It's been three days now and nobody seems to have bought John Fisher's 10-thumbs-level clumsy attempt to threaten Oakland with the departure of the Athletics, thus eliminating the value of the threat. Fisher, who has always been invisible as a way to hide his ineffectual tenure, played his last card — relocation — in an attempt either to force the city of Oakland to accede to his financial demands or to force his way out of the city entirely, and the reaction was, "Fine, go."
That's not what he was after. He wanted the city to write him a check. He wanted people to miss him. He wanted to see Oakland feel bad about all the ways it has been mean to him, and he wanted to run an extravagant late-stage bluff to get it all. Well, he could get the money he is asking for, but at the cost of what is left of his reputation as an owner.
The value in owning a sports franchise is financial, but it is also in getting to play at being a civic benefactor, to be credited for paying for the deeds of others and at the zenith of the gig getting to ride in the lead car at the parade. To paraphrase the line in The Godfather, nobody does this to be made to look ridiculous.
But Fisher's positioning here, the size, nature and timing of the demand makes him look like nothing more than a bully, and the reaction to his attempt to use relocation as a blackjack tells how little leverage he has if he plans to win the praise he seeks. By his absence and stance on leaving the area, to Fremont and then San Jose and then Laney College without asking permission and now this threat, his rehabilitation in the public seems more unlikely than ever, and that's saying something.
Mostly, the feeling from the public here is one of resignation. They've heard the threat to leave before, because it has been the core value of Fisher's ownership. He has rejected the Coliseum as a stadium because of its age, the Coliseum site because there are few commercial benefits without having control of the lands around the stadium, and though he hasn't said it specifically but has through his deeds, Oakland as a whole. It's hard to be a hero when the message isn't "Look at our baseball team" but "Look at our moving vans."
The A's haven't fully embraced Oakland since Walter Haas, Jr., sold the team on his deathbed in 1995; before that, they routinely outdrew the Giants and had a payroll in the top ten. Since then, there has been a litany of dissatisfaction about the location of the team, no matter what the team happened to be doing at the time, and eventually that becomes nothing but a low tedious drone. The Raiders, who as the city's first team held a greater place in the city's collective heart, talked about leaving so often that when they did, the public outcry was minimal, and that was only over five years. The A's have been at it for five times as long.
And now we're here, with Fisher trumpeting he has been given permission to look at other cities if he isn't given $855 million from his current one. It's an arm twist, and not a subtle one, from someone who has never shown much affinity for or even interest in the arms he is twisting. If he succeeds, we'll see if he follows through. If he fails, we'll see if he follows through on his threat to go.
But in either event, the "we" in question will not be a large and engaged throng, but a dispirited group of folks who have been worked too many times to care much any more. There is a significant A's following in the Bay Area, but neither Fisher nor his predecessor, Steve Schott worked very hard to tap it except when it came time to threaten to leave. As marketing campaigns go, that one lost its power to offend in 2000. Thus, Fisher's chance to redeem himself in the eyes of his current constituency has reached its nadir, and one wonders if he can ever raise it again.