In our continuing look at bad owners, we head west to Oakland to direct you to one of the worst baseball owners. It is obviously subjective to deem someone the worst owner, but the case for John Fisher of the Oakland Athletics is not a straightforward one. Before we explain further his track record as owner, let us introduce you to John Fisher.
John Fisher is the son of Doris and Don Fisher who were the co-founders of Gap, Inc. and inherited his fortune from them. He and businessman Lewis Wolff purchased the franchise, with Fisher becoming managing general partner. Fisher gained full ownership of the team in 2016, when Wolff sold his remaining shares.
What makes Fisher a bad owner is due not primarily to the A’s record. Over the course of his ownership, the team has logged a record of 1,428 wins versus 1,385 losses good for a 0.508 winning percentage. In addition, the A’s reached the playoffs six times in the nine years from 2012 through 2020, while also getting into the playoffs in 2006, going as far as the League Championship Series that year.
Based on the above record, some might be wondering why we would classify John Fisher as a bad owner. Essentially, despite a net worth of $2.2 billion as of 2022 (was $3.1 billion at 2021), he has been a penny pincher throughout his ownership relative to other owners. Over the time that the billionaire Fisher has owned the team (2005 – 2022) the average team salary was $70.3 million, which ranked the A’s as the 27th lowest payroll for that period. The average payroll for the 30 teams during that period was $112.1 million, with the New York Yankees coming in at #1 with an average payroll of $201.8 million.
Despite that low payroll, the A’s did reach the playoffs, seven times. Only once (2006) though during those seven playoff appearances did Oakland win a series. After that one playoff series win, the Detroit Tigers subsequently swept the A’s in the Divisional Playoffs four games to none. We look at the glass as half empty here rather than half full, since just making the playoffs had little to do with ownership and more about the executive management, specifically Billy Beane the General Manager. Beane was on the forefront of using advanced analytics (aka sabermetrics) to find extraordinary value in baseball players that other teams had discarded and put together some of the best low cost team’s baseball has ever seen. A low cost team and a budget owner will only take you so far and to no fault of Beane, his teams could never beat the best big budget teams during the playoffs.
If you are not familiar with Billy Beane, the book Moneyball by Michael Lewis, published in 2003, documented his use of advanced metrics in the game of baseball. Later on, the book was made into a movie of the same title in 2011 starring Brad Pitt (definitely recommended by us here at BP).
Given a genius of a general manager, all Fisher likely had to do was support the team marginally and he could have reaped the benefits by taking them to a World Series, not just for himself but the city of Oakland. Unfortunately, both Beane and the city of Oakland have been saddled with a cheap owner during the past 17 years. Therefore, we give little to no credit to Fisher for any of the team’s success and credit Beane and the rest of his front office for turning baseball straw into marginal gold.
There are other cheapskate owners such as Fisher, but what makes him the worst of the worst is that this billionaire would not only not properly fund his team, but just officially announced the relocation of the team out of Oakland to Las Vegas. The Athletics had been in Oakland since 1968, but after not getting the sweetheart deal he so desired from the city, he finally signed a deal with Las Vegas to move the team to that city. It is not like Oakland did not support this franchise. They did and had a rich history of teams that won pennants and World Series’ dating back to the early 70’s. That team also had a bad owner who began selling off the pieces of his championship teams when he decided that he could no longer afford the player salaries. We truly feel terrible for the city of Oakland having dealt with horrible past baseball owners and now losing their third and final of their sport’s teams after the Oakland Raiders (NFL) and the Golden State Warriors (NBA) also departed.
In the end, Fisher has abandoned Oakland and taken the $380 million in public funding from Las Vegas to build a new stadium at a grand total cost of $1.5 billion. Oakland which has a large African American population does not have the resources to dole out public funding like some larger cities in the US, such as Las Vegas, so in the end a 55 year relationship with the city will eventually come to an end as a greedy owner gets his shiny new stadium with lots of public funding.
We heard recently a sport’s talk show talking how Oakland lost their team since they would not or could not cough up the money to buy a new stadium, which led to their poor attendance. There was no mention from this particular talking head about how a miserly owner had demoralized the fan base by cutting off funding of the team long ago. It is truly amazing the disconnect from reality, but just like many in the industry, they will blame everyone else except the true culprit, which in this case is undoubtedly the owner.
It is true that the stadium the A’s play in was not the best for baseball as compared to other parks, but to suggest that this is the reason why people were not coming to see them is ludicrous. If there was some correlation between an old ballpark and poor attendance then how can you explain teams such as the Boston Red Sox, Chicago Cubs, and the Los Angeles Dodgers, who all have extremely loyal, fan bases but also some of the oldest parks in the game. No one is suggesting that these teams relocate or build a new park anytime soon.
The bottom line is that fans care much less about the ballpark and much more about the product on the field. There is a lot more we could write about the deceit and lies not just from Fisher, but also from MLB on this move, but that will be for another post.
Safe to say that both Fisher and MLB alienated another portion of their fan base, a very loyal fan base over the past 55 years, to grab what is important in their minds and that is money. John Fisher and MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred remind us of another famous fictional person in this case, Gordon Gecko from the movie Wall Street, who uttered those illustrious words, “greed is good”! Sorry Gordon, I mean Rob er, John, greed is not good, especially for the fans of Oakland and their A’s and for the game of baseball.
Baseball Purist 
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