It has already been removed from the Fanatics website, and the inner doings of that particular sludge factory are hard to know, so while we can assume the worst, we should prepare to be surprised downward. Could Fanatics have known, during the time it was still available for sale, that they had created a dead-on metaphor for the Athletics franchise in perpetuity? The hat’s conception is a mystery that John Fisher's next letter to the public is unlikely to reveal, but fair is fair, and the hat is what it is, or was what it was. Folks, we give you—the Ass Hat:
Marketing at its best amounts to being the first to spot a trend, and that insight is doubly valuable if that trend lasts for decades to come. In that sense, even and maybe especially if no one ever bought or wore it, the Ass Hat is perfect. It says everything about the A's of this decade, and is also the signpost to their bleak future. It fits that no one will be able to wear it. Who, after all this, would want to?
It is a testament to where the A’s are as they end their decades in Oakland that the brief viral fame and quiet withdrawal of The Ass Hat was not the most damaging team-related social media release of the week. This is because there was also Fisher's soulless and roundly derided letter pretending that he ever had an ongoing affinity for the team and its history and its followers. It was one brown note after another, all the way down to his reference to the earthquake that interrupted the team's final championship run. Which he misspelled.
It was in keeping with Fisher’s multilayered tone-deafness that he commissioned an almost-certain-to-be-fired-soon employee to write that letter for him, and a measure of his utter uselessness as an entrepreneur that he thinks it represented a convincing rebuttal to all the things people have been saying about him for years. Indeed, most of the people who saw the letter made sure to print out a copy so as not to spit onto their phone or laptop. Former Oakland A’s pitcher Trevor May gave it the respect it deserved when he mocked Fisher for not saying it on camera. “Releasing a letter, clearly written by someone else, and including a bunch of names you DEFINITELY do not know, is just disrespectful to those that love the team,” May wrote. “You love owning stuff, just not your actions. Either stand up with pride or keep hiding.”
For all the belated outpourings of sympathy for Oakland and its fans, and the richly deserved condemnations of Fisher as an invisible yet still repellent failson who preferred to destroy his franchise rather than sell it or save it, the story here is not the final game in Oakland, which happens later this afternoon. It’s the even more miserable developments that will come later.
John Fisher, you see, didn't end baseball in Oakland as much as he cratered the viability of the franchise itself, wherever it ends up. It has no more of a future in West Sacramento or Las Vegas than it did in Oakland. His power-carelessness has made this franchise, which has been a free-riding barnacle on the hull of MLB for as long as he’s owned it, into something more abstract. It is the St. Louis Browns without Baltimore as a viable escape hatch, the Washington Generals without the Harlem Globetrotters to prop them up—it's that bereft, that hopeless, and that much of a challenge to the imagination.
Indeed, Fisher's insults to West Sac have already begun, with Fisher—or one of his invertebrate spokesmen, now that original front man Dave Kaval has exhausted our ability to endure either his face or voice—announcing that any postseason games the A's somehow incur in the next three-to-one-thousand years will be played in Las Vegas. It takes a serious man with an ironclad will to open his relationship with his next town with such a deftly wielded middle finger. The Fisher touch is that he still hasn't noticed that his team’s future home is giving him the same treatment. There remains no evidence that Las Vegas is keen to either have or hold the team either. Fisher’s A’s are not moving to Vegas or Sacramento so much as they are into The Forbidden Zone.
It doesn’t matter. Fisher is both a caricature and an inordinately obstinate man, and he has become the most detestable and least sympathetic sports figure in the nation just by being himself—first with the decision to leave Oakland and then in the ways that he has manifested that choice. He bought the team 19 years ago in the same way and for the same reason he once bought artwork, which is solely for his own amusement. This is evident in the way he ran the team, which was cheaply and with a religious devotion to roster churn aimed at keeping expenses down. It isn't that Fisher wasn't a baseball fan per se—his family bought a piece of the Giants three decades back as mostly silent partners and fully relinquished it only when he became the money behind the A's—but he clearly lost interest four years ago. That was right about the time that Fisher made up his mind that Oakland was no longer worth his attention. He wrecked the painting he bought because he didn't like the frame.
How he wrecked it will be Fisher’s real legacy, as an owner and as an enduring local villain. His interest in Sacramento is transparently only as a spite house, and his ability to relocate again three years after that to Las Vegas remains very much in doubt. His stubbornness should keep him on a path toward Vegas, and he may eventually get what he wants. But his investment in the operation will never increase because his new strategy is to invest in his team’s honeymoons in two new cities until the insults die down. It’s not a long-term plan, but then again he is not a long-term planner. The grift has to keep moving because history tells us that the longer Fisher stays, the worse a neighbor he becomes.
It will not take long, you may rest assured, for his 29 fellow owners to rue their acquiescence in allowing both the original move and the methods Fisher used to escape. It is easy to imagine what comes next—the league having to take control of the franchise once Fisher has completed its dissolution, and then being stuck with the task of repairing all the damage he has willfully done to it. Even eventual winning, which seems highly unlikely given ownership’s refusal to invest in the team at any recognizable level, cannot save Fisher from the reputation he has built for himself even among his most jaded partners in MLB's ownership cohort. He has essentially screwed them, too, which is more or less the only way to get read out of that rancid club.
Oakland has known and scorned billionaires before, and while it surely would prefer to still host the Raiders and Warriors, it has survived their departures and will survive this one. There are places where Joe Lacob is still recognized for his Curry-flavored acumen even if the jury is out on what happens thereafter; Mark Davis, whatever his shortcomings, has not yet been an active impediment to the operation and flowering of the Las Vegas Aces. Fisher, though, is only and ever the guy who aggressively damaged his own belongings to make them too foul to the eye, all to prove some strange point to someone somewhere who by now is no longer paying attention—that this is his team and no one else’s, maybe, or just that he regards it merely as real estate bait rather than an ongoing sporting and cultural concern. The point was always that he could do whatever he wanted with the team he owned, and now he’s doing just that.
And now it ends, with a final series against the merely grim Texas Rangers and a completely non-contextual final game sellout—one final Fan Depreciation Day on a Thursday afternoon. The team announced a crowd of 30,402 on Tuesday night, well below the Coliseum’s listed capacity but still the fifth-biggest crowd of the year after two Giants games in which most of the ticketholders were Giants fans, a Yankees game played in front of mostly Yankee fans, and a Dodgers game for mostly Shohei Ohtani fans. What fans were in the house on Tuesday were there for the novelty of seeing something for the last time. It wouldn’t be a difficult drive to see the A’s in Sacramento next year, but they won’t be making it.
That's all Fisher has to peddle—goodbyes. The next one will either be addressed to the about-to-be-maltreated-and-dismissed baseball fans of Sacramento County, and then there will be one more for the as-yet-uninterested baseball fans of Las Vegas, if Fisher’s team can ever manage to get there. He has firmly marked this team as baseball's hobo army. They might as well be wearing its owner's disgusted and largely unseen expression on their hats; the vagrant's clothes in which Fisher has dressed his team have already become a shameful and permanent full-body tattoo. The A's now represent an ethical rather than a financial bankruptcy, all because the man who actively, deliberately, and even proudly wrecked them is making dust and ash angels in the debris as proof of his worth. He is the emptiest of empty suits; the fact of it does a gross disservice to the coathanger that holds it all up. The deliberate damage Fisher has done will surely outlast even his withered 10-thumbed hand.
And the ticket to Thursday's game you may hold as a keepsake will seem like the most distasteful kind of memorabilia once it becomes clear what it represents, not just to the first of Fisher’s shunned homes but to the value of the game itself. But it will retain some value, if only as a reminder that while Ass Hats came and went in one adjustable size, they are still prominent in the owner's suite.
