Nearly 70 years ago, a Southside bar played host to one of the unlikeliest of organizations: the St. Louis Browns Fans of Chicago. Supporters of St. Louis’ little brother franchise were tricky to find in their own hometown, even during Browns games, let alone a 300-mile interstate drive north. But in 1954, such a conference took on an even more desperate, hard-edged tone: There were no St. Louis Browns. The serially impoverished franchise had finally yanked out its roots and made its own voyage, east to Baltimore, to become the Orioles.
The internet, according to Google, contains just one reference to the SLBFC, a digitization of the June 4, 1959 issue of The Daily Colonist, which contained a feature on one of its members, Max Gordon. Here is what history has preserved for us:
Fortunately, analog history has served us at least a little better, as Red Smith devoted his April 12, 1955 column to the madmen who steadfastly declared that “The Browns Will Rise Again.” These fans met each other in the Comiskey bleachers, rooting against the home team, naturally forming a phalanx against overwhelming numbers. When their visiting nine vanished, they went underground. The minutes of their prior meeting, which Smith dutifully if not entirely faithfully transcribes, includes an interrogation of Orioles PR director Dick Armstrong on the rumor that the new club had scheduled a bonfire of the Browns’ old flannels. They were mollified by the response that the O’s would never let good cloth go to waste, and would instead repurpose them.
From there the St. Louis Browns Fans of Chicago fades into history. Bill Leonard, the club’s secretary, is gone; so are Bill Veeck and Eddie Gaedel and Dick Armstrong and everyone else, everyone except perhaps the fabric that might, re-dyed in black and orange, sit behind glass in a Don Larsen jersey somewhere. But the spirit of the SLBFC lives on, sadly, in the nine cities that have had baseball torn away from them, without anesthesia.
***
The Athletics are wearing their road grays, with Oakland splashed across their chest. Of course they are; for perhaps their final game as The Oakland Athletics, they’re up in Seattle, signing the final page of the 2024 season. A chant of “Let’s Go Oakland” surfaces every so often from the few green-clad fans in attendance, each time quickly dying down. The wake was already held last Thursday at the Coliseum; this final weekend feels more like a deleted scene, baseball presented out of order. It’s Kids Appreciation Day at T-Mobile, and between innings on the jumbotron raffle prizes like Twitch gift cards and PS5s are distributed. Seattle has no real obligation to recognize the moment; after all, their ownership voted, along with the rest of them, to support John Fisher’s move to Las Vegas*. But for the first pitch, 2000 ALDS hero Rickey Henderson steps out, wearing a split jersey, half Athletics, half Mariners. He’s met with wild applause from both the majority and the minority.
It’s all wrong, but beyond the obvious reasons why it’s all wrong. The Athletics don’t feel like a team preparing for exile. Their final record of 69-93 is hardly inspiring—though you’d have to go back to 1965 with Hank Aaron’s Milwaukee Braves to find a better one in their final season—but most relocating clubs, since the days of the Browns, have left under a cloud of futility, often tied to their financial resources. The Nationals of the late 2000s, and the Brewers and Rangers of the early 1970s, took their time finding their footing in their shiny new stadiums. The last time a franchise left while trending upwards rather than down, the roster betraying a level of hope discordant with everything beyond it, was the Athletics themselves, when Charlie Finley dragged Catfish Hunter, Reggie Jackson, and Sal Bando with him to Oakland in the first place.
A handful of Athletics fans wait outside the stadium for the gates to open, but this is a different demographic than the funeral goers of last Thursday. These people are the expatriates. They’ve already left the Bay, some of them moving to the Pacific Northwest, some visiting from places like Utah and, ironically, Sacramento. (“I’m going to watch the games,” she tells me, “but I won’t go to one.”) They have, like the SLBFC, rooted their fandom in something other than a sense of place. Most of them admit that they’ll still follow the team; one has a time-share in Vegas, and will happily attend if the A’s join them. Most hoped that the team would find its way back to Oakland, to better tie to their memories. But relocation is already part of their own lives, and they’re collectively happy to wander to stadiums and see their old team in different parks, tour the country.
The idea of rooting for the A’s in Sacramento, uninterrupted, is probably an unpopular one. It’s also understandable. On a Friday morning in early 2008, I drove into work at the construction company where I served as an accounting clerk. My boss called me into his office before I could turn on my computer, and when he asked me to close the door behind me, I realized, “I’m about to get laid off.” He then laid me off. He was a good man, and the construction industry was struggling through the Great Recession; honestly, he took it harder than I did. I grabbed my stuff, got back into my car, turned on sports radio, and discovered that the city of Seattle had officially settled with the SuperSonics to release the franchise from their lease on Key Arena. It was a rough morning. And it stayed rough: Even in their garish orange and blue jerseys, it was nearly impossible not to track the rise that had already begun with the drafting of Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook, even if I had to pretend to wear a disguise while doing it.
***
On September 23, John Fisher published another letter to Oakland fans, explaining more than apologizing, wishing he could speak “to every one of you individually” while avoiding all media interaction. On September 26, his organization managed to top it, posting a three-minute video entitled “Thank you, Oakland Coliseum” setting 57 years of highlights against stock soundtrack music, before lingering on an aerial shot of the stadium, its lights flickering before going dark. It’s easy to stare at this performance and wonder who it’s all for, but the answer is of course nobody; this is just part of the standard operating procedure, the checklist of emotional montage delivered as bloodlessly as possible. This is how it’s done.
On the day of the final home game, Jeff Passan published the following tweet:
He then went on to share a heartfelt piece by ESPN’s Tim Keown, cataloging the everyday people whose fandoms, and sometimes literal occupations, have been severed by John Fisher’s drive for profits. Buster Olney noted: “What remains a total mystery is why the other owners in baseball stand by as the A’s debacle plays out, and they don’t do anything.”
It’s not really a mystery. MLB ownership supported John Fisher’s move because it wanted to create precedent for their own potential opportunities in the future, simple as that. Diamondbacks owner Ken Kendrick is already leveraging the threat of relocation into more public funds from the city of Phoenix. Jerry Reinsdorf spent last winter chatting up folks in Nashville. And this is the point where the legacy of John Fisher, and no small part of Rob Manfred, coalesce: This is about greed, but it is not just about greed. It is about power.
It was born of greed. Fisher’s negotiations over the Howard Terminal site began as a simple matter of haggling over percentages. But it went awry, as it’s gone awry so many times, so publicly, since: Facing a stubborn city government already battle-tested by the Raiders and Warriors, and confident in his ability to engineer a better deal in the desert, Fisher pulled the trigger on the move. Now he has no stadium in Vegas and no concrete plans for securing the funding for it, while scuttling off to a Triple-A stadium with questionable OSHA standards. And as a reward for all this wasted effort, he’s reviled by just about every person who has ever watched a baseball game.
The irony is that the owners (both the one moving and those green lighting relocation) like to pretend that they’re powerless in all this; their obligations to their shareholders, or their children’s potential obligations, have bound their hands. It’s why so many people tied to the industry have felt compelled to shake their heads and say “it’s part of the game,” the same way they would lament the closing of a factory. “They’re allowed to do this” and “It’s fine to do this” become interconnected, because the economic system that permits such a thing is unassailable. It’s within the rules, and that’s all that matters. Power justifies the use of power.
And that’s the part so many people struggle with: Fisher won’t be earning more money at the end of this. He will have secured the revenue-sharing money that had threatened to run out on him, but even that was a mirage; Rob Manfred had instituted that revenue-sharing deadline in the CBA to give Fisher an extra negotiating tool with the city of Oakland. His new stadium, shiny as it might be, will be smaller than his old one, his market smaller and his fanbase less devoted. At a certain point in this sad debacle, the scales tilted, and Fisher would have been better served to renew the lease on the Coliseum, re-open negotiations on Howard Terminal, or just sell and become hated in a more generic billionaire way.
And that’s where it became about power. Because even though that would have been the optimal outcome, Fisher was determined to do what nearly every billionaire does when confronted: get their way. So many writers are portraying this situation as cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face, without the implicit undertone: They know. MLB understands this is bad for baseball, and that’s exactly why they’re letting it happen, as a show of force. This is how hard they’re willing to fight for the right to maintain power over the people. They want to pretend that the destruction of 57 years of Oakland Athletics culture and history is a mere byproduct of a system that demands profit. But that’s not it. Oakland is an example, just as Seattle was for the NBA 15 years ago. Capitulate, or we will salt this earth.
This, too, has happened before; history makes all things boring. It happened with Charlie Finley in Kansas City and Clark Griffith in Washington. But in the past, the threat to baseball’s antitrust exemption prevented the salt, if not the fire. Griffith got his racially pure baseball market, and Washington got an expansion team, albeit a doomed one. Kansas City got a senator on their side and the Royals quickly followed. This time, a combination of the nebulous promises of expansion and the turbulent political climate allowed Manfred and Fisher the opportunity to bully local government without fear of its bigger brother bullying them back.
***
One thing is certain: There will be no OAFO. Perhaps there will be an online version, a forum buried outside of Google’s reach, where folks can commiserate. Some of them will root loudly against the Athletics Baseball Club Sponsored by the City of Sacramento, while others will root quietly for Lawrence Butler and Brent Rooker and the next good A’s team. Both philosophies are ethically valid. Not long after the Sonics left, I drifted back to baseball, starting with a little essay about Dan Meyer that eventually became a writing career. The OKC box score glances grew less frequent, then stopped altogether. Basketball quietly ceased to exist. For many in Oakland, I imagine it’ll happen the same way, without ceremony, and the loss to baseball will be great and incalculable.
But I also find myself drawn to the A’s fan I spoke to from Sacramento, who wasn’t going to let a billionaire decide what she was going to do. He had no power over her. She could take baseball for exactly what she wanted, watch the games and love the players from afar, even while she was living close, neatly separating John Fisher from the team he owns. The death of the author, as it turns out, applies just as well to authors as terrible as Fisher, and that no matter what they try to do to stop it, baseball is ours to make with what we will.
But that’s a problem for the future; here, in Seattle, the Oakland Athletics still cling to existence. But not convincingly: The crowd gets to its feet as Mariners manager Dan Wilson ambles to the mound. Logan Gilbert has given up a single to Nick Allen, the only blemish on an otherwise perfect 5 ⅔ innings. The Athletics put up a little bit of a fight in the seventh, scoring a pair of runs, but it’s a faint heartbeat. The chants are growing quieter. Everyone is tired.
Then, in the ninth, the A’s mount a threat against rookie reliever Troy Taylor. The Athletics score a pair of runs to bring it within two, and Max Schuemann steps to the plate. The modern Athletics have been built on guys like Schuemann, affordable non-prospects who can emulate competency. Schuemanns have gone by many names over the years: Pinder, Barton, Buck, Smolinksi, Hannahan. After starting 0-2, he works the count full, then reaches out at a sweeper to a shared roar of joy and disappointment.
As the public address system pumps its victory music, the fans in green huddle close to the dugout, trying to find something in proximity. The relievers wander in from the bullpen, waving their gloves and tipping their caps. Still the fans wait, swelling; every fan clad in green and gold soon coalesces in one section, chanting, singing, waiting. There’s nothing else for them to do; a few players toss their caps over the netting, and Lawrence Butler, the last player on the field, strips his jersey and waves to the crowd before disappearing into the tunnels. Still they wait. Their chants die and then they call them up again, chanting at the ushers and security lining the field, chanting solely for each other.
After a while the public address system calls out: “We ask that you make your way to the nearest exit. We look forward to seeing you again soon.” The crowd boos. They don’t want to leave and there’s no reason to stay, except to keep it all from ending. They are waiting to be kicked out, because they already have been.
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