‘Vegas beware’: Frustrated A’s fans want to show world it’s not their fault

Clary’s social media newsfeeds were filled with fellow A’s fans also furious they were being blamed for the slow death of baseball in Oakland. He saw MLB commissioner Rob Manfred point to sparse crowds at the Coliseum as a key reason the team needs to abandon its home of 55 years and start over in the Las Vegas desert.

Enough was enough.

“I get why people aren’t going to games, but it feeds a false narrative,” Clary said. “I thought, doing the opposite, showing up, will set the record straight.”

So Clary, a high school baseball coach from Vacaville, came up with an idea: A “reverse boycott.”

The hope is to turn Tuesday night’s game against the Tampa Bay Rays into a loud, unified statement that A’s, namely owner John Fisher, are the ones who abandoned the fans. The fan base has endured years of seeing star players traded to slash payroll, which is now the lowest in baseball. Not coincidentally they are the worst team in baseball, by far, on pace to having the worst record since 1899.

They are averaging 8,675 fans per home game, dead last among the 30 teams. One A’s fan tweeted Friday that they had determined 14,700 tickets had been sold for Tuesday’s game.

Will that be enough to show the world that the baseball spirit didn’t die of natural causes in Oakland, but that owner John Fisher killed it?

“The idea is to pack the (ballpark) on a random weeknight, showing MLB and the country that us fans are not the problem,” Clary tweeted on April 13, days before the team announced its first binding agreement for potential ballpark land in Las Vegas. “Hope to see you there.”

Clary’s tweet took off and, soon enough, the project gained steam online.

Longtime fan Bryan Johansen is replacing his player banners that for years have draped the outfield facades with brand new ones urging Fisher to sell the team. Another longtime fan, Anson Casanares, decided the boycott event needed unifying threads.

Casanares, a member of the Oakland 68s — the group whose drum-playing has given a heartbeat to the skeletal Coliseum crowds — teamed up with local clothing brand Oaklandish to produce thousands of green shirts with the message “SELL” printed in white across the chest and give them out to fans attending Tuesday’s game. The shirts cost $5 to make and the duo hoped to raise $25,000 to cover costs. They collected more than $27,000 in donations.

Fans like Casaners and Clary say this reverse boycott isn’t just a statement: This is personal. It’s one last stand against an owner they feel has dragged A’s fans through the mud while destroying the team they care about so passionately.

“If you’re an A’s fan, it’s like being at war,” said Casanares, an Oakland resident. “When you go to games, it’s not about what’s happening on the field. It’s about figuring out how to wake people up to talk about what’s going on.”

Casanares has been going to A’s games regularly since 2006, a year after Fisher joined the ownership group.

The A’s were just a few years removed from the best of their Moneyball era, when fans had reason to show. From 2001-04, the A’s drew an average of 2.18 million fans per season, middle of the pack in MLB, and reached the playoffs three times. From 1988-92, under the ownership of Walter Haas, the A’s ranked in the top five in attendance and also had among the league’s most expensive payrolls.

Going back to the days of Charlie Finley, A’s owners have largely followed a pattern of culling the stars they grew and placating fans with a promise that the cycle would one day end.

Fans say Fisher has taken the pattern to new extremes. Given his position as the third-richest owner in baseball, his parents founded The Gap clothing store, there was hope he’d invest to keep homegrown star players around and add others to bring a World Series to Oakland for the first time since 1989. There was hope his family’s deep Bay Area ties would make the new stadium process a little smoother. One point everyone agrees on is that the Coliseum, built in 1966, needs to be replaced. Instead, Fisher sped up the roster churn and slashed the baseball budget to unworkable lows and, since taking full ownership in 2016, has failed to build in the Bay Area.

That’s when fans say Fisher and Co. started using the fans as an excuse and a potential exit strategy.

“I think they started to view their fans as another one of their enemies,” A’s fan Hal Gordon, also known as Hal the Hot Dog Guy, said. “There’s an implicit bargain that fans are going to show up when your team is terrible. Not everybody, but fans will. And they’ll have fun. Because that’s their team.”

A’s executives say they tried; the A’s Access program started in the late 2010s was a fan-favorite cost-effective season ticket program full of discounts and bargains. But the A’s shut it down after the pandemic because it was losing money. Then came increases in season ticket prices, parking and concessions, all while the team’s stars and even former manager Bob Melvin left with little or nothing coming in return.

If the A’s leave Oakland, longtime supporters like Clary, Casaneras and Gordon say the fan base should be remembered as one that put more sweat and tears into keeping the team’s culture alive than their owner ever did.

This is a group that for years printed and plastered signs with their own crafted nicknames and slogans across the bleacher railings. A group that beat drums for hours straight to manufacture a raucous environment. It’s fostered fan groups from the “Hendu Land Group” and “Fly Boys” of the 1980s to “Coco Fingers,” “Melvin’s Misfits,” and “The Last Dive Bar” of the new millennium — some of which disbanded in grief as their favorite players were traded away.

“I’ve always said your true character shows based on how committed you are to your sports teams,” Casanares said. “If this happened anywhere else, the attendance would probably be worse. The Oakland spirit is in everyone, it’s a fighting city. It’s the Bay Area. There’s a lot of civic pride.”

It’s also a fan base that clings on to hope that in the end, the A’s will remain in Oakland. With new ownership, of course.

Why the optimism when all seems lost? The legislative stalls in Las Vegas last week, which may or may not foil a stadium deal, were a sign to many to keep the faith. Fans also hold hope that the commissioner will remember the wild-card game record 54,005 fans that showed up in 2019, or the crowd of 56,310 for a Bay Bridge Series game against the Giants in 2018, that this team has been well-supported, and not that long ago when the A’s tried to field a competitive team.

Fans say they no longer expect to hear Fisher’s side of the story. He has never spoken publicly to the media or on the record about his stadium search. Attempts to reach Fisher and team president David Kaval for comment for this story were unsuccessful.

But fans hope this reverse boycott gets the commissioner’s attention — after all, it was seven years ago he suggested the idea of leaving Oakland would be “a mistake.” The message they want to send is that they will show up if the team is owned by someone who cares about the A’s as much as they do. They want the team to stay. They want Fisher to sell.

For now, that hope drives them.

“I don’t want to say it’s a fitting end, because I don’t think it’s the end,” Clary said. “I don’t think it will happen until shovels are in the ground. I’m an optimist. I still think they can turn it around. That’s what it means to be a fan.”