About an hour after MLB commissioner Rob Manfred began speaking to reporters about what he saw as the unfortunate future of baseball in Oakland—or, rather, the lack thereof—a baseball game started in Oakland Coliseum.
This has been the miserable tension at the core of the A’s for months. The franchise has been starved of hope by a seemingly indifferent owner in retail magnate John Fisher. The threat of relocation has been hanging over the team’s head for years; now, it seems closer than ever, with the Nevada legislature voting Wednesday to approve public funding that would help pay for a stadium in Las Vegas. This roster was not built to win. The stadium is unfit for regular play; the fans have been scapegoated and frustrated; the future is generally bleak. Yet, in the meantime, baseball must go on in Oakland.
It’s an awkward dynamic. This season has invited considerable talk of the Athletics’ storied past in Oakland, decades rooted in place, and just as much talk about their uncertain future, whether in the Bay Area or Las Vegas. But the present? Easier just to ignore. Better not to look directly at this roster, methodically stripped for parts over the past few years, designed to fit only in some kind of hypothetical purgatory of Quad-A.
