@MccoyWelch28241 Probably why I watch only 3 weeks of college hoops a year
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Rick Hurd
23.7K posts
Rick Hurd
@3rdERH
I believe in baseball and miracles.
94565 Katılım Mart 2009
4.1K Takip Edilen4.2K Takipçiler
WHAT A GAME.
The United States has beat the Dominican Republic to advance to the WBC Championship game!🦅🇺🇸
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@vegasasnews Let’s compare notes down the road. It’s a great young team offensively. And yeah, the A’s fans in Oakland have a right to be heartbroken. Greed killed the franchise. $$$$ don’t make it Ok.
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I’ve had the misfortune of dealing with a lot of A’s fans who are just angry and hurt who think it’s all Fishers fault. I’ve done my research and I’ve seen first hand what Fishers has done in Las Vegas and he has kept his word and been great for and to our community. If that hurts I’m sorry. It’s what’s been going on.
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Cool story. Public enemy of something that doesn’t exist anymore from fans who chose dirt and flags over the team.
Rick Hurd@3rdERH
Nailed it. John Fisher could well go down as public enemy No. 1 in all of Oakland's sports history.
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@vegasasnews Compare the A’s attendance to the G’s in the early 70s and during BillyBall and during the Bash Brothers era. They even drew more than 2 million under Schott. Is Fisher paying ya to be his mouthpiece?
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Never Oakland fans fault even though they have a 40 year history of poor attendance.
As for emptying your wallet? A’s always had the cheapest seats and you still didn’t go.
Don’t fret- Vegas will make this disgraced franchise envy of the league.
Lastly, go enjoy the Ballers. Granted they are desperate for fans (sounds familiar right) they are all you have. Don’t lose them.
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@vegasasnews Im not absolving the city of Oakland. What I’m saying is that Fisher should’ve sold the team when the opportunity was there to sell it. He shouldn’t have lied with a marketing campaign to stay when the whole time they knew they were leaving. As sports ownership goes, pure evil.
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Trust me if that’s your argument you’re going to look like a fool. The city of Oakland is also to blame for being a poor partner and allowing the city to get to where it’s at now.
Lastly, remember this conversation because once the team starts here they will be World Series contenders. If you aren’t supporting the team now we don’t want you around when we win. If you want to join us we will welcome you.
baseball-reference.com/teams/OAK/atte…
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@VegasAsFan @PeteATurner @SR_TheInscriber @JeffPassan What you guys don’t understand is what these teams mean to their communities in terms of revenue, hobs and hope. MLB has been pitching to contract the A’s or get them out of Oakland for years. Many groups were interested in saving them. MLB wouldn’t let it happen.
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Pete - You are 100% correct. People like Passan and @3rdERH just took the easy way and grasped at low-hanging fruit and neglected to research and understand the underlying issues. The market never provided enough fans, the anti-business politicians, the environmental red-tape, the reality of baseball financing, and most of all, the media - all made the A's stay in Oakland untenable.
Many of the media types might be stewing in their own bitter juices, knowing they were complicit. Had they been honest and reported all the above, voters might have pressured their governments to support the team.
John Fisher is building a stadium, building a winning team, and involved in community outreach. He's the same John Fisher. What's different is a healthy environment, the absense of a lazy and dishonest media, and a group of brainwashed people.
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Way, way, way, way back in the day, Jeff Passan approached me at a Royals game in 2004 and introduced himself. He was young, bold and supremely gifted. We all knew he'd be a superstar. If there's somebody who serves up truth as truth is, @JeffPassan is that guy. Thanks for this.
Tim Phares@phares_tim
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@VegasAsFan @SR_TheInscriber @3rdERH @JeffPassan The team has a market to invest in, a market that wants them to thrive.
Lots of work to do, and many challenges…but no franchise has a brighter future.
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@PeteATurner Hard facts: Zero World Series, zero ALCS with Fisher running the show. Finley brilliant at recognizing talent. Even the players who hated him acknowledge that. Haas in a league of his own. Schott and Fisher in it for the money and not the fans. Playoffs easier to reach.
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Hard facts -
The A's have been to the ALCS and WS 11 times
1.6 million avg tickets sold in those peak A's seasons. 21k fans average per game.
Let's compare them to Toronto. The Blue Jays haven't been 11 ALCS; they've got 10. So we'll take one of their best regular-season win total seasons.
The Blue Jays pull 39k per fame in their peak seasons.
The Phillies? 11 ALCS trips 35k per game.
Oak had the biggest yard in terms of seats, a huge media market. Lots of winning. Let's be honest about the long term health of the team. Let's be honest about revenue. Let's be honest about the political environment of Oakland. None of that aligned with the success of the ball club. The A's were gone the second Haas saved the Giants.
Rick Hurd@3rdERH
@PeteATurner @JeffPassan Winners? Zero rings. Significant extensions for the best young players? Zero. Fisher didn't build a thing. Billy Beane, David Forst, Billy Owens, Keith Leippman, so many others did. Fisher didn't do a thing. His legacy will be as one of baseball's most hated owners ever. The end.
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@PeteATurner @JeffPassan Winners? Zero rings. Significant extensions for the best young players? Zero. Fisher didn't build a thing. Billy Beane, David Forst, Billy Owens, Keith Leippman, so many others did. Fisher didn't do a thing. His legacy will be as one of baseball's most hated owners ever. The end.
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Looks like a good owner to me.
He's built winners since he took over in 2016, despite being limited on rev. then again, the A's are one of the most competitive franchises throughout the time in Oak, so winning was nothing new...
He got the A's the hell out of Oakland.
He left a fanbase that struggled to support winners, even Haas. Now that he's got a great business partner in Las Vegas, he's locking up young talent-like the Indians did back in the 90s...seems like what the A's needed wasn't a better owner, rather, a better market.
When the demos, press, local gov cannot back a team, it's on the team to get out of that town.
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@PrideandPoise21 I'd put him on their all-time Under-rated team. Great player.
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@LorenzoNeal I'm very sorry to read this. My sympathies and prayers to you and your family.
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With a heavy heart, I share the loss of my mother.
She was my pillar, my world, & a woman whose faith and love touched so many. I pray I can live a legacy even half as strong as the one my parents left behind.
Tell the people you love that you love them. Tomorrow is not promised.
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@PeteATurner @JeffPassan Whatever man. I'm fully versed in it, too. Fisher is a bad owner. Walter Haas is beloved. Those with a heart understand why. That's why A's fans will walk a hundred miles someday to piss on Fisher's grave.
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I'm fully versed in the A's saga in Oakland. I've lived it, researched it...I deal in facts.
Many anti-A's fans have been deluded. Most of these folks cannot accept reality. They folks get exploited by media outlets that cannot tell the truth.
This leads to lies like: "The tool shed," "pushing dirt" "funding gaps" "not enough copper." As each of these obvious falsehoods are debunked, the deluded twist themselves into tighter knots to maintain the illusion.
This will sting...Walter Haas delivered the fatal blow to the A's in Oakland. The A's were always building winners in Oak...but that never mattered.
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@BigM_5588 Fisher is in a place of his own. The Town of Oakland is no example. But Fisher could've stayed and thrown his money into the team like a dude named Walter Haas. A deal could've been made in this case.
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Nailed it. John Fisher could well go down as public enemy No. 1 in all of Oakland's sports history.
Dan Moore@DmoWriter
World, this is Walter Haas Jr. Haas bought the A's in 1980 for around $12 million. The A's were, at the time, the worst team in baseball. (In 1979, they went 54–108.) They had baseball's lowest attendance. The Coliseum, now 14 years old, was drab and showing wear. Oakland, meanwhile, was corkscrewing. The city was bleeding employers. Crime was surging. And its most important institutions all seemed to be abandoning it. Charlie Finley—the man Haas bought the A's from—had been trying for several years to move the team to Denver. Al Davis was in the middle of suing the NFL for the right to move the Raiders to Los Angeles. Things seemed bleak. Just a few years prior, Oakland had been the most successful sports town in America. Now it seemed to be dying. Many outside observers wrote both team and town thoroughly off. No doubt casual fans around the country would have bought the idea that the Oakland Coliseum was no longer a place worth investing in. Haas—former president and CEO of Levi Strauss and Co.—said fuck that. He spent his own money to upgrade the Coliseum. He built up the organization, hiring the likes of Sandy Alderson, Andy Dolich, and, later, Billy Beane. He invested in the community. ("We built 10 little league fields in and around Oakland,” Dolich, an Executive VP, told me, for my book. “Reading programs. Affordability programs to bring little league groups and schools to games. We were partners with the Oakland Zoo. We tried to immerse ourselves in the community. That stuff makes people proud.”) And he compiled a roster full of stars (Jose Canseco, Mark McGwire, hometown heroes Dave Stewart and Rickey Henderson). By the end of the 1980s, the A's were the very best team in baseball. They had baseball's second highest attendance. They had baseball's highest payroll and among its highest revenues. They went to three World Series in a row, beating the Giants in one. In 1987, Oakland hosted the All Star game. Health failing, Haas sold the A's in 1995 for $85 million. The price was laughably low—Haas offered buyers a discount, in return for their promise that they keep the A's in Oakland—but it still constituted a massive return on that initial $12 million investment. The idea that the A's, just ten years later, were not an organization worth investing in—that both baseball and business success could never be had in East Oakland—betrays an ignorance of history and a lack of imagination. Fisher could have spent money on players in Oakland. He's a billionaire (richer than Haas was) who collected revenue-sharing checks nearly every year of his tenure. In 2017, he could have built a new stadium right at the Coliseum site. The Raiders were gone (again). He had the historic East Bay market to himself. He could have had what Haas had. He could have given Oakland what he's now giving Las Vegas. Oakland would have rewarded him for it. Let us be frank about what happened: he chose not to. That choice should not be accepted at face value. As Walter Haas's son, Wally, once told the @sfchronicle, it was, rather, "unforgivable." I appreciate Evan's reporting here. It's an incredible about-face we're witnessing. But the history that was thrown away in Oakland is an important part of this story. Without it, the story's incomplete.
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@PeteATurner @JeffPassan You couldn't be more wrong. I watched the A's for five decades. Look up the name Walter Haas and do some research about the A's history in Oakland. Fisher is the epitome of everything wrong with the rich in America in 2026. They destroy lives and think the $$$ justifies it.
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@3rdERH @JeffPassan Passan is wrong on this. He's an obvious talent...but he's way behind on the A's story.
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@NateLovesGallo @CoachSwit Yes, but if you throw 85 now, people don't look at ya. That's the point.
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For all the velocity experts out there…
So are we saying the pitcher who throws 85 mph, commands the zone, and can land two off-speed pitches for strikes anytime has no chance of playing D1 baseball?
Or are we pretending those guys don’t still get outs? Just wondering?
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@NateLovesGallo @CoachSwit Believe it or not, many coaches still emphasize "mess up their timing" over "blow it by them."
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@3rdERH @CoachSwit Old school coaches still exist man. They don’t have success, otherwise you’d see people shifting to their philosophy
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