Tag Archives: John Fisher

The temporarily Sacramento Athletics

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Sutter Health Park

Sutter Health Park in Sacramento, designated to be the temporary home of the Vegas-striking A’s. With apologies to Casey Stengel, the park is lovelier than Mr. Fisher’s team.

Losing in baseball provides reactions running the proverbial gamut from outrage to sarcasm with gallows humour somewhere in the middle. When Sacremento-to-be Athletics owner John Fisher suggests tiny Sutter Health Park to be so intimate he can’t wait to see the Show’s top stars (he mentioned Yankee bombardier Aaron Judge specifically) hit home runs there, we wonder.

It’s bad enough that Fisher tried and failed to strong-arm Oakland into handing him a big new real estate development with a ballpark thrown in by-the-way. Bad enough that he turned the A’s into the Gang Green That Couldn’t Pitch (Catch or Throw) Straight (Without Being Hustled Out of Town).

And bad enough his idea of playing nice with Oakland is to pick up and move to Las Vegas in due course, assuming Vegas or Nevada can’t thwart him yet, while deciding to leave Oakland after this season to spend three seasons at least in the fourteen-thousand seat Triple-A ballpark that hosts the Giants’ farm team, the River Cats.

All because the A’s and Oakland couldn’t agree yet again, this time on extending their lease to the rambling wreckage of the Oakland Coliseum.

“It appears,” posted ESPN’s Buster Olney, “that the difference between what Oakland offered and what the A’s wanted was about $35 million or so over three years. Or about the same that the Angels are paying reliever Robert Stephenson. Meanwhile, owners overseeing an industry worth many tens of billions of dollars stand by and watch their weakest franchise put on this cheap circus, and do nothing.”

So not only does Oakland still lose, but Fisher sounds as though he might revel in the A’s deeper downfall in front of . . . well, the Sutter Health capacity is only slightly larger than the A’s have been drawing while Fisher’s mirthless Coliseum comedy has played out.

Longtime Washington Senators owner Clark Griffith once said, “The fans enjoy home runs, and we have assembled a pitching staff that’s certainly pleasing them.” Griffith made the remark sardonically—after his Old Nats pitcher(s) got hammered for distance yet again. Fisher has the sense of humour of a barracuda deprived of its three squares for one day.

“Come an’ see my amazin’ Mets,” original expansion Mets manager Casey Stengel loved to tell fans who fell in love with their slapstick style. “I been in this game a hundred years but I see new ways to lose I never knew were invented yet.” Shown Shea Stadium for the first time, the Ol’ Perfesser cracked, “Lovely. Just lovely. The park is lovelier than my team.”

Rarely at a loss, anchoring most of Stengel’s Yankee winners full time, Hall of Famer Yogi Berra once observed, “The other teams could make trouble for us if they win.” Should I be surprised if Fisher should observe of his A’s in Sutter Health Park, “The other teams could make trouble for us if they lose.”

The Orioles survived a ghastly 0-21 beginning to 1988 with gallows humour. “Join the hostages,” Hall of Famer Cal Ripken, Jr. hailed a reporter new on the Orioles beat. Said a button manager Frank Robinson took to showing at the slightest provocation, “It’s been lovely, but I have to scream now.” A local DJ elected to stay on the air until the Orioles won. Before they did break the streak, Robinson mourned, “We’re gonna kill the poor guy.”

“We know we’re better than this,” said Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn during a time of Padres struggle. “We just can’t prove it.” Said Rocky Bridges after an arduous loss, during a two-decade life managing in the minors, “I managed good, but boy did they play bad.” (This is the same Rocky Bridges whom Stengel once named to an American League All-Star team as an infielder, saying of it, “They were close to launching an investigation.”)

It would figure if Fisher’s Sacramento A’s (ok, they’re not going to call themselves that, officially) say, “We know we’re worse than this, we just can’t prove it.” Manager Mark Kotsay may find himself saying, “I managed bad, but boy did they play worse.” All things considered, it might actually get him a raise.

Time was when the Yankees’ most notorious owner, George Steinbrenner, was about as gracious a loser as a crocodile is a dinner guest. Let his Yankees incur a losing streak as long as two, and the speculation began on when, not whether he’d throw out the first manager of the season. (Not to mention when the once-notorious Columbus Shuttle of slumping Yankees going back and forth between the Bronx and Triple-A would commence.)

OK, that’s a slight exaggeration. But he did once fire Berra after promising him a full season on the bridge—until the Yankees lapsed into a season-opening 6-10 record that included a pair of . . . three-game losing streaks. (“I didn’t fire Yogi, the players did,” the Boss purred.)

An owner who thinks nothing of either trading or letting walk any A’s players who show even a few degrees above replacement-level player talent, Fisher wouldn’t shock anyone if he thinks about firing his manager, coaches, and maybe two clubhouse stewards, before trading his entire pitching staff, after a season-opening winning streak.

(In case you wondered, as of Thursday morning, the A’s sandwiched two three-game losing streaks around their lone win to open this regular season. Thus far, the players haven’t fired Kotsay yet. Stay tuned Friday afternoon, when the A’s face the Tigers, coming home after splitting a weather-prompted doubleheader with today’s Mets in New York.)

Sutter Health Park is said to hold fourteen thousand seats. Fisher’s shenanigans may put the A’s into the record book under a dubious distinction: the only major league baseball team that couldn’t sell out a ballpark a third the size of Wrigley Field.

But A’s president David Kaval talks of increasing Sutter Health’s capacity. Seriously? They must be enthralled with acres of empty seats, which is what they’re going to have unless Fisher either sells the A’s (a consummation A’s fans devoutly wish) or decides he’d like to have something better than the American League West’s Washington Generals to offer.

Being saddled with a team run from Bizarro World and leaving a too-much-troubled Oakland further in the lurch might not make for Sutter Health becoming the friendliest of confines. Don’t tell Vivek Ranadivé, who owns the NBA’s Sacramento Kings and bought the River Cats two years ago. He may not believe it yet.

“Believe it or not,” he tells The Athletic‘s Evan Drellich, “this is going to be the best ticket in [MLB]. Because it’s a small, intimate stadium. It’s like being in the lower bowl in a basketball game. And so imagine that, (Shohei) Ohtani is there and it’s a small, intimate stadium. So it’s going to be the most sought-after ticket in America.”

Ranadivé has the slightly ulterior motive of using Fisher’s duplicity as a lever to hoist Sacramento as a major league showcase for whenever the Show elects to add two more teams. But he, too, seems to suggest everyone who loves a good trainwreck might even be willing to pay to see one.

“Ladies and gentlemen, your Orphan Athletics”

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Oakland Coliseum

Vegas may beware more than abused A’s fans think . . .

The way things aren’t happening with John Fisher’s bid to hijack the Athletics out of Oakland and into Las Vegas, you shouldn’t be shocked if the Orphan Athletics becomes the team’s semi-official name for a spell or two.

At this writing I don’t know which thought is the more profound thought: A’s fans in Oakland desperate to see Fisher sell the team to someone willing to keep them in Oakland, or baseball fans in Las Vegas who don’t seem all that anxious to have them here.

Hear me out. Having their Triple-A team, the Aviators, playing in that lovely little ballpark up in the Summerlin area is one thing, and a very nice thing, too. But wanting major league baseball by Fisher’s ways and means is something else entirely.

You couldn’t ask for more proof of my suspicion that Las Vegas isn’t in as big of a hurry to welcome the A’s as first believed than its mayor’s own publicly expressed ambivalence.

Earlier this week, Mayor Carolyn Goodman said she thought the A’s should stay and work things out in Oakland. Until she didn’t. On Tuesday morning, she said, “You have the fan base there. We already have the Raiders. Each city needs to have that spirit of sports . . . I love the people from Oakland. I think they deserve to have their team.” On Tuesday afternoon, after the you-know-what hit the you-know-what, she said, whoops.

“I want to be clear that I am excited about the prospect of major league baseball in Las Vegas,” she began her backpedal, “and it very well may be that the Las Vegas A’s will be come a reality that we will welcome to our city.”

. . . [I]t is my belief that in their perfect world the ownership of the A’s would like to have a new ballpark on the water in Oakland and that the ownership and the government there should listen to their great fans and try to make that dream come true.

Should that fail, Las Vegas has shown that it is a spectacular market for major league sports franchises.

Translation, in part: Fisher should renew his oft-failed efforts to strong-arm Oakland into building him a new ballpark for which he’d have to pay little to nothing, but if he still can’t by all means he should continue putting the bite on Las Vegas and on Nevada whole to do it. For a team his ten-thumbed, toeless touch has reduced to what was once just their official emblem—a white elephant.

“Goodman was not speaking with any real authority on this matter,” writes The Athletic‘s chief of Bay Area coverage, Tim Kawakami. “But just take her skepticism—she literally said the A’s should figure out how to build in Oakland—as a representation of the Las Vegas demographic that never seemed too excited about the A’s relocating to Nevada.”

Just like with every other demographic, business or fan: The more you get to know Fisher’s operation, the less faith you have in anything good happening.

To me, the most telling point wasn’t Goodman’s comments. It was that her clear ambivalence about the A’s in Las Vegas was met with nearly total silence among powerbrokers in that region. Ambivalence on top of ambivalence. Where was the rallying cry from all those businesses and fans supposedly lining up to welcome the A’s? Where was the energy? Why didn’t anybody with clout step up to bellow that the mayor was wrong and the A’s will take this town by storm in 2028, which is the new theoretical finishing date?

Maybe Las Vegas won’t get really excited about possibly being the new home of the A’s until or unless Fisher sells the team. But Oakland’s going to insist that, if he does, he sell the A’s to Oakland interests who’d be more than happy to keep the A’s there and maybe build a ballpark for which they, not the local or county or even state taxpayers, will pay.

And the rest of MLB’s owners “don’t want to force Fisher to sell the team,” Kawakami writes. “But if anything’s going to get them thinking about it, or at least to suggest quite strongly to Fisher that it’s well past time to pass this team to someone else, it’ll be if he blows this Las Vegas situation.”

Don’t bet against that, either.

Fisher’s track record includes blowing two significant proposals back in the Bay Area, one at Laney College (with or without bothering to check with California’s Board of Regents to be sure property at the campus was available in the first place), one at Howard Terminal. (Where Fisher said, essentially, “Build me a delicious real estate complex and let’s throw a ballpark in for good measure.”) Not to mention blowing whatever chance the ancient and decrepit Coliseum had to be rebuilt.

Speaking of which, the A’s Coliseum lease experies after this season. Where will they go from there until, in theory, their intended Las Vegas ballpark gets built? In fact, there’s still no plan other than just plopping one onto the property of the soon-to-be-history Tropicana Hotel. There’s also no known, firm, secured plan coming from the Fisher camp to play A’s home games anywhere else, though speculation includes Sacramento, Salt Lake City, and the Aviators’ Las Vegas Ballpark.

Somehow, I just don’t think turning the A’s into what Kawakami describes as a barnstorming AAAA-level team is the best way to make friends, influence people, and turn Las Vegas ambivalence into Las Vegas popping champagne and partying hearty over the pending A’s relocation.

Remember, as Kawakami does: The A’s have lost 214 games over 2022-2023. Their television lucre by way of MLB is going to be cut short big enough if they end up playing their home games on the road, pardon the expression. That’s not exactly going to inspire Fisher to invest in improving the major league product or the farm system.

“I can’t imagine how the A’s will be any better than they’ve been the last two seasons, and they might be worse,” Kawakami writes. “Until 2029 or 2030.”

Meanwhile, the Nevada State Education Association, one of the state’s teachers’ unions, has filed suit to challenge how legal was and is that $380 million in taxpayer money state lawmakers voted and Gov. Joseph Lombardo signed to hand the A’s to build the ballpark that might never be. The suit argues the gift is illegal because it failed to undergo the required two-thirds majority vote in both state legislature houses, getting approved by simple majority instead.

The money’s actually contingent on building at the Trop prop. The NSEA suit follows their appeal after a court struck down a ballot initiative forcing the $380 million to a public vote of approval.

Meanwhile, Oakland fans continue their efforts to persuade someone, anyone to force Fisher to sell the A’s. Fan groups Last Dive Bar, the Oakland 68s, and others have called for boycotting Opening Day against the Guardians. The A’s answer is offering possibly-unprecedented buy one-get one tickets for the game.

That’s only slightly less absurd than the prospect of thinking about ballpark announcers hailing before first pitch time, “Ladies and gentlemen, your Orphan Athletics!”

Viva Las VegA’s?

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The Sphere

Oakland A’s fans may not be the only ones hoping this blast around Las Vegas’s Sphere proves to be baseball’s version of Dewey Defeats Truman.

Ladies and gentlemen, your Las Vegas Athletics of Oakland. At least, they will be as of 2028, now that baseball’s owners voted unanimously to allow John Fisher to hijack the A’s from a city who loved them but whose leaders, for assorted reasons, refused to let Fisher strongarm them into a new development with a ballpark thrown in for good measure.

I write as a baseball analyst and as a lifelong fan. Would I love to see major league baseball in Las Vegas, where I’ve lived since 2007? You might as well ask if I’d love to discover a million tax free dollars at my front door. But I’m hard pressed for now to know which about the A’s situation is worse.

Is it Fisher discovering not every Oakland muckety-muck had turnips for brains and wouldn’t just build him that development and hand it to him on a platinum serving tray? Is it that the A’s now get to turture Oakland a few more years before they’re actually ready and able make the move?

Is it Las Vegas’s and Nevada’s powers that be jumping eyes wide shut into handing Fisher $380 million worth of the funding for a projected billion dollar-plus ballpark adjacent to The Strip, funding that’s liable to hike when the usual unanticipated cost overruns cost Nevada taxpayers more than the billion the A’s are “expected to arrange?”

The only thing possibly standing in the way of finishing the Fisher hijack is a Nevada pollitical action committee whose interest is public education forcing Nevada’s $380 million to a public November 2024 vote. “Were that to happen,” write The Athletic‘s Evan Drellich and Melissa Lockard, “and were the public to subsequently vote against providing the money, the move could be, at the least, delayed.”

Dare to dream. Well, the Oakland fan group the Last Dive Bar does. “So what’s to say this Vegas [move] is going to be this glaring success?” asked Last Dive Bar member Bryan Johansen of Lockard—right before answering.

They have what they didn’t have all those times (in previous attempts to move) in that they have the support of the commissioner to move and they have a city that just says, yeah, do whatever you want here. But it’s still Fisher and he still has to do that work, and he still has to put a shovel in the ground. And to today, he hasn’t been able to accomplish that, so there’s still a glimmer of hope that he’s not going to be successful and will be forced to either sell or work something out in Oakland.

The A’s have been in Oakland three years longer than they spent in their native Philadelphia. RingCentral Coliseum, the home they’ve known since moving there from Kansas City in 1968, has been a living, neglected wreck for what now seems eons. And Oakland was willing to give a $375 million commitment to a new A’s stadium if only Fisher and his trained parrot David Kaval left things at that.

But Fisher and Kaval insisted on pushing the $12 billion Howard Terminal development project with a ballpark thrown in for good measure. Oops. Now the A’s, which have been allowed to devolve into the American League’s first among known basket cases, stand likely to be turned into a game-wide hate object thanks to an owner about whom decriptions as ten-thumbed might be polite.

“But what could have worked better?” asks Deadspin‘s Sam Fels, who answers almost promptly:

The tiniest ballpark in the tiniest market in a climate inhospitable for getting to the park or sitting outside? Or a gleaming new [Oakland] park right downtown that included far more of a footprint for Fisher and revenue streams in the nation’s tenth biggest market, in one of the wealthiest areas in the country? Isn’t it just possible, with all of that, that the A’s might have become the big market team that the Bay Area suggests they should be? Well, not under Fisher’s ditch-focused guidance, but under someone with a few neurons that fire at the same time? Did anyone think the Giants were a big market team before they moved into their palace in downtown San Francisco?

The alleged Las Vegas plan is to build a retractable roof ballpark where the Tropicana now sits. That still counts on that which cannot always be counted upon, travelers silly enough to hit Vegas at the peak of summer’s notoriously dry roasting heat, to see a team in which they normally have no rooting interest.

Las Vegas without such travelers has sports fans to burn. (No pun intended.) Baseball fans are more numerous than outsiders might suspect. They could in theory jam the future ballpark and still not do it enough—not with a ballpark said to be planned for 30,000-35,000 seats—to compel Fisher to do anything much more than entertain thoughts of selling the team.

But they might have done it for a new expansion team. Oops. Commissioner Pepperwinkle and his minions seem to believe Vegas needs an “established” team—whether or not it’s the (ahem) white elephant into which Fisher turned the A’s—instead of something splashy new. Never mind that Vegas has lived as much and maybe a little more on the splashy new as the tried and true.

Thoughts of Fisher selling the team have been prime on A’s fans for about as long as Fisher’s owned them. This past season merely amplified those thoughts with the prominent and rousing “Sell the Team!” chants among those A’s fans who still refused to let RingCentral’s wreckage deter them. The very thought of Fisher selling to one who cares about the team may have been what Disney legend Annette Funicello called the dream that’s a wish the heart makes.

Whether the buyer will be someone who actually believes a baseball team should be built to compete and win as best as possible to win is impossible to predict for now. So is whether such a buyer will be willing to take the A’s as far off the larger revenue sharing teat as possible, considering Fisher having to keep them on it isn’t really going to make him true friends among the owners who approved his hijack.

This is not Walter O’Malley being squeezed out of Brooklyn by a capricious, tyrannical city and state building czar determined never again to allow privately owned sports facilities built on New York land. This is the latest in a long run of baseball owners with the wherewithal but not the will to build entirely out of their own pockets without one. thin. dime. of public money factoring in.

It’s also the latest in a long run of municipalities who think there’s nothing wrong with fleecing their constituencies on behalf of creating or luring major league sports teams that don’t always prove to be saviours of local economies without the locals or the visitors paying through their noses, bellies, and any other passages possible.

Not to mention the latest in a too-long run of the A’s looking to get out of their dilapidated digs but finding the wrong ways to do it, or the wrong opponents to cross. Wanting to escape that was one thing. Going deliberately into the tank after the pan-damn-ic season while still trying to fleece their home city was something else entirely.

As The Soul of Baseball author Joe Posnanski writes in Esquire, “They seemed on their way to San Jose at one point—the city wanted the team so badly that they actually sued Major League Baseball—but the Giants’ said that San Jose belongs to them and blocked the move. After that, the city of Oakland and the State of California put almost $800 million on the table in infrastructure, tax kickbacks, and various other goodies.

“This hasn’t proven to be enough . . . Fisher believes he can get more, that he needs more, that he deserves more.”

The Sphere, that big, $2.3 billion dollar Las Vegas ball of animated light on the outside and overpriced concert and other event seating on the inside, which may be liable to lure more people watching the outside than listening and watching on the inside, couldn’t wait to blast the news on the outside.

A’s fans in Oakland, who have suffered two lifetimes’ betrayals and refuse to surrender without a fight, may not be the only ones hoping that’ll end up equaling Dewey Defeats Truman.

ESPN writer in depth: Oakland was had

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Oakland Athletics fans

Few fans are more abused by the shenanigans of their team’s owner than A’s fans.

Come November, seemingly, baseball’s owners may have the chance to vote on whether or not to let Athletics owner John Fisher finish what he started, namely hijacking the A’s to Las Vegas. Seemingly.

Getting it to their vote is a three-layered process. It should end with the A’s told to stay put, with Fisher told to sell the team, and with new owners tasked for good faith work with Oakland that will keep the A’s there without one taxpayer’s dime to pay for it.

Right now, the best news for abused A’s fans is that the team isn’t going to equal the 1962 Mets for season-long futility. As of Thursday morning, the A’s sat at 46-106 with ten games left to play. They’re 7-11 in September including a current seven-game losing streak, but even if they lose those final ten they won’t overthrow the Original Mets. Swell.

Because the worse news, according to an in-depth examination by ESPN’s Tim Keown, is that Fisher and his trained seal David Kaval “blindsided” Oakland with their plan to move the A’s to Las Vegas. It’s also that Fisher running the so-called “parallel track” between staying in Oakland and moving to Las Vegas might well have been a one-way track in disguise.

Bottom line: Oakland was had. Fisher’s failed attempt to strong-arm the city into all but handing him a $12 billion Howard Terminal development project that seems to have included a by-the-way new ballpark for the A’s turned into Fisher picking up his badly-abused baseball toy and carting it off to Vegas in due course.

On 19 April, according to Keown’s examination, Oakland mayor Sheng Thao was driving home from a local business opening, comfortable that the gap in keeping the A’s in Oakland was down to a mere $36 million once the city learned of $64 million in federal grants coming toward Howard Terminal.

That’d teach her. Because as she drove, Keown said, Kaval called. Oops. “Hey, just a heads up. Somebody leaked to the press that we have a binding deal with Las Vegas.”

“Thao had scheduled a week of intensive talks with the A’s and a team of mediators to bring the deal home,” Keown wtote. “Hotel rooms were booked. Flights were reserved. Thao even gave it a name: The Negotiation Summit. At the event the evening of Kaval’s phone call, Thao told Leigh Hanson, her chief of staff, ‘I really think we’re going to get this over the finish line’.”

Not quite. After one call leading to another leading to another, Fisher himself called Thao. She told Keown Fisher said, quote, “I feel really bad. I really like you and I like working with you, but we’re going to focus all our energy on Las Vegas.” “In the very beginning,” she said she replied, “I literally asked you, ‘Are you serious about Oakland?’ and you said yes. But if your focus is on Vegas, good luck.”

The leaked story appeared in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Thao’s chief of staff Leigh Hanson told Keown, “Not sure it’s a leak when you’re quoted in the story. Pretty sure that’s not how leaks work. If you’re going to be strategic, try not to be so sloppy.”

Sloppy? That doesn’t begin to describe this disaster. Neither does it begin describing Fisher and Kaval not only pronouncing the $12 billion Howard Terminal plan dead, but also trading Fisher’s so-called “legacy” project in Las Vegas—55 acres off the Strip, and a community park atop a ballpark—for nine acres where the Tropicana Hotel now sits.

Except that Keown says further that the A’s relocation application to MLB now doesn’t even include a ballpark proposal. Sketches were produced and published back last spring, of course, but there’s not only no park propsal in the application—a ballpark which would  have to be domed or retractably-roofed thanks to Las Vegas’s notoriously hot summers—there’s no financing plan noted and no architect designated.

All that after Nevada lawmakers approved and Gov. Joseph Lombardo signed a bill authorising $380 million public dollars to build a ballpark on the Tropicana site, and sports economists began tabulating how much higher prospective cost overruns would run the taxpayer price tag no matter how much the A’s would kick in to help cover them.

Nevada fell hook, line, and stinker after Fisher and Kaval essentially tried and failed to game Oakland. “Fisher wanted to build a new, state-of-the-art ballpark at Howard Terminal because he had a vision of changing those 55 acres around the Terminal,” writes Cup of Coffee‘s Craig Calcaterra, interpreting the damning Keown report.

Fisher wanted to be a hero; he didn’t want to build a new stadium because it would be good for the fans, or it was simply something the team needed after playing in a decrepit ballpark for so long. He wanted the plaudits. When Fisher didn’t get exactly what he wanted exactly when he wanted it from Oakland, he wasted no time in taking the next-best deal in Vegas.

Hilariously, the Fisher and Kaval’s rush to Vegas has been largely disorganized. Keown notes that in the Athletics’ revenue projections, they assumed an annual attendance of 2.5 million fans, but their proposed new ballpark in Vegas would only seat 30,000. Multiply 30,000 by 81 home games and you get 2.43 million — a mathematical impossibility, even if they sold out every single home game. Furthermore, the Athletics don’t have an actual ballpark design, a financing plan, an interim home for the team until they open the new digs, nor do they even have an architect.

After Lombardo signed the aforesaid bill, I wrote this: “An optimist may now be described as someone who thinks enough owners will a) wake up and decide, after all, that there’s something transparently stupid about billionaires unwilling to build their teams’ own digs without a taxpayer soak; and, b) show enough spine, accordingly, to stand athwart Fisher (and Manfred, their hired hand, after all), yelling ‘Stop!'”

But who will yell? Especially with the Rays reaching a deal for their own new $1.3 billion ballpark in St. Petersburg, for which the Rays reportedly will only have to pay half, with the other half coming from city and Pinellas County governments, which means from taxpayers living in or visiting that area.

Will it be the preliminary three-owner review panel of Mark Attanasio (Brewers), John Middleton (Phillies), and John Sherman (Royals), not exactly the Three Stooges but three of the smartest owners among a group not exactly renowned for brains?

Will it be commissioner Rob Manfred (whose hands are anything but clean in the entire A’s mess) and an eight-member executive board, knowing Manfred is too willing to grant Fisher and the A’s a bye on the usual required nine-figure-plus relocation fee?

Will it be enough among the remaining thirty owners if and when it gets far enough for their vote? Will they be willing to a Fisher who more or less abused the living daylights out of Oakland and its baseball team before deciding he and it have a future in Las Vegas, long-enough-suffering A’s fans in Oakland be damned?

The Attanasio-Middleton-Sherman panel should be brainy enough to do what they can to recommend against rewarding Fisher-Kaval’s bad faith playing and convince enough of their peers to vote no. “This whole process” Calcaterra writes, “has been even more of a circus than we thought.” In the Fisher-Koval circus, it seems the clowns and the animals trade off on holding the keys.

But at least the A’s won’t meet or beat the Original Mets for season-long futility. Isn’t that just peachy?

The All-Scar Game

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Austin Riley, Pete Alonso

Austin Riley’s (Braves, left) kneeling throw to kneeling scooper Pete Alonso (Mets, right) ended the bottom of the All-Star Game eighth with a double play . . . (MLB.com photo) . . .

The best thing about Tuesday night’s All-Star Game? Easy. That snappy eighth inning-ending double play into which Athletics outfielder Brent Rooker hit. He shot one up the third base line to Braves third baseman Austin Riley, who picked and threw on one knee across to Mets first baseman Pete Alonso, who scooped on one knee to nail two outs for the price of one, doubling Blue Jays second baseman Whit Merrifield up.

That play preserved what proved the National League’s 3-2 win over the American League in Seattle’s T-Mobile Park. They got the second and third runs in the top of that eighth, when Elias Díaz (Rockies) pinch hit for Jorge Soler (Marlins) with Nick Castellanos (Phillies) aboard after a nine-pitch leadoff walk and nobody out. Díaz sent Orioles righthander Félix Bautista’s 2-2 splitter off a bullpen sidewall, then off an overhang into the left field seats.

It meant the first NL All-Star win since 2012. It also meant Díaz becoming the Rockies’s first-ever All-Star Game Most Valuable Player award winner. Otherwise? It meant almost nothing. Because the worst thing about this year’s All-Scar Game was . . . just about everything else.

Mr. Blackwell, call your office. All-Star Game specific threads have been part of it for long enough. They began ugly and devolved to further states of revulsivity. But Tuesday night took the Ignoble Prize for Extinguished Haberdashery. The only uniforms uglier than this year’s All-Star silks are those hideous City Connect uniforms worn now and then during regular season games. Both should be done away with. Post haste. Let the All-Stars wear their regular team uniforms once again.

Who are those guys? They sort of anticipated long ovations for the hometown Mariners’ All-Star representatives. But they didn’t anticipate they’d be longer than usual. To the point where two Rays All-Stars—shortstop Wander Franco, pitcher Shane McLanahan—weren’t even introduced, when they poured in from center field among all other All-Stars. (Rays third baseman Yandy Díaz, an All-Star starter, did get introduced properly. But still.)

Maybe the two Rays jumped the gun trotting in while the ovation continued, but they should have been announced regardless.

While I’m at it, what was with that nonsense about bringing the All-Stars in from center field instead of having them come out of the dugouts to line up on the opposite base lines? Some traditions do deserve preservation. Not all, but some. What’s next—running the World Series combatants’ members in from the bullpens? (Oops! Don’t give the bastards any more bright ideas!)

Down with the mikes! In-game miking of players has always been ridiculous. But on Tuesday night it went from ridiculous to revolting. When Rangers pitcher Nathan Eovaldi took the mound miked up, the poor guy got into trouble on the mound almost at once. He had to pitch his way out of a two-on, one-out jam in the second inning. He sounded about as thrilled to talk while working his escape act as a schoolboy ordered to explain why he put a girl’s phone number on the boys’ room wall.

What’s the meaning of this? We’ve got regular-season interleague play all year long now. The National League All-Stars broke a ten-season losing streak? Forgive me if hold my applause. So long as the entire season is full of interleague play, the All-Star Game means nothing. Wasn’t it bad enough during those years when the outcome of the All-Star Game determined home field advantage for the World Series?

The road to making the All-Star Game mean something once more is eliminating regular-season interleague play altogether.

Elias Díaz

. . . saving the lead (and, ultimately, the game) Elias Díaz gave the NL with his two-run homer in the top of the eighth. (And, yes, the All-Star uniforms get uglier every year. Enough!) (AP Photo.)

Tamper bay. Sure it was cute to hear the T-Mobile Park crowd chanting for Angels unicorn star Shohei Ohtani to come to Seattle as a free agent. The problem is, he isn’t a free agent yet. He still has a second half to play for the Angels. I’ll guarantee you that if any team decided to break into a “Come to us!” chant toward Ohtani, they’d be hauled before baseball’s government and disciplined for tampering.

I get practically every fan base in baseball wanting Ohtani in their teams’ fatigues starting next year. If they don’t, they should be questioned by grand juries. But they really should have held their tongues on that one no matter how deeply you think the All-Scar Game has been reduced to farce. Lucky for them the commissioner can’t fine the Mariners for their fans’ tamper chants. (Not unless someone can prove the Mariners put their fans up to it, anyway.)

Crash cart alert. Cardiac Craig Kimbrel (Phillies) was sent out to pitch the ninth. With a one-run lead. The National League should have put the crash carts on double red alert, entrusting a one-run lead to the guy whose six 2018 postseason saves with a 5.90 ERA/6.74 fielding-independent pitching still felt like defeats. The guy who has a lifetime 4.13 ERA/4.84 FIP in postseason play.

Kimbrel got the first two outs (a fly to right, a strikeout), then issued back-to-back walks (six and seven pitches off an even count and a 1-2 count, respectively) before he finally struck Jose Ramirez (Guardians) out—after opening 0-2 but lapsing to 2-2—to end the game. Making the ninth that kind of interesting should not be what the Phillies have to look forward to if they reach the coming postseason.

Sales pitch. How bad is the sorry state of the Athletics and their ten-thumbed owner John Fisher’s shameless moves while trying and failing to extort Oakland but discovering Nevada politicians have cactus juice for brains? It’s this bad—when the T-Mobile crowd wasn’t chanting for Ohtani to cast his free agency eyes upon Seattle, they were chanting “Sell the team!” when Rooker whacked a ground rule double in the fifth.

Can you think of any other All-Star ballpark crowd chanting against another team’s owner in the past? Not even George Steinbrenner’s worst 1980-91 antics inspired that. That’s more on Fisher, of course, but it’s still sad to think that a team reduced to cinder and ashes with malice aforethought captured an All-Star Game crowd’s attention almost equal to the attention they might have paid the game itself.