Poor, poor, pitiful Athletic(s)

 

The Athletic Club of Philadelphia first started playing baseball in 1860. The team went on to win the very first pennant—I mean the first pennant anywhere, ever—in the very first league (amateur, pro, you name it, anything short of the Hanseatic League) in the National Association, in 1871.

Various incarnations of the name—sometimes with an "s" on the end, sometimes not—popped up again in the National League and the American Association in the 19th century, but then vanished like the vestigial limbs on an evolutionary tree.

The 19-aught-1 Athletics were a charter member of the American League, managed and owned by a mediocre former catcher named Cornelius McGillicuddy, a.k.a., Connie Mack.

"The Tall Tactician," as he was invariably called—seen here with Fatty Arbuckle when the latter was a lammester from Hollywood morals charges—was the last manager to NOT wear a uniform, sticking instead with his undertaker suits, right down to the old-fashioned, attached collars.

Mack was considered a baseball genius, and managed the A's for 50 seasons, a record that will never be broken.  (It helps to own the team. Or to be on the good side of Brian Cashman.) 

He was also desperately short on cash most of the time, which would become a theme for the A's: their owners were either savvy baseball men who lacked for money, or men who had the money but no baseball.

Mack won 9 pennants and 5 World Series—and finished last 17 times. His feuding sons sold the team to a sharp, self-made Chicago businessman named Arnold Johnson, who had built a fortune in vending machines and real estate.

Johnson just happened to own the lease on Yankee Stadium. And the Yankees' Triple-A farm team in Kansas City. And be in the vending machine and real estate businesses with Yankees co-owner Del Webb. 

On buying the A's, Johnson sold off his lease on the Stadium in the interests of propriety, the Yanks cleared him to move the team to KC, and for the next five years, the Kansas City Athletics served as a de facto farm club for the Yanks. The two teams made 16 trades, involving 61 players. It was as if Scranton was suddenly made a major-league franchise.

(Johnson is second from right. And generally last in the American League.) 

Hey, no collusion here! 

Missed in all this palm-greasing and back-scratching was the fact that the A's were moving from the 3rd largest city in the country in 1955—Philadelphia—to the 20th. But hey, that was all the rage in baseball then! 

Major-league owners were convinced that most big, Eastern cities were dying hellholes filled with—shudder—Black people! Surely, the future lay in overwhelmingly white, heartland or West Coast towns, such as Kay-cee, or Minneapolis, where Horace Stoneham first wanted to plunk the Giants.

In 1960, Arnold Johnson had the temerity to die, spoiling a beautiful relationship with your New York Yankees. The new owner, a certain Charles O. Finley, knew baseball—but was short on money. Or commons sense. His big idea was to complete the Athletics' cross-country hejira to California. 

Charlie O. chose Oakland, a floundering old port town, which meant moving from what was by then the 26th largest city in the country...to the 38th largest.

In Oakland, the A's became the only team other than the Yankees to ever win three straight World Series, 1972-74, and they won three straight pennants again in 1988-90, once Charlie O. and his mule had wandered off into the sunset. And Oakland even mounted something of a comeback.

But it was still a small city in a shared market, and the team still had to play in the cookie-cutter, Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, which looks like something out of Thunderdome when you're inside it.

The team got by, famously, on Moneyball, which decreed that on-base and slugging percentages were all that mattered, and that things such as fielding and mental acuity on a ball field were so much hooey. Billy Beane's Moneyball teams went out and averaged 98 wins a season from 2000-2003—and lost every playoff series in the first round because of egregious mental and fielding mistakes.

But hey, the whole thing got an Oscar nomination for Jonah Hill!

Today, though, Oakland is still just the 45th largest city in the country, and the Giants are more firmly ensconced than ever across the Bay. So the big idea of the new owner, after he and Al Davis had milked the community of all it would give? 

Move the team to Las Vegas. In 2028.

To be sure, Vegas is the 25th largest city in the U.S., and a hot-hot-hot destination. It will also be the world's largest sand trap in another generation or so. 

Here is the A's new home in April, 2022, just in time for Opening Day:

Move to a sizzling desert town with a shrinking water supply, where the average June-August temperatures are already 102-107 degrees, on a rapidly overheating planet?

What could POSSIBLY go wrong?

Looks like another boffo A's decision. And hey, since their Oakland lease expires after 2024, at least three years of Yankees visits will probably be hosted in either Reno or Vegas' current, minor-league park.

Why not the Bellagio??

Oh, and by the way? Philadelphia is still the sixth-largest city in the United States. 

Suffice it to say, I have trouble summoning up sympathy for such "small-market teams," after almost 70 years of awful decisions. But hey, the A's can always move next to Saskatchewan, I guess, or maybe Point Barrow, Alaska. 

I bet they'll still win another World Series before Brian Cashman does.