Oakland A's need a change in ownership, not a change in scenery

The Oakland Athletics have been making headlines this week, and it has nothing to do with the product on the field. The total attendance for home games Tuesday and Wednesday was 6,451, a number that wouldn't fill the stadium of their Double-A affiliate in Midland, Texas. Naturally, social media has had a field day, using this as exhibit A of why the A's should relocate. Taking the attendance numbers at face value is, at best, a lazy argument. Those criticizing A's fans for their lack of attendance need to understand the real reason why numbers are so low. If you follow me on social media, you know I am not shy about my A's fandom. You also would know I have been very vocal in the last few days about the current state of the team and that I believe it is the ownership, not the city, that needs to change. In 2005, three years removed from the events of Moneyball, John Fisher purchased the A's. Since then, the team has accelerated on the downward spiral of being the cheapest team in baseball. During Fisher's tenure, the A's became synonymous with developing talent. Unfortunately for fans like myself, Oakland also became the butt of the joke that the A's were the best Triple-A team in baseball. From 2005-21, the A's let go of talent and fan favorites such as Yoenis Cespedes, Josh Donaldson and Marcus Semien, to name a few. None of this compares to the fire sale in March 2022, when the A's blew up the roster by trading star infielders Matt Chapman and Matt Olson along with pitchers Chris Bassitt and Sean Manaea. Understandably, fans were upset, but Fisher's next move is what is causing the seats of Oakland Coliseum to be empty. Despite spending $0 in free agency and having the same payroll as they did in 1991, the A's nearly doubled ticket prices this season and stripped away all benefits of holding season tickets. Oakland has also taken away parts of the game-day experience fans loved. On opening night, Twitter was full of fans letting social media know how awful the ballpark experience was. Half of the concessions at the stadium were closed; those that were open were slow, and at one point, the stadium ran out of ready hot dogs. Fans that endured the 40-minute wait for a frank were greeted at their seats by cobwebs, making it look like the building has been deserted for years. One fan on Twitter even said the whole stadium "felt gross and dirty" and it "wasn't an experience she was eager to pay for again." When ownership is practically discouraging fans to attend games, can you blame fans for not wanting to show up? Then there's the whole stadium debacle. When the Raiders moved, the A's marched out a petty "Rooted in Oakland" campaign that went along with their plans to build a new ballpark. Actions speak louder than words, however, and many fans have lost trust with how ownership and the front office have carried themselves in the process. On May 24, 2021, during the middle of an A's game against the Seattle Mariners, team president Dave Kaval tweeted a video from the Vegas Golden Knights Stanley Cup Playoff game. Rather than watching his first-place team play, the team's president was in Las Vegas, leading many fans to believe he was searching for a new home for the A's. Many fans, myself included, felt that this was also offering praise to another city's fanbase. So much for staying rooted in Oakland, I suppose. Fisher has maintained the A's need more revenue to spend money and keep those players, and that revenue will come from a new stadium. He made the same argument to get the San Jose Earthquakes a new soccer-specific stadium, yet seven years later they still rank toward the bottom of Major League Soccer in payroll. So why should A's fans believe he won't do the same in Oakland? So as far as attendance goes, fans are staying away because they don't want to put money in their $2 billion-dollar owner's pockets that they know he won't spend to improve the team. They are staying away because the stadium has cobwebs on the seats and the urinals are still horse troughs. They aren't buying jerseys or merchandise because their players will just be traded or released once they develop into stars. If the A's manage to build a new ballpark in Oakland, it will be in spite of ownership, not because of it. The fans are stuck in the middle of a bad situation. They either don't attend after years of being dragged through the mud and risk losing the team, or they show up and enable more of the same lack of effort to fuel the ownership group's half effort to build in Oakland. The attendance numbers aren't the reflection of a fan base, they are the reflection of a boycott.