistently held through the Howard Terminal negotiations, was that the public sector needed to fund the infrastructure for a privately owned stadium. When Oakland could not fully fund that infrastructure -- a city with a chronic budget deficit and competing needs for basic public services -- Fisher concluded the market was untenable and left.
The question of whether Fisher was technically correct that the Howard Terminal deal could not be made to work financially is separate from the question of whether he tried hard enough to make it work. People close to the negotiations, speaking carefully but with clear subtext, suggest that Fisher was not particularly motivated to close the Oakland deal after the Las Vegas option materialized.
Fisher is the controlling decision-maker. He chose to leave. The responsibility for that choice is his.
The City of Oakland
Oakland's contribution to this outcome is real but frequently overstated in analysis that is trying to seem balanced.
The city had genuine fiscal problems. Oakland was facing budget shortfalls that required cutting police, fire, and library services. The infrastructure costs associated with the Howard Terminal site -- contaminated land remediation, transportation improvements, utility work -- were substantial and not trivially offset by the tax revenue a new stadium would generate.
City council politics also complicated matters. The coalition needed to approve a stadium deal included members with competing priorities and legitimate concerns about gentrification effects, public land use, and whether subsidizing a billionaire's stadium was the right use of Oakland's limited financial tools.
But it is important to note that Oakland made a significant counter-proposal in September 2023, after the A's had announced their Las Vegas land purchase. That proposal included $450 million in infrastructure funding through a project-area financing mechanism. The A's rejected it. The city's willingness to put that deal on the table, late as it was, suggests that Oakland was not simply obstructing a deal it could have done.
The city bears responsibility for taking too long to get to serious negotiations, for the bureaucratic delays in the environmental review process, and for the political dysfunction that made deal-making harder than it needed to be. Oakland failed to execute a stadium deal over twenty-plus years of trying. That is a failure. It is just not the primary failure in this story.
Major League Baseball
MLB's role in the A's departure is the most underexamined piece of this story.
Commissioner Manfred repeatedly stated that MLB preferred the A's to stay in Oakland but supported the franchise's business decisions. This framing is misleading. The league has substantial leverage over franchise relocation decisions: the approval vote requires 75% of owners, and the commissioner has significant influence over how that vote is framed and timed.
The commissioner's office also has tools for supporting struggling franchises in their stadium negotiations. MLB can provide financial assistance, facilitate discussions with potential investors, apply political pressure on city governments through media and business relationships, and in extreme cases provide direct support for stadium construction.
There is little evidence that MLB deployed these tools seriously on behalf of the Oakland situation. The league's apparent calculation was that Las Vegas was a better long-term market than a deteriorating Oakland arrangement, and that calculation drove the league's stance. The 27-2 vote to approve relocation was not a reluctant concession; it was an outcome the league facilitated.
MLB has a structural interest in franchise stability and community presence -- the sport's antitrust exemption and its federal recognition as a quasi-public institution rest partly on the premise that it serves community interests. The Oakland departure represents a failure of that premise, and the league carries responsibility for allowing and enabling it.
The Fans
The accusation that insufficient fan support caused the A's departure has been made most prominently by Fisher himself, and it deserves to be addressed directly before being largely dismissed.
Attendance at the Coliseum was poor. That is true. The A's drew some of the smallest crowds in baseball for much of the 2010s and 2020s.
But the argument that fans are responsible for the franchise's departure requires ignoring several important facts. First, attendance declined in direct correlation with the team's competitiveness and the stadium's deterioration -- not independently of those factors. Second, the A's ticket prices, while lower than the Giants, were not negligible for a working-class city facing economic displacement. Third, and most importantly, fan attendance is a response to the product, not an obligation that exists independent of the product's quality.
Fans in Oakland attended in large numbers when the team was good. The 1988-1990 dynasty era drew well over two million fans per season. The Moneyball playoff teams of the early 2000s drew respectably. When Fisher's ownership produced competitive teams -- the brief window in the late 2010s when the A's surprised -- attendance responded upward.
Blaming fans for not attending an intentionally bad team being marketed minimally from a deteriorating stadium is among the least defensible arguments in this entire situation.
The Media
The Bay Area media played a complicated role in this story that is worth acknowledging. National baseball media -- ESPN, The Athletic, various podcasts and newsletters -- generally framed the Oakland situation as a tragedy of inadequate public support for a franchise in an era when cities should know better than to let this happen. This framing let Fisher off relatively easy.
Local Bay Area media was more aggressive in covering Fisher's role, but even there, the coverage often focused on process and logistics rather than the underlying values question: was this a franchise owner acting in bad faith with his community?
The media's failure was less about dishonesty than about a structural disinclination to assign unambiguous blame to a billionaire sports owner when the story could be told as a complicated civic failure instead.
The Honest Summary
Fisher bears primary responsibility. Oakland bears secondary responsibility. MLB enabled the outcome. The fans do not bear meaningful responsibility. The media underserved its audience.
That is not a satisfying conclusion because it is not symmetric. Blame in complicated situations often is not. The A's left Oakland because the owner of the team decided to leave, and the systems that exist to prevent franchise relocations either could not or would not stop him.
Everything else is context.
Support LV Athletics Nation by shopping through our affiliate links. Every purchase helps fund independent coverage of the A's relocation story.
Affiliate links. We may earn a commission at no additional cost to you.