Nevius: A's owner John Fisher not making the one cut that's needed

Last week, Oakland A’s owner John Fisher sent a letter to the team’s staff and fans. It seemed only polite to write him back.

Hi John,

Kind of a surprise to hear from you. It’s been a minute. I guess this is your first public statement since you bought the team in 2005.

Frankly, we were starting to wonder if we had a “Wizard of Oz” kinda thing going on here. You know, where you didn’t exist and somebody behind the curtain was pulling levers and making sounds.

Let’s admit it. We don’t know you. We never see you. We never hear from you. Maybe you are the life of the party, witty and charming.

But there is one thing we do know.

You are a terrible baseball team owner.

In that sense, your letter is a masterpiece of diminished expectations. This is exactly the kind of cheap, unsympathetic and awkward message in the time of crisis that you expect from a franchise that is run like a Quickie Mart.

(People can read it for themselves, but if they don’t have the time, we can summarize it here. In the letter, Fisher says, in so many words: We are cutting everyone’s salary. We are putting a “significant” number of people on furlough. We aren’t going to pay the minor leaguers. Also, I love baseball.)

(Apparently, Fisher thinks that despite this drumbeat of bad news - reports have already surfaced of young employees unable to help roommates with the rent - it might be appropriate at the end of the note to tell us he was a real fan.)

(“I love the game of baseball,” he wrote. “I love rooting for our team.”)

Really? You love baseball?

Because from here, it looks like you are doing all you can to make it an unpleasant experience for your players and your fans.

The part of the letter that really gets me is stiffing the minor league players. News reports say they were making $400 a week. So far the A’s are the only team to cut minor leaguers’ salaries.

Seriously? $400 a week? These are young guys, perfectly aware that they are chasing a moonshot dream, making do with next to nothing in small parks in small towns, and you can’t pay them $400 a week?

Of course, you’ve also failed to pay rent on the Coliseum, which comes to $1.2 million.

That’s just weird. Isn’t $1.2 million like couch cushion change for someone Forbes Magazine says is worth $1.85 billion?

On the other hand, it fits a pattern. Surely you’ve got the money. You just bend over backwards not to spend any of it.

There are reams of evidence. Shamelessly gaming the revenue-sharing system, collecting payouts from Major League Baseball - reported to have been as much as $40 million in some years - while holding your payroll down to subsistence levels. The A’s were so blatant baseball had to change the rules to phase out the payments.

You are also famous for getting great value from exciting young players, and then trading them just as they become eligible for their deserved big salary bump. It undermined any connection between fans and star players. Just when you bought a Yoenis Cespedes jersey, he was shipped to Boston.

And, of course, you have failed to maintain even a semblance of a major league ballpark. The Coliseum is the seediest, saddest and emptiest place in organized baseball.

The fans, bless their hearts, still come to the games, but there are acres of empty seats, even on warm summer Oakland afternoons. It just isn’t that much fun.

The players, of course, are too savvy and diplomatic to say anything. But you have to wonder what these guys thought when they walked into the ’70s-style rumpus room that is the clubhouse.

These are elite professional athletes, some of whom are currently - hello, Matt Chapman - the best in professional ball at their position. They travel the league. They see other clubhouses. They know what the standards are.

And then they come back home and hope the sewer doesn’t back up again.

(Fisher, of course, references the attempts to build a new ballpark in the letter. A downtown ballpark would be such a plus for Oakland it is impossible not to root for its success).

(But let’s be honest. Even if we pretended that the Oakland City Council was a sensible and reasonable political body, it’s hard to see this working out.)

(Look at the track record. Have you seen a single moment that makes you think: Man, the A’s are really turning it around? Nope. It continues to be a franchise in free fall.)

(The miracle, of course, is that they manage to find good/great players. And, even with their low payroll, baseball-unfriendly ballpark and lack of fans, they win. It’s the single redeeming feature of the team.)

So John, at this point I’d ask you a question:

Do you really love baseball?

Then sell the team.

Give it to somebody who can run it right.

You can watch.

Sincerely, CWN.

Contact C.W. Nevius at cw.nevius@pressdemocrat.com. Twitter: @cwnevius