Barber: A's belong in Oakland, not Portland

Couldn’t Oakland have one night? Just a single evening to celebrate its fascinating and occasionally glorious sporting past, and to promote the idea that sports may actually have a future here?

No. No, it couldn’t.

The A’s did a cool thing on Tuesday, allowing free entry to all fans on the 50th anniversary of the first Major League Baseball game played in Oakland. Spectators lined up hours before the game and were allowed to choose the available seats of their choice. Then the A’s went out and clobbered the White Sox.

It should have been the baseball equivalent of a Mr. Rogers singalong. But reality has a way of intruding on Oakland sports, and on Tuesday that reality dropped in the form of a report out of Portland, Oregon, stating that a group has made formal offers on two sites there, with the intent of getting a 32,000-seat baseball stadium built.

The group, the Portland Diamond Project, has not explicitly voiced its intention to steal the A’s from Oakland. But with attendance (for not-free games) flagging and the A’s adrift in their own search for a ballpark site, it’s the backdrop of any MLB relocation discussion.

For the good people of Oakland, the Portland news triggered a sickening case of deja vu. I don’t know if any fan base ever has been treated so poorly, by so many different team owners over so many years, and deserved the insult less.

You may be ready to offer a rebuttal here, and it would go something like this: Baseball fans have been treating A’s games like quarantined anthrax zones lately. Oakland ranked next-to-last in attendance among the 30 MLB teams each of the past two seasons, outdrawing only the Tampa Bay Rays - whose stadium, Tropicana Field, was an eyesore the day it opened. This season, the A’s already have hosted four games with attendance figures smaller than 10,000.

All of this is bad. And it would be easy to conclude that Oakland fans don’t deserve the A’s. That they have given up on their baseball team.

I would argue that Oakland fans have plenty of reason to lose hope in the A’s, and in all their teams, because they have been ignored and abandoned so frequently.

Since the Raiders opened shop in 1960, Oakland has brought the world some of the most entertaining athletes in the history of sports, along with game-altering strategies and cultural icons. But with a couple of exceptions, team ownership in the East Bay has been a sad procession of the cheap, the incompetent and the fickle.

The clear exception is the Haas family’s ownership of the A’s from 1980 to 1995. Walter Haas Jr. and his group spent money and got out of the way, and that approach led to three consecutive World Series appearances from 1988 to 1990.

I’d be happy to put the Warriors’ current co-owners, Joe Lacob and Peter Guber, in the same category. They have been creative in their hires and generous in their payroll, and it has led to the Golden Age of Warriors basketball. Of course, Lacob and Guber are about to exit Oakland for a new arena on the San Francisco waterfront. It isn’t the most egregious abandonment of the 510, because the NBA team is only moving across the bay, and the demand for tickets in the Steve Kerr era has already priced many long-time fans out of Oracle Arena. Still, you couldn’t call these guys champions of Oaktown.

Next to other Oakland sports moguls, though, Lacob and Guber look pretty clean.

Consider the Davis family, for example. Al Davis will never lose his place as the titan of Oakland sports. He helped put this working-class city on the map. But his decision to leave one of the NFL’s most rabid bases for the artificially greener pastures of Los Angeles in the early eighties was unconscionable.

Oakland fans shouldn’t have forgiven Davis, but most did. And when he brought the Raiders home in 1995, he repaid those supporters by bullying the Coliseum Commission into building Mount Davis and destroying the atmosphere at the stadium - especially for baseball. Al’s son, Mark Davis, clearly inherited the disloyalty gene. He will uproot the Raiders and take them to Las Vegas by 2020. Raider Nation turned the other cheek after Al Davis brought his team back for the reboot. Now Mark Davis is slapping that cheek.

Meanwhile, pre-Lacob Warriors ownership was a running joke. Franklin Mieuli seemed like a true bon vivant with his motorcycle and deerstalker hat, but the radio/TV producer didn’t have enough money to sustain a winner. And the guys who followed Mieuli - Dan Finnane, Jim Fitzgerald and Chris Cohan - didn’t appear to be even trying.

In the 35 seasons between 1977-78 and 2011-12, the Warriors made the playoffs six times. They actually managed to sell a lot of tickets during that extended famine, but you have to wonder how. The Warriors were about as irrelevant as a pro sports team could be.

And then there are the A’s. When they won three World Series in the early 1970s, they did it in spite of team owner Charlie Finley rather than because of his leadership. He fought the salary demands of every star who played for him, and even lost ace pitcher Catfish Hunter in 1975 because he failed to honor the contract they had signed. Finley’s threats to move the A’s out of Oakland were constant.

Since Haas sold the team, A’s top executives have been a Who’s Who of “who’s he?” Stephen Schott, Ken Hofmann, John Fisher and Lew Wolff have all claimed poverty, even as their team has played in one of the largest media markets in America. And more often than not, the won-lost record has reflected that reluctance to spend. So has attendance.

Looking across all sports, it’s fair to say that when a good team has taken the field or court in Oakland, the fans have responded enthusiastically. But those boosters do not have unlimited patience. Spurned by greedy owners and disillusioned by some truly terrible teams through the years, they demand a decent product.

And that’s where we stand with the A’s now. Bob Melvin’s 2018 team is showing some promise. It has bright young lights like Matt Chapman and Sean Manaea. But parts of the roster still feel like patchwork. And in Oakland, there is always the feeling that a ballplayer who breaks out into true stardom will only be traded for inexpensive prospects.

So forgive A’s fans for staying away from the ballpark, and for their uneasiness.

I understand that it’s John Fisher’s money we’re talking about, not mine. He can do what he wants with his team - just as Mark Davis and Joe Lacob can. But I really hope the A’s don’t succumb to the lure of Portland, if and when it’s offered to them.

Please find some strong corporate partners and develop a site in the East Bay. Oakland sports fans have been disregarded and disrespected for long enough. Don’t rob them of their last team.

You can reach columnist Phil Barber at 707-521-5263 or phil.barber@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter ?@Skinny_Post.