It’s messy for the A’s as usual, but they still beat the Phillies

The mess for the Oakland Athletics seems to be getting messier. Not on the field where it should matter, but in the off-balanced world of stadium envy and franchise shifting

Baseball has reached that mythical half-season period known as the All-Star break. But what’s been broken, other than the usual number of bats, is the promise the sport belongs to the fans. Particularly those in Oakland, who are losing their team, slowly but unfortunately, surely.  

Try repeating the idea that the team belongs to the people who attend the games and that the owner is “merely a caretaker”. What A’s owner, John Fisher, is taking is the team out of Oakland.

The plan is the A’s eventually will be moved some 80 miles or so to Sacramento as a way stop before then heading another 500 plus miles to the Nevada desert. The A’s then are going to Las Vegas, where it’s been 110 degrees or hotter for 10 consecutive days. The wish most likely is in time the weather will cool down if the unfortunate scheme to take the A's out of Northern California will not.

Then again Las Vegas will have a domed ballpark, if and when it is constructed. The team, while filled with individuals whose primary benefit has been affordability, very well can hit, run and just when you least expect it, win. Sunday the A’s overwhelmed arguably the best team in the majors, the Philadelphia Phillies, 18-3 (that’s the Phillies not the Eagles to be clear) and took two of three games. A few days earlier the Phillies swept the Dodgers in three games.

True this isn’t football or basketball. In baseball, the bottom dwellers often do well against the top teams. Still, what the A’s did, Lawrence Butler hitting three home runs in what legitimately could be called a rout, is worthy of recognition. So are the impending troubles the A’s could face in moving to Sacramento, where the natural grass could be replaced by artificial turf at Sutter Health Park, where they will be sharing the complex with the minor league River Cats, the Giants triple-A farm team. It would be the only artificially turfed stadium without a roof in the Majors, meaning summer temperatures would be uncomfortable because of the heat reflected off the playing surface. 

“Decisions needed to be made sooner rather than later because there’s a lot of work to be done to assure the well-being of the players who are going to have to make adjustments to accommodate the decisions the league is making,” Tony Clark, director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, told John Shea of the San Francisco Chronicle,

If that sounds confusing, what else would you expect when the A’s are involved? It has never been easy from the time the late Charlie Finley brought them to Oakland from Kansas City.

But the old A’s won 3 consecutive World Series titles in Oakland.  Amazing how cursed this franchise seems to be off the diamond.