Skodnick: As A’s Are Ripped From Oakland, It’s Time For MLB’s Anti-Trust Exemption to End

Thirty-five years ago, so much was different. 

The Oakland Athletics, who led the American League West by five games over the Kansas City Royals on Sept. 26, 1989, had a lineup featuring Mark McGwire, Rickey Henderson, Jose Canseco. 

Dave Stewart, Mike Moore, Storm Davis, Bob Welch and Curt Young formed a rotation that won 81 games between them.

Despite playing half the season without superstar right fielder and designated hitter Jose Canseco, the A’s clubbed 127 home runs on their way to a 99-63 record, the best in the American League, and drew more than 2.5 million fans to the Oakland Alameda County Coliseum.

They breezed through the American League Championship Series, beating the Toronto Blue Jays 4-1 and swept their rival across San Francisco Bay, the San Francisco Giants, in a World Series most remembered for something that happened to the field and everyone and everything around it – the Loma Prieta Earthquake – than anything that happened on it.

It was a different time, before regional sports networks injected hundreds of millions of dollars into professional sports via television rights fees and before the 1994 strike.

Today, 35 years later, the A’s will play their final game in the Oakland Alameda County Coliseum. They’ll likely play the next three seasons in a Triple-A ballpark in Sacramento, before maybe moving to Las Vegas, should the financing for a new ballpark come together. It hasn’t yet.

Athletics owner John Fisher and Major League Baseball’s owners, along with Commissioner Rob Manfred, are the modern day equivalent to the robber barons of Gilded Age American society.

You don’t have to believe me. Look at the history for yourself.

They opposed, for years, any attempt by the players to unionize, and it took the Herculean efforts of Marvin Miller – the former president of the United Steelworkers – along with Oakland-raised Curt Flood sacrificing his career and Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally filing a grievance that was upheld by an independent arbitrator to free players from the reserve clause, which allowed Major League Baseball’s clubs to exclusively hold the rights to a player’s services in perpetuity.

In the same way that John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil held a monopoly on petroleum products, Major League Baseball’s owners hold a monopoly on their product – elite professional baseball as entertainment – and while economic monopolies are generally illegal in the United States, MLB’s monopoly was granted by the Supreme Court’s ruling in a 1922 case where the Federal Baseball Club of Baltimore sued the National League, with the court holding that baseball does not constitute interstate commerce and thus doesn’t fall under the purview of the  Sherman Anti-Trust Act.

In 1972, when Curt Flood sued for free agency, the Supreme Court upheld the anti-trust exemption it had gifted baseball’s owners 50 years earlier, leaving it up to congress to revoke the exemption. 

In the intervening 52 years, it hasn’t – and that has given free reign to malignant owners like Jeffrey Loria and John Fisher to pit city against city, citizens against local governments, and fans against ownership, holding markets hostage while demanding public funds to build newer, more extravagant stadiums to drive their private profit.

Since taking control of the A’s in 2005, Fisher has perpetually pursued a new stadium, playing Oakland against Fremont and San Jose in the Bay Area before settling on a stadium site at Howard Terminal near downtown Oakland, and then playing Oakland against Las Vegas when the city his franchise has called home since 1968 didn’t pony up enough public money. 

He’s also cut spending on player payroll, taking an organization that creatively found new ways to analyze the game – so much so that a best-selling book about the organization was made into a film starring Brad Pitt that garnered six Academy Award nominations – and making them a middling franchise, reliant on prospects and borderline Major Leaguers to remain somewhat competitive, content to balance the books with revenue sharing checks from the other owners rather than gate receipts from Oaklanders who buy tickets.

And he can get away with it, largely sans scrutiny, because 102 years ago, the Supreme Court ordained that professional baseball is not interstate commerce.

That the A’s, who drew 1,670,734 fans to the Coliseum in 2019, the year before the pandemic, have drawn less than a million fans each year since 2021 shouldn’t be a surprise. 

Baseball fans are nostalgic, but they aren’t stupid. They know when their favorite team isn’t going to be competitive on the field. Oakland’s fans, of which there are plenty despite what John Fisher wants you to believe, haven’t been inclined to show up to watch an uncompetitive team while its trust fund billionaire from across the bay shops the franchise to whichever legislative body will sign over the most money for a stadium. Can you blame them?

In the 124 seasons since the A’s were founded, they’ve called three cities home, none as long as Oakland, where they won four World Series in Oakland. Soon, perhaps, Sacramento will be the fourth home, albeit a temporary one, while they try, try, try to finally nail down stadium financing in Las Vegas, a city that hasn’t warmly embraced the idea of the A’s coming to town. 

No, really. Even the mayor of Las Vegas, Carolyn Goodman, said that the A’s should find a way to stay in Oakland.

“I personally think they’ve gotta figure out a way to stay in Oakland and make their dream come true,” Goodman said on a February 2024 episode of Front Office Sports Today. “I just know that [owner John Fisher] — longtime successful family — in my opinion, needs to listen to people that are up there. It’s their team.”  

She later backtracked on those comments, releasing a statement saying, “I want to be clear that I am excited about the prospect of Major League Baseball in Las Vegas, and it very well may be that the Las Vegas A’s will become a reality that we will welcome to our city.”

The bright spot out of the mess that Fisher has made in Oakland and Sacramento and Las Vegas, perhaps, is that A’s fans aren’t taking this lying down. 

They’ve organized. Last season, they planned and executed a reverse boycott, filling the Coliseum to tell Fisher and MLB owners, “It ain’t us, it’s you.” They organized a giveaway, giving out kelly green t-shirts with a one-word message for Fisher: Sell. And A’s fans and those who sympathize with them have taken the shirts to every other MLB ballpark and around the world.

Neither are politicians, including Congress members Barbara Lee and Mark Desaulnier. The pair of Democrats represent Oakland and the East Bay and sponsored a bill requiring that an MLB franchise that moves more than 25 miles pay compensation to the jilted city, and if they don’t, MLB would lose its antitrust exemption. It’s just a bill, and it hasn’t gone anywhere, but it’s a start.

If you count yourself as a baseball fan, regardless of which team you root for, you should be looking at what Oakland fan groups like the Oakland 68s and Last Dive Bar have been doing and figure out how to organize your team’s fans, lest this happen to city. Contact your member of congress and your senators and demand MLB’s antitrust exemption be taken away.

Because some day, that ballpark you grew up going to will show its age like the Oakland Coliseum, or Olympic Stadium, or Griffith Stadium, or the Polo Grounds, Ebbets Field, or Braves Field. 

And your favorite team’s owner might just look for greener grass elsewhere, playing your city against, say, Nashville or Portland or Charlotte or Las Vegas, to see who which city give away the most public funds to subsidize the team’s bottom line. Once the ballpark is built – wherever it’s built, it doesn’t really matter whether it’s in your city or somewhere else – he can flip the franchise to another billionaire and secure his profit.

Don’t think it could happen to your team? 

You haven’t been paying attention for the last 70 years.

Photo: Catcher Terry Steinbach of the Oakland Athletics does the “bash” with teammate Dave Henderson during the 1989 World Series against the San Francisco Giants at Oakland Coliseum in Oakland, California. (Photo by Focus on Sport via Getty Images)