There seems to be a lot of vitriol directed at the Oakland Athletics owner since the announcement that the team might move to Las Vegas. This FanGraphs article in particular takes aim at John J. Fisher. It denigrates him for using family money that he supposedly didn’t earn, and accuses him of malfeasance.

Here’s a question: If Fisher were on some comical Major League-type mission to tank the Athletics’ future in Oakland, how would the team have been run differently under his tenure, particularly over the past five years?

The A’s haven’t run a $100 million payroll in team history. They’ve never been in the top half of the league in payroll under Fisher and haven’t been out of the bottom quarter since 2007. They’ve frequently transcended that lack of resources due to some borderline heroic efforts by groundbreaking front offices under Billy Beane and David Forst and then-manager Bob Melvin. But with Melvin gone and the front office starting to fall behind the times, the team’s medium-term outlook is among the worst in baseball.

How else could the A’s have intentionally reduced fan interest? Constantly trading away star players, perhaps. Roping off the upper deck of the stadium. Neglecting not only upgrades to the Coliseum but the kind of basic maintenance and upkeep that would, say, prevent the Great Sewage Flood of 2016. Or the possum infestation that just last week rendered the visiting broadcast booth unusable.

FanGraphs.com

I suspect the Stadium issue likely arises from the public-private ownership deal with Oakland, which in 2016 was still all public. While the Athletics own part of the stadium now, they did not in 2016. And while it’s one thing to fix toilets, the problems there probably involve major plumbing infrastructure that may have necessitated a huge underground improvement. Now the team is looking at permitting, environmental impact statements, and a government that likely wants to spend what little money they have elsewhere.

The biggest fallacy in the argument above in my mind is that the Athletics are currently doing something different than at any time in the past. Look at this history of the Athletics season winning percentages. When haven’t they built up a team only to tear it down?

They built a great team in the 1970s, only to tear it down. That allowed them to draft and build back up to the late 1980s/early 1990s dominance, which was torn down again. That allowed a fairly long run of success before other teams caught up with Moneyball, before another fallow period. The previous cycle under Wolff and Fisher look s pretty much like the current cycle under Fisher alone.

Blame Fisher all you want. The Rays have the same problem. When every proposal a team makes gets shot down, what happens next? Note that I’m a big proponent of governments not paying for stadiums, but that also means governments should not be a hindrance to stadiums. Oakland could have said any number of times, “Thanks for trying to make something better here, be our guest.” There’s little chance of graft in that attitude, however.