The Oakland A's Are, Regrettably, a Line Item in John Fisher's Private Equity Portfolio
Last week, a reporter in Sacramento spotted John Fisher, the A’s owner, and Dave Kaval, the club president, touring Sutter Health Park — presumably to scout out a potential temporary home — along with a couple of executives from Sansome Partners.
As I noted at the time, that last part — the presence of the Sansome Partners execs — was particularly noteworthy.
Sansome Partners is a private equity firm that just so happens to count Fisher as a Founding Partner. As an important aside, Fisher is not currently listed on the firm’s masthead, but any level of research indicates the direct ties between Sansome Partners and the Fisher family. Another layer to the Sansome Partners connection to the A’s: Sandy Dean, who was with Fisher in Sacramento, is not just a Founding Partner of the firm but also a Board Member of the baseball team.
The firm’s investment strategy, especially as it relates to “Long-Term Value Creation,” coincides impeccably with how Fisher’s A’s have been run:
“We focus on long-term value creation and are less concerned with short-term results.
In our public equities fund, we are able to make investments in the face of near-term uncertainty when we feel the long-term prospects are attractive.
In our private investments, our portfolio company managers operate without the pressures of achieving short-term targets and can focus on building value.”
That first sentence, in particular, encapsulates the club’s years-long stumble toward Las Vegas while simultaneously stripping down the current iteration of the A’s and driving the team into a metaphorical ditch. For context, the A’s, who last year ended the season with 112 losses — the most in Oakland history — have so far spent $1.5 million in guaranteed free-agent deals this offseason. The club’s first spring training game, incidentally, is in exactly a month.
At the risk of collapsing a complex situation that has spanned decades — even before Fisher entered the frame in 2005 — his A’s can be summarized thusly:
The Oakland A’s are, regrettably, a line item in John Fisher’s private equity portfolio. Nothing more than that.
In case you want to tumble into a rabbit hole about the outsized influence of private equity on the A’s, Major League Baseball, and North American sports at large, I highly recommend checking out this piece from PitchBook, which breaks down the team-by-team connections. As you pour through the numbers you might wonder, like I did, how exactly it is that Arctos Sports Partners — another private equity firm — is allowed to invest in six MLB teams.
That’s enough for now, but one day, I’ll follow this up with another related piece: How venture capital and private equity explain the dynasty of the Warriors and the demise of the A’s.