A's minus

 Forty-six thousand and change saw the Oakland A's off to Sacramento/Las Vegas yesterday, and it was some wave goodbye. Kelly-green everywhere. Groundskeepers patiently scooping up the ballpark dirt and filling fans' empty pop bottles and plastic cups. Memories and more memories running loose on a sun-washed northern California day.

Heck, the A's even won their last game in Oakland, beating the Texas Rangers 3-2. How about that?

How about legendary A's Dave Stewart and Rickey Henderson throwing out the first pitches, and Barry Zito singing the national anthem? How about fans sitting in traffic for five hours waiting to get into the Oakland Coliseum one last time? How about one last shot at carpetbagging owner John Fisher -- a banner beyond the left-field wall that read "It's Not Us, It's You"?

Because it's not them, understand. It almost never is.

You can argue that a franchise -- Connie Mack's franchise -- that moved from Philadelphia to Kansas City to Oakland is just doing what it does again. But that's ignoring a lot.

 It's ignoring the 57 years the A's played in Oakland. It's ignoring 57 years of fathers passing on their A's fandom to their sons, and their sons passing it on to their sons.

It's ignoring Reggie and Catfish and Sal Bando and Joe Rudi. Rollie Fingers and his Snidely Whiplash 'stache. Vida Blue and Bert Campaneris and Fingers, A's manager Dick Williams and catcher Gene Tenace suckering Johnny Bench into a strikeout in Game 3 of the 1972 World Series.

That was the first of three straight World Series titles for the A's, and then Charlie Finley all but liquidated the club. A half-century later Fisher essentially liquidated Oakland, deciding to move the A's (after a layover in poor Sacramento) to a city so unenthused by their coming even the mayor of Vegas begged Fisher to find a way to keep the team in Oakland.

He didn't, of course. He let the Coliseum rot, he let the team go to hell, and finally, in this last week of the Oakland A's existence, he sent out a  letter that was a masterwork of disingenuousness, thanking the fans he crapped on for their support and shedding crocodile tears over having to leave Oakland.

Rarely has there been such a load of sheer horse pucky. Or gall.

Rarely has baseball been more tone-deaf to the history it clings to so tenaciously, nor to its own longstanding principles.

Once upon a time, remember, baseball banned eight Chicago White Sox for life for consorting with gamblers, even though some of the eight really didn't. And once upon a time it banned Pete Rose for life for betting on his own team when he was managing the Reds.

Now there are online betting kiosks outside major-league ballparks, and MLB is a couple seasons away from officially  welcoming the capital of American wagering into the family.

Somewhere Joe Jackson and Connie Mack weep.