The Oakland Athletics and San Francisco Giants ended their largely mythical rivalry Sunday with their final Bay Bridge Series game, a 4-2 10-inning win by San Francisco. The victory put the Giants back at the nowheresville existence of .500 and kept the A’s from moving into undisputed possession of 13th place in American League. In other words, the only noteworthy thing about it was that the rage that has swirled around the A’s move to Whoever Will Have Us has morphed into simple resignation. Listening to Giants broadcaster Mike Krukow wax for the length of an inning about the quality of the Coliseum field conditions and longtime groundskeeper Clay Wood was properly instructive, in that the two teams who pretended not to notice each other for nearly the entirety of the current century are now nostalgic for the thing they never truly relished, and that the current corporate stances of the two organizations has been mostly We’re leaving countered by, Then why are you still here?
That’s the A’s place now—playing out the string on a funeral that never ends, completing a race toward utter anonymity just so John Fisher can complete a 15-year crusade to leave no matter where the destination is. The two games against the Giants drew a total of 70,000 people, and mostly proved that we don’t value rivalries as a staple of fandom as much as we prefer the “get off my lawn” kind of rivalry. A’s fans never valued the Giants as their logical bete noire the way they should have, and Giants fans habitually dismissed the A’s as beneath their notice.
Mostly, what the two sides never figured out is that 162 games at home is better entertainment value than 81, and that having someone handy to fire off double birds on a daily basis is its own kind of regenerative fun. And now it’s gone.
Then again, the fan bases are who they are, and they behaved toward each other consistent with their natures. Even the much hotter 49ers–Raiders rivalry suffered from the reality that they were rarely good at the same time, and the Raiders have moved three times since those mythically good old days. The Giants–Dodgers rivalry in New York didn’t prevent either team from being spirited away to California, and Cubs fans’ purported enmity with their South Side neighbors won’t prevent the White Sox from leaving if Jerry Reinsdorf gets a shipping container full of bank notes from some lunatic in the Tennessee state house. Business abhors competition and embraces monopoly in all things.
Other than sponsorships and the 1989 Earthquake Series, though, the A’s and Giants never competed with each other in any meaningful way, and the Giants won most of those wars because the A’s were largely beset by cheap, lazy, or cheap-and-lazy owners who preferred to whine about their lot rather than change it. Only Walter Haas Jr. took on the Giants frontally, and in those years the A’s were the better team and draw.
But like we said, business abhors competition, and without competition there is no rivalry to mourn. The A’s are so sure of their future that they are going to a town they refuse to acknowledge (Sacramento) in hopes of getting enough free money in a town they can’t enthuse (Las Vegas) because the grift isn’t about finding a home as much as it is always having a new one just in case. If Vegas somehow works out, which is to say if Fisher overcomes his own hilariously shoddy business instincts, the A’s will tie Sacramento’s real love, the Kings, for the number of cities abandoned by one sporting franchise. In Europe, the tradition for a failing sports team is to liquidate and disappear (see Girondins Bordeaux in France as the latest example), and in the case of the A’s that doesn’t seem like an unreasonable end given the quality of its operators.
The A’s are a wrong that cannot be undone now that the Coliseum has been sold to local entrepreneurs who do not have Major League Baseball on their wish list. The difference is that Sacramento knows it is not valued as a life partner and won’t regard sitting in 110-degree heat pretending that it is. It may end up with the A’s full time if Vegas collapses under the weight of the city’s baseball ennui, but it won’t take more than three years for it to see that John Fisher is no less a repellent failure there than he was in Oakland.
But there is at least this much: Clay Wood isn’t going to Sacramento with the team because A) there is no need to fertilize, water, and cut plastic turf and B) the consultant’s job he was offered as a half-hearted balm isn’t worth the drive from his home. He will come out of this relationship with his dignity intact, making him the rarest kind of A’s employee. In other words, he’s not waiting for the I-80 Series to become a thing, because it won’t.
