The Oakland A's have lost all three of their games so far on opening weekend in the Bay Area, and only 22,784 fans showed up for those games. This will happen when you deliberately put a minor-league product out there and charge major-league prices, which is what A's owner John Fisher is doing.
Fisher, see, wants desperately to get the hell out of Oakland, despite the fact the A's have called it home for almost 60 summers.
He wants to move the team to Las Vegas, even if the A's don't have a ballpark there yet, may never have, and are in negotiations with Sacramento and Salt Lake City for temporary accommodations.
He wants to move the team there even though Vegas seems profoundly lukewarm about the idea -- the mayor even said Fisher should try harder to keep the team in Oakland -- and Oakland just offered to extend the team's lease for five years with a three-year opt-out. This would keep Fisher from moving the team to temporary quarters.
In other words: Oakland is offering Fisher a measure of security to actually make moving the team to Vegas easier.
Meanwhile, Major League Baseball has unanimously approved Fisher moving the team, even though he's gutted the ballclub and you'd think MLB would want to distance itself from the Vegas crowd now that the best player in baseball, Shohei Ohtani, either got himself mixed up with an interpreter who stole Ohtani's money to place huge bets, or Ohtani was using the interpreter to place bets for him.
Strange days for the former Pastime. Strange days indeed.
In the meantime, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred promises what he hopes is a speedy investigation (and by "speedy", he means, "I hope like hell we can clear Ohtani really fast"). This while the A's-to-Vegas chatter continues apace.
I don't know about you, but I'm thinking it might be time for MLB to cool that chatter for a bit. And maybe investigate John Fisher's ownership of the A's while they're at it.
Or would that not be strange enough at this point?
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