What Would it Take For MLB to Force an Athletics Sale?

Owning a baseball team isn’t work in any meaningful sense. If it were, John J. Fisher would be out of a job by now. Fisher’s Athletics are on pace to have the worst single-season record of any AL or NL team since 1899. It’s not even June yet and they’re 24 1/2 games out of first place and 18 games out of third. Their 4-23 record in divisional play has floated every other team in the AL West over .500. Only one qualified starter, Jordan Lyles, has an ERA worse than Oakland’s team ERA. The baseball stinks, and ironically, A’s fans are seeing more of it anyone else. There is no rest for the weary.

The story of professional baseball since the 2010s has been that of a divorce between competitive and financial incentives. Winning does not beget profit; quite the opposite in some cases. But even as a commercial enterprise, the Athletics have been an astonishing failure. Their attendance is the worst in the league by far, with some midweek games against uninspiring opponents drawing as few as 2,000 paying customers. After a blowout win in Oakland over the weekend, the Astros’ social media team tweeted “10 runs in front of tens of fans” in reference to the pitiable attendance at the Coliseum.

There’s a long tradition of fans (or operatives, in this case) of big-market teams mocking their counterparts who cheer for less successful clubs by tweeting pictures of empty seats. It predates the idiom “poverty franchise,” but carries the same sentiment. Look at this worthless team of losers and the uncommitted dilettantes who can’t be bothered to cheer them on. Surely our greater commitment will be rewarded by the baseball gods, they say.

That brand of banter is increasingly viewed as impolite, and not just because it wasn’t long ago that the Astros lost 100 games a year with no one in the stands to witness their ineptitude. It’s because more and more, owners like Fisher are making clear that unwavering allegiance is folly.

This team hasn’t reached the ALCS since 2006, hasn’t won a game in the ALCS since 1992. This team fails to develop talent, and what promising desert flowers shoot up through the pavement are quickly culled and traded away. This owner allows his stadium to fall into disrepair, then uses his own neglect as pretext for noisome threats about leaving the city.

If there’s a business anywhere else in America whose proprietor treats his customers with such contempt as Fisher treats A’s fans, I’d like to see it. You’d have to be an absolute sucker, the kind of mark who attracts grifters from miles away on scent alone, to give a single cent of your money to a person like Fisher.

Not that he cares. Fisher’s A’s have their bags packed for Las Vegas, where they’ll build a ballpark wherever they can get the biggest tax break. Fisher’s confederates and court functionaries made their case in the Nevada state legislature on Monday. The bill for up to $380 million in public funding for stadium construction was announced, introduced, and debated over Memorial Day weekend, a hint at whether the people of Las Vegas will get more respect than the people of Oakland.

An economist testifying in support of the deal proposed a 2028 Opening Day ribbon-cutting for the stadium, then said such a date was “all aspirational.” Promises were made of thousands of new high-paying union jobs in construction and stadium operations. Left unanswered: How does one square those numbers with the A’s only employing a few hundred full-time workers? How are these optimistic projections about economic benefit different from the similar promises made to Atlanta, Cincinnati, Miami, and dozens of other cities across the country that sank hundreds of millions into billionaires’ real estate portfolios in exchange for returns that never came? What void does Las Vegas have in the tourism, construction, and entertainment sectors of its economy that can be filled by baseball, but not by existing businesses, including its NFL, NHL, and WNBA teams?

The most important outstanding question: Why anyone should believe that Fisher, given his behavior in Oakland for the past decade, would construct a less embarrassing team in its shiny new home?

On the field, the A’s have moved beyond embarrassment, to the point where I pity the players and front office workers who have to live the question: Can you turn one of MLB’s most prestigious ballclubs into a failing K-Mart? I worry that helming this disaster might destroy Mark Kotsay’s once-promising managerial career. I worry about the developmental damage Oakland’s young pitchers will almost certainly endure in their fruitless attempts to collect enough outs to end the suffering.

Who benefits from this? Not the players, not Kotsay or David Forst. Not the fans or the innocent denizens of either Oakland or Las Vegas. Not MLB or its media partners. Perhaps only Fisher, if one were willing to use a perverse corollary to Hanlon’s Razor to ascribe intentionality to the years his miserliness and lack of vision have cost everyone who’s touched the A’s under his administration.

So last week, Meg Rowley came to me with a reasonable question: What would have to happen for MLB to get rid of John J. Fisher?

You mean, “Get rid of?” Like, concrete shoes?

No, nothing that dramatic. What would have to happen for MLB to force Fisher to sell the team?

It’s important to remember that the commissioner of baseball doesn’t serve the best interests of the sport or even of the league necessarily. He reports to the owners, who have collective hiring-and-firing power over the putative leader of the sport. If the commissioner tries to punish one owner for incompetence or malfeasance, the other 29 might stand up and depose said commissioner before he comes for them. If Rob Manfred came after Fisher for fielding an uncompetitive mess of a team, what would stop him from toppling Phil Castellini? Would the Giants and Cubs have reason to be concerned about the Johnson and Ricketts families’ involvement in right-wing politics? Best to keep the commissioner in his place, then.

This behavior is by no means specific to Manfred or MLB. It pervades all sports.

Here’s a partial list of ownership behavior, across major North American sports, that hasn’t caused the league to intervene. Cal McNair of the Houston Texans handed the reins to the team to the closest thing you’ll find to Rasputin in the AFC South. The Wilpons ran the Mets for years amid financial and (frequently legally actionable) cultural dysfunction. The Arizona Coyotes have been the closest thing to Fisher’s latter-day A’s in the past few years. They lost draft picks for holding a private scouting combine for draft prospects, got kicked out of their arena for just straight-up not paying their bills, and are currently trying to navigate the next few years playing in an arena a quarter the size of any other NHL building as new arena plans get shot down left and right.

The only sanction visited on ownership came against Andrew Barroway, who sold a controlling interest to current owner Alex Meruelo in 2019 but maintained a 5% stake in the team. Barroway was banned from the NHL three months ago after he was arrested and charged with a felony for strangling his wife. Would a league levy sanctions against a controlling owner for similar misconduct? Well, in 2019 Giants CEO Larry Baer was caught on camera in an altercation with his wife. After an apology and a three-month self-imposed leave of absence, Baer returned to his post and remains there to this day.

In the rare cases when a league steps in and “forces” a sale, that power tends to be exerted circuitously. The late Jerry Richardson, former owner of the Carolina Panthers, sold the team in early 2018, months after Sports Illustrated reported on a series of lawsuits by former employees who’d accused Richardson of using a racial slur in the office and engaging in sexual harassment. In 2020, Atlanta Dream owner Kelly Loeffler drew national attention, and the pointed ire of her own team, for her vocal opposition to the Black Lives Matter movement. Loeffler’s views contributed to the loss of her U.S. Senate seat and the subsequent sale of the Dream. But neither Richardson nor Loeffler were forced to sell by their respective leagues, it was just expedient to do so at the time.

The same goes, incredibly, for former Washington Commanders owner Dan Snyder, who stands at or near the top of any list of worst owners of all time. Whether it was for running the team into the ground, building a culture of workplace sexual harassment, or clinging to the team’s outdated and racist former name, Snyder was under fire more or less nonstop for 20 years. And yet the nail in the coffin was the revelation that Snyder had been cooking the books for years, hiding a $55 million loan from the NFL and his minority shareholders, and withholding ticket revenue from visiting teams.

In the past 10 years, the NBA has forced two owners — Donald Sterling of the Los Angeles Clippers and Robert Sarver of the Phoenix Suns and the WNBA’s Phoenix Mercury — to sell after making racist comments. Sterling was banned for life, while Sarver chose to sell shortly after being fined $10 million and suspended from the league for one year. In both cases, the owners’ conduct and impact on the atmosphere of their respective workplaces had been an open secret for many years, during which time the league did little or nothing to fix things.

The last MLB owner to be ousted by the league was Frank McCourt of the Dodgers. Then-commissioner Bud Selig took operational control of the Dodgers away from McCourt in 2011 after the latter filed for bankruptcy protection. After a six-month legal battle, McCourt agreed to sell the team.

In these cases, two patterns of behavior emerge as so egregious they’d convince the other owners to break class solidarity and bounce one of their own. The first is a PR snafu — in actuality, a horrendous act of bigotry, violence, or workplace misconduct, but let’s try to think along with the owners here — so egregious it’s impossible to weather. And even then, the standards can be nebulous and depend on the relationship between owners and the caprices of an individual commissioner.

The second is one owner screwing with the other owners’ money. For decades, Snyder embarrassed the NFL, but his tenacious attachment to his team made removing him more trouble than it was worth for Paul Tagliabue, Roger Goodell, and their masters. But once it came out that Snyder was hiding money and exposing the NFL to legal liability, the math changed. The same goes for McCourt. It’s incredibly difficult to run an MLB team to the brink of insolvency, but billionaires are sometimes capable of truly remarkable creative acts.

Ordinarily, when a team enters genuinely dire financial straits, the owner is pragmatic enough to divest without too much prodding from the league. The only thing that set McCourt apart from Claude Brochu was his stubbornness.

There is a third way to get rid of an owner, demonstrated just last year by Roman Abramovich, late of Chelsea F.C. Abramovich, as dug-in an owner as ever there was, came under government sanctions because of his ties to Vladimir Putin during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In a matter of a few days, the club went under government administration with an eye toward a sale, which was executed later that spring. Short of The Gap, Inc. invading a neighboring country, it’s unlikely Fisher will fall afoul of this doctrine. Which leaves us with the two previously stated options.

The impulse to protect the other 29 owners’ financial interests from one team’s bad decisions is the closest we get to the league looking out for the best interests of the sport. Under a different set of financial conditions — conditions that existed as recently as 10 or 15 years ago — the A’s might have wobbled toward the brink of insolvency. If that were the case now, I have no doubt Manfred would intervene and force a sale.

But with each team taking in a share of national TV revenue and licensing deals, with labor costs suppressed by the luxury tax, the lack of a salary floor, and the underpayment of rank-and-file front office workers, it might be genuinely impossible to run a baseball team out of business anymore. Sure, the richer owners might grouse privately about writing checks to a team that’s making the whole lot of them look bad, but that’s a long way from voting a member out of the club.

If Fisher wants to sabotage the sport’s reputation in his city, play three-card monte with taxpayers and legislators in two states, shoo away potential fans, and let his ballpark fall into disrepair, that seems to be his prerogative. There’s nothing the fans, the players, even the government can do to prevent Fisher from continuing to destroy this team, and collect the profits from doing so. As long as the A’s don’t flirt with bankruptcy, the only body with the power to force Fisher out — the owners — has no incentive to make a change.