MLB contraction in 2001 might have been right, in light of the plight of the once-regal Oakland Athletics

Just saying: Shuttering two FUBAR franchises, as MLB faked doing two decades ago, would foster new teams blooming instead of Las Vegas inheriting the turd blossom John Fisher made of the A's.

Jun 28, 2023

Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred might as well have been on a mental loop with one of the defining early moments from The Office during this Oakland Athletics-to-Vegas travesty. This is not a compliment.

Hacky lede? Guilty as charged, with one good excuse. Finding a solid sitcom cross-reference, at least I have found, dissipates fan-anger before it morphs into anger that can ruin your day. Sometimes the Blue Jays win, sometimes they lose, sometimes its rains, and this is supposed to be fun — fun, damn it. Good fandom means having expectations from your favorite forms of entertainment, with a bit of folk wisdom about how to improve it in the mix. You are, of course, responsible for how deeply and how often engage with it, and for your own happiness. If it sucks, dip out or find another form of it.

Piling on to the many denunciations of how Athletics majority partner John Fisher, et al., faked the death of baseball in Oakland, with the collaboration of two commissioners, is barely needed. The condemnation has been 97 per cent universal in the last two weeks since state-level politicians approved corporate welfare for a Vegas ballpark that likely is not even on a big enough tract of land. From insiders’ insiders such as Ken Rosenthal and Jeff Passan, to YouTubers, to marquee players such as Las Vegas native Bryce Harper, everyone has averred that this stinks worse than a possum carcass left in the penultimate row of Mount Davis after the last Raiders home football game in 2019.

The hook, line, and sinker may have come from longtime Bay Area scribe Ray Ratto during a recent Distraction episode. As Ratto pointed out, Fisher and the Athletics have never had leverage in landing a replacement for the Coliseum, but keep carrying on as if they do. They have no hand, let alone enough payroll room for Brad Hand.

Anyway, The Office scene that Manfred conjured is from “Halloween” early in Season 2. It is a good window into Michael Scott not just being Steve Carell’s cheerier, just as cringy Americanized take on Ricky Gervais’s David Brent in the OG British The Office. The first third of that season pushes that Michael is a personification of the Peter principle: someone promoted to his level of incompetence. The episode is two before “The Client,” which is the first big ‘Michael gets a win’ story that shows he is a sales savant.

Basic setup for “Halloween”: Michael Scott was to have terminated one employee by Oct. 31. Naturally, he waits until the last day of the month when everyone has come to work wearing some pretty elaborate costumes.1 His first choice is Creed Bratton, who is dressed as Dracula.

Creed talks Michael out of it and talks him into turfing Devon White instead.2

Devon’s reaction: “Creed’s an idiot, you know that! No, no, no, no, no! You had it right the first time, you gotta go with your gut, man!” slaps. Well, at least it does for me.

What MLB had right, completely by accident through pre-labor negotiation brinksmanship, was downsizing from 30 to 28 teams. It was trial-ballooned in the winter of 2001-02. Now, to be clear, “contraction was a ploy.” It was never going to actually happen at that time, and “such a scenario would have been and remains nuts.” That was how Craig Calcaterra phrased it in 2014.3

Nuts is a batting practice fastball in the wheelhouse in the landscape of 2023. As a fan, even as a pro-union one, it is tempting. The swelling rank of NFT (not F-ing trying) teams does long-term existential harm to baseball if not necessarily short-term economic harm. Seeing what has happened to Oakland, and what is happening in Kansas City where the Royals franchise is doing the same stadium shakedown by refusing to field a proper MLB roster… well, forgive me for blue-skying a hot take that some fast-buck ownerships would take the buyout and run to buy another yacht. It is important for billionaires to have yachts. It keeps them from getting into unsafe submersibles.

The players’ association would be up in arms just like it was back in ’01-02. But they could always get it in writing that expansion will happen sooner rather than later. Otherwise, one of classic-era The Simpsons’ critiques of North American organized labour — “Then we’ll go too far, and become corrupt and shiftless, and the Japanese will eat us alive!” — will seem less prophetic. I mean, look at what Shohei Ohtani is doing as a righty starter and as a designated hitter.

Revisiting that period in 2001 and ’02, though, involves a side trip to just more than a decade previous to that. There was a time when the bane of being a young Blue Jays diehard was not shaded in Yankee pinstripes or Boston crimson and navy. It came in Oakland jade-green and gold. Looking back, as an aging Xennial, the lesson from those Rickey Henderson-infused A’s crews was important in becoming a smarter and less tribal sports fan.

1989: An ass-kicking masterclass I needed

It was great to be young and a Jays fan in 1989. I actually was 12 years old that summer, so I did not want to start this scribbling here. I am well aware of Ken Dryden’s The Golden Age of Anything aphorism.4 That particular year was not actually a good one for major-league baseball.

There was labour tension following wage theft that occurred during collusion. That was not easily understood by a kid, but you knew something was off. What was this in the paper about Andre Dawson showing up at Chicago Cubs spring training with a blank contract? Why was Tim Raines’s name absent from the Expos boxscores in the Kingston Whig-Standard for the first month of the ’87 season? An article in a copy of Sports Illustrated that a teacher lent me explained why Kirk Gibson was now on the L.A. Dodgers instead of the Detroit Tigers without being traded or having signed a big contract at the December winter meetings.

Plenty of teams were still playing on knee-buckling and back-aching Astroturf. Also, in ’89, Pete Rose was banned. Officially, it was for betting on baseball, and unofficially, it was for being a degen. Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti died shortly after throwing Rose out of baseball. The World Series was interrupted by the Bay Area earthquake.

A memory burn of the Jays’ arc is a walk-off defeat against the Yankees on the last weekend of July. The only part I recall vividly is the bottom of the ninth. It was tied, and pesky Randy Velarde, a righty-batting infielder, led off with a triple into the right-field corner to set up a Yankees victory. The Yankees scored him on the first try. The result left the Jays two games below .500, and my father was irritated by the defeat. The boxscore only backs him up. The Jays had coughed up a five-run lead in the span of six fielding outs. And these were the 1989 Yankees, not the 1999 or 2009 Yankees.

Obliged to defend my guys, I bet my dad they could still win an AL East division where no one had taken command. The Jays commenced to playing .667 ball over the next two months before winning the division flag on the last Saturday of the regular season. You could look it up.

Then came the league playoffs against Oakland. Over five games, the A’s and Rickey Henderson, showed us that the Jays were not good enough to win in October. It was an ass-kicking masterclass.

Since Henderson had been in the AL East with the Yankees while I was first learning baseball, his talent was evident. Part of the allure of baseball, why a shy kid like me liked it, is that it seems equitable: everyone gets a chance to shine, and even apex predators get humbled. Rickey Henderson illustrated, though, that baseball is not Domination Culture-proofed.

That was sealed in after an early-season game the year prior, also in a Sunday game at Yankee Stadium. Henderson took off to steal third base, and when the Mark Eichhorn sidearm delivery sailed past Toronto catcher Ernie Whitt, Rickey kept running and scored the eventual game-winning run. Wait, you can do that? Score from second base on a wild pitch? In my experience, Henderson was the first ballplayer who was so good that you just wanted to scream, “Unfair!” while knowing that you were too old for that.

First Henderson overmatched the Blue Jays with his speed in Oakland. Then he did it with his power in Toronto by crushing two home runs and stylin’ on his home run trots.

The grumbling from the Blue Jays players in the media, and from adults in my midst, led to a moment of truth. Were you going to fall in line with the tribalism and have the red-ass like Blue Jays players such as Whitt, the pitcher Todd Stottlemyre and third baseman Kelly Gruber, or be magnanimous in defeat?

As a cracker-ass ginger kid, I was fairly oblivious to any Black and white coding. Experience around the hockey arena, though, had provided exposure to hearing “hotdog” or “showboat” used as a pejorative, and I heard it from adults over those few days, although not from my parents. It also seemed like point-missing elevated to performance art, 18 years before Twitter. There was a great ballplayer decimating my Beloveds of Summer with a historic performance, and all people wanted to do was slap on a “hotdog” or “showboat” label? Talk about your denials that you were in the presence of greatness.

And if after-school reruns of Night Court taught pubescent and adolescent boys of that era anything, it was that you always keep your eyes peeled for the presence of greatness. Even if you’re a Rich Texan and Christine Sullivan distracts you into losing an arm-wrestling match against Judge Harry Stone.

(Markie Post. you are missed.)

That was those 1988 to ’90 Oakland teams — the industry standard, regardless of what happened in World Series or what Canseco and McGwire were doing by doping with steroids. never really tarnished that memory. It might even enhance it, plus it was fodder for a great Lonely Island special… These Athletics days… and those Oakland nights.

The entire history of baseball, as I would come to understand through Charles P. Pierce before the turn of the millennium, “is a history of money.” For a spot in time that was the bittersweet build-up to the nirvana of 1992 and ’93. While Toronto led the American League in attendance four seasons in a row from 1989 to ’92, Oakland, in the pre-Mount Davis Coliseum, ranked second, second, third, and fourth respectively. Share that with revisionist reply guys carrying water for MLB and John Fisher.

That was the Oakland Athletics through a Xennial lens. The Moneyball phase that inspired Michael Lewis’s book and the Hollywood adaptation was the sequel. Seeing an Oakland team that is on pace for 120 losses is sad enough. Seeing it in Las Vegas will be sadder.

The Subtle Art of Not Giving A Fck* is a self-help book, not a sports business textbook

What was golden about that time? There was still some illusion that at least every MLB team tried to compete, and revenue generation and franchise valuations were not the alpha and omega. There were bad teams that racked up 100 or more losses. It might be naivete speaking, but not feel like the economic model had been so subverted — perverted — into a closed system where winning and excellence are just too gosh-dang expensive to bother with making an effort. And there is no consequence for failure. A good eight of the 10 franchises in the two Central divisions are NFT teams, along with Oakland and the Colorado Rockies in the two West divisions.

The Athletics franchise, wherever it ends up, is just one grotesque that exemplifies that dry rot. When the economic structure of MLB fosters Kansas City Royals starting pitcher Jordan Lyles, per The Guardian, “ma(king) a $50M career out of the art of losing,” then fans should be demanding a better way. Real consequences for sucking would be riveting viewing, eh?

A sport with a century-plus history of minor leagues, and that executed a hostile takeover of Minor League Baseball (MiLB) during the 2020 COVID-19 pause, has the pieces in place to bring promotion-relegation to North American sports. That is another post, though.

Instead, MLB is intent on expanding to 32 teams. Great. More of the same.

Contraction revisited

So how does that lament support an argument to contract two MLB teams? It does not, necessarily. My jam is fairly modest — big-time sports need to become more sustainable and more flexible to market demands. There is also the not-inconsiderable matter of climate adaptability, which will probably mean shortening and regionalizing regular-season competition in MLB, the NBA, NHL, and NFL. Seriously, MLB, why are you playing midseason games in London?! Sending the New York Mets overseas is an act of war!

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