The Unofficial (And Somewhat Incomplete) 2023-24 Offseason Timeline of the Oakland A’s
In light of the roaring success of the inaugural “Unofficial And Somewhat Incomplete A’s Timeline,” I’m releasing the offseason edition on the eve of spring training. One reader described the initial effort, which I’ve added below, as “amazing, hilarious, and heartbreaking.” I suspect the same adjectives will apply to this timeline, as well.
This offseason, there was, as it turns out, an abundance of content, mostly detailing the ongoing skullduggery (and general embarrassment) underpinning the efforts of John Fisher, the club owner, to move the Oakland A’s to Las Vegas.
What follows is the lightly edited version of the running timeline I typed up on my iPhone Notes app as the offseason played out. Who knows? Maybe I’ll have to keep this bit up…
*Oct. 16: After Trevor May announces his retirement on Twitch, he tells John Fisher: “Sell the team, dude.” Adding: “Take mommy and daddy’s money somewhere else, dork.”
*Oct. 24: Bob Melvin hired as the new manager of the Giants.
*Oct. 27: Just before the start of the World Series, players union president Tony Clark says he does “find it interesting” that the A’s would leave the 6th-biggest market for one that would keep them in revenue-sharing.
*Nov. 6: The Guardians hire former A’s star Stephen Vogt as their new manager. Current manager Mark Kotsay had been interviewing with the Mets before he was eliminated from the process one day earlier.
*Nov. 7: The A’s exercise Mark Kotsay’s 2025 option; He had been headed into the final year of his deal. GM David Forst calls in an “obvious decision” even though the club had let him look around for other jobs.
*Nov. 14: The Athletic reports that MLB owners are expected to approve the club’s move to Las Vegas; A plane flies over the Owners Meetings with a sign that says: “A’S BELONG IN OAKLAND.”
*Nov. 16: MLB owners vote unanimously to approve the A’s move to Las Vegas.
*Nov. 21: 5 days after the Vegas news, the team sends its official weekly email newsletter, highlighting the organization’s charitable efforts in Oakland.
*Nov. 28: The Oakland B’s launch their franchise, announcing that they will be playing at Laney College in 2024 in the Pioneer League, now an independent league that had previously been rookie ball.
*Nov. 30: A headline that could only be attached to the A’s: LVSportBiz.com reports that “Las Vegas Set To Get First Look At Athletics Stadium Renderings Monday,” adding parenthetically: “Previous Drawings Were Not Actual Baseball Stadium.”
*Dec. 1: A’s postpone their planned unveiling of renderings out of respect for two Nevada Highway Patrol Troopers who were struck and killed by a car.
*Dec. 6: At the Winter Meetings, super agent Scott Boras calls out Rob Manfred and the MLB owners for turning the A’s, “one of the great franchises,” into an outlier. Adds: “I’m not sure why they did it this way… I think it hurts the game.”
*Dec. 15: There’s a report that the A’s are signing Trevor Gott, who would be the first major league free agent the club has signed to a guaranteed deal the entire offseason.
*Jan. 4: The Oakland B’s announce they had scheduled a game at the Coliseum on June 29, signed the lease and paid a deposit before the A’s blocked them.
*Jan. 17: MLB and the players’ association approve the A’s to receive revenue sharing in 2024 despite not having a binding agreement in Las Vegas to build a stadium. It had been previously stipulated in the CBA that the team needed to have a binding agreement in place to get the revenue-sharing money.
*Jan. 18: John Fisher, Dave Kaval and a couple of executives from Sansome Partners are seen touring Sutter Health Park in Sacramento, a potential temporary home for the A’s between Oakland and Las Vegas. Sansome Partners is a private equity firm co-founded by Fisher. There are also various reports, later confirmed, that the A’s have gone to Utah to scout out another potential home. This one is the future ballpark of a Triple-A team. Only broke ground in November so doesn’t actually exist yet. Located 17 miles outside Salt Lake City and most crucially is built to have a 7.5K capacity.
*Jan. 24: Speaking at a Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce event, John Fisher tells reporters, “I started out as a Giants fan before we bought the A’s” and then insists he “gave everything he had” to keep the team in Oakland. The emcee at the same event, when the crowd says nothing after she welcomes the A’s to Lav Vegas, quips: “Are we alive back there?”
*Jan. 26: Seven billboards with the phrase “Utah wants the A’s” show up in the state, posted by Big League Utah, a coalition aiming to bring MLB to Salt Lake City.
*Jan. 30: On back-to-back days, Ken Rosenthal and Jeff Passan — MLB’s top two preeminent reporters — pen stories explicitly detailing the flimsy nature of John Fisher’s A’s business model and proposed move to Las Vegas. Most poignantly, the stories call attention to the fact that the A’s are in danger of losing $70 million per year in TV money because they don’t have a long-term ballpark lease.
*Feb. 2: Amid the ongoing torrent of John-Fisher-is-objectively-a-disaster-columns, the Defector publishes a piece that is the most damning of all, somehow exceeding the expectations of its impeccable headline: “John Fisher’s Wandering Athletics Are Slipping Free Of Reality.” Fisher is referred to in the piece as “Athletics owner and slimy coward.”
*Feb. 2: The A’s officially announce the signing of starter Alex Wood and the trade for starter Ross Stripling. As of this juncture here are the club’s top 3 earners: 1. Ross Stripling, SP, $9.25 M; 2. Alex Wood, SP, $8.5 M; 3. Aledmys Diaz, INF, $8 M.
*Feb. 5: A Nevada teachers union, by way of a political action committee, sues Nevada and its governor to block the bill which gives the A’s $380 in stadium funding. This is the second such lawsuit on this matter.
*Feb. 6: The Mayor of Las Vegas, Carolyn Goodman, goes on a podcast and explains, in great detail, why the A’s proposed move to the Tropicana site “doesn’t make sense.”
*Feb. 7: FanGraphs, one of the industry’s leading baseball analytics organizations, does the math and concludes the A’s have a 0% chance of winning the World Series.
*Feb. 8: A day after Ray Ratto writes a column that features a line paraphrasing the Las Vegas Mayor telling John Fisher to “fuck off back to where you came (from),” Tim Kawakami enters the conversation. In his piece, the veteran columnist writes that failure for Fisher in Las Vegas isn’t “inevitable” but it “sure would be the betting choice.” Ken Rosenthal, Jeff Passan, John Shea, Ray Ratto and Tim Kawakami have all now weighed in on the Fisher mess in the space of 10 days.
*Commissioner Rob Manfred, when asked about the A’s ballpark plans beyond 2024, says the temporary home is “clearly going to be some place in the west.” Later in the same story, when asked about the Las Vegas Mayors’ comments about the club’s move not making sense, the commissioner said: “All I can say: the governor, the Clark County officials, have all been wildly supportive of the A’s moving to Las Vegas,” Manfred said. “I didn’t really have a reaction. I mean, frankly, I only caught up to it after she said one thing and then said another, so it kind of canceled each other out in my mind.”
*Ken Rosenthal publishes an interview in The Athletic with Sheng Thao, in which the Oakland Mayor takes the following shot at John Fisher: “We’re seeing that he has the same issues going to Las Vegas. There was a thought that this plan he had in the beginning was viable. And now we’re seeing that actually, maybe the plan isn’t viable. The question becomes, are the plans not viable or is it that the ownership’s not viable?”
*Feb. 11: The Super Bowl is played in Las Vegas, the city where the A’s, of course, are planning to move. During the two-week lead-up to the biggest sports event of the year, there has not been a single positive story, headline, partnership, community initiative or photo shoot of the team in its presumptive new home. If John Fisher is at the game, he certainly isn’t shown on the broadcast.
*Feb. 13: NBC Sports California announces that Jenny Cavnar will be the primary play-by-play announcer for live-game coverage of the A’s, making her the first female primary play-by-play voice in MLB history. Worth noting: No A’s official is quoted in the official press release. This is significant a) because NBCSC pays the club nearly $70 million/year to broadcast the games, b) because of Cavnar’s prominent role as the new TV voice and, c) because of the historic nature of the hire. Furthermore, the team’s official Twitter account doesn’t send out a tweet about the ground-breaking news, instead merely liking NBCSC's post. Zooming out, on the eve of spring training, the team’s account (which has long since instituted a policy of turning off replies), has now gone nearly a month since sending its last tweet on January 19.
*Hours after the Canvar news, John Shea of the San Francisco Chronicle reports that the A’s are set to meet with officials from Oakland and Alameda County on Thursday to discuss a Coliseum lease. With the current lease set to expire at the end of the 2024 season, securing a new one would allow the A’s to maintain the club’s TV deal with NBCS.