I have to tell you something upfront. I am from the Bay Area. I grew up there. The A's were part of the backdrop of my childhood in the way teams are when you grow up near them. Not my primary team, but present. Real. A thing that existed in the community in the way sports teams exist when they have been somewhere for a long time.
So I am not a neutral observer on this story. I want you to know that going in. But I also think the fact that I watched this happen from close up and over years makes me better equipped to explain what actually occurred than someone who is summarizing it from the outside. Sometimes proximity is a liability in journalism. Sometimes it is the whole point.
What happened to the Oakland A's over the last decade is the Bears story and the Bills story and the MiLB story and basically every story I write on this site, all compressed into one franchise over one decade. It is the complete and comprehensive illustration of how professional sports ownership works when the owner decides the city they are in is no longer worth the trouble.
How it started
The A's stadium situation was always complicated. The Oakland Coliseum is a genuinely terrible facility by modern standards. Built in 1966, shared for years with the Raiders, perpetually in need of repairs that never quite happened, visually depressing in a way that became kind of darkly charming over time but was objectively not the product a 21st century MLB team should be putting fans into. Nobody disputed that the A's needed a new stadium. The question was who was going to pay for it and where it was going to be.
John Fisher bought the team in 2005. In the years that followed, the franchise pursued stadium deals in three different locations. Fremont. San Jose. Then a waterfront site in Oakland itself near the Coliseum called Howard Terminal, which was the one that seemed closest to actually happening and then spectacularly did not.
The Howard Terminal project was ambitious. A 35,000 seat ballpark on the Oakland waterfront, surrounded by a mixed-use development district that was going to bring housing and retail and commercial space to a part of the city that genuinely needed it. The renderings were beautiful. The concept was sound. Oakland needed the development. The fans wanted it. The city was trying to make it work.
Fisher wanted public money. The city could not or would not produce it in the amounts he needed. The negotiations dragged. The deadlines kept getting extended and then not met. And the whole time this was happening, Fisher was quietly exploring other options.
"The A's situation is what happens when an owner decides the city is no longer worth the trouble. And decides to make that exit as slowly and as profitably as possible."
The reverse boycott
At some point during the Howard Terminal negotiations, the A's fanbase did something genuinely unusual. They organized a reverse boycott. Instead of staying away from games to protest the team's performance or the ownership's decisions, they showed up. En masse. On a specific day, for a specific game that was otherwise expected to draw almost nobody, thousands of fans packed the Coliseum to show the league and the ownership and whoever was watching that Oakland wanted baseball and was willing to support it.
The crowd that day was significantly larger than the A's had been drawing on most nights. The energy was real. It was one of the more unusual collective acts of sports fandom I have seen, a group of people essentially staging a demonstration with their attendance to prove a point about their own commitment.
John Fisher watched it happen, reportedly, and was unmoved. Or at least, whatever he felt about it, it did not change the direction the franchise was heading.
This is the detail that I keep coming back to when I think about this story. The fans told him, loudly and clearly and in a form he should have understood, that they were there and they cared and they wanted this to work. And it did not matter. The decision had already been made somewhere else.
Sacramento and then Las Vegas
The A's announced their relocation to Las Vegas in 2023. Before the move was fully complete they played a transition season in Sacramento at a minor league park while the Vegas stadium got sorted out. A major league team, one of the oldest franchises in the American League, playing in a Triple-A facility in Sacramento as a temporary measure.
The Sacramento situation was genuinely surreal for anyone who follows baseball. The attendance was bad. The product on the field was stripped down because Fisher had been cutting payroll for years in advance of the move. The team was not trying to win. It was trying to get to Las Vegas and start over with a fresh stadium and a new set of local taxpayers to negotiate with.
Las Vegas approved a stadium deal that involves significant public funding. The Tropicana site, where the stadium is being built, came with complications. The timeline kept shifting. None of it went as smoothly as the initial announcements suggested it would. But the direction was always clear and it was always away from Oakland.
What Fisher actually did here financially
John Fisher bought the A's in 2005 for roughly $180 million. The franchise is now valued at over $1.2 billion. He cut payroll aggressively in the years leading up to the move, which reduced costs while the value of the franchise itself kept appreciating. He traded away or let go of virtually every player of significance. The teams that won all those division titles in the early 2020s got gutted methodically.
He got public money for a stadium in Las Vegas after failing to get it in Oakland. The franchise value appreciated through the whole thing. The A's brand, whatever damage it took in Oakland, retains its history and legacy and the MLB affiliation that makes it worth over a billion dollars.
From a pure financial perspective, Fisher executed this about as well as an owner can execute a relocation. He minimized costs, maximized leverage, got public subsidy in the new market, and landed with a more valuable asset than he started with. If this were any other kind of business we would probably write it up as a case study in asset management.
It is not any other kind of business. It is a baseball team that has been in the Bay Area since 1968 and had fans who drove up in their green and gold and organized reverse boycotts to prove they were worth keeping. Those people are not in the case study.
Why this is the Bears story
I was in Chicago last weekend when the Bears board voted to advance the Hammond plan. I wrote about sitting in the Wrigley bleachers when the news came through. The reaction I saw there is the same thing Oakland A's fans were feeling for years, except compressed into one Friday afternoon instead of spread across a decade of slow-motion departure.
Both situations follow the same arc. An owner decides the current city is not providing enough value in the form of a stadium deal. The owner makes that known and begins negotiating with alternative markets. The city tries to find a solution. The owner's demands are calibrated to be just barely out of reach. Eventually the owner leaves. The franchise value has appreciated throughout because the threat of relocation is itself valuable to the negotiation. The fans are left.
The A's story is worse than the Bears story in at least one specific way: Oakland never got the years of false hope that Chicago got with the Howard Terminal project. Oakland fans were told their stadium was happening and they believed it and organized around it and it still fell through. That is a specific kind of betrayal on top of the general betrayal of the move itself.
But the underlying logic is identical. The owners in both cases were optimizing for their own financial position. The cities and the fans were inputs into that optimization, not the point of it. When the math stopped working in Oakland's favor, Oakland lost. When the math stopped working in Illinois's favor, Illinois lost. The math does not care about the reverse boycott. It does not care about the fans in the Wrigley bleachers in their Bears hoodies in June.
The Coliseum now
The Oakland Coliseum is still there. The city bought it back from the A's. There are plans and proposals and ideas for what it could become. A soccer stadium. A development project. Various things. None of them have materialized into anything concrete yet.
The last game the A's played there was in September 2024. The fans who showed up for that game, and there were more than had been showing up all season because people wanted to say goodbye to the place even if they were furious at the organization leaving it, got to watch their team in a stadium where the upper deck had been tarped off for years and the scoreboard had issues and the foul territory was massive and the whole thing felt like a building that had stopped believing in itself a long time ago.
That is what it looks like at the end. Not a dramatic final chapter. A stadium that gave up on itself before the team officially left. A fanbase that tried everything short of buying the team themselves. An owner who made a billion dollars and moved on.
I try not to be purely sentimental about this stuff. I understand how the business works. I have written about it extensively on this site and I believe most of what I have written. The owners are acting rationally. The stadium leverage dynamic is real. The financial logic is sound.
But I grew up in the Bay Area. And the Oakland Coliseum, for all its problems, was a real place where real things happened and real people cared about them. The last game was not nothing. The reverse boycott was not nothing. The fans who showed up for years to a team that was slowly being disassembled around them were not nothing.
They were just not enough. They never are.