Final Score

 Dear John,

Sorry it took me a few days to respond to your letter. Thank you for taking the time to address us, the fans of the Oakland Athletics, and for giving us all your vision for the future, and the past. Thank you for making an effort to try and explain why after fifty-six years of baseball in this town you have decided to leave for the much more hospitable climes of the Nevada desert. 

Thanks for nothing. 

In your letter, you say that you have tried your very best to keep this team in Oakland. Yet each time some sort of compromise was worked out with the city, there were new conditions imposed and all the while you kept looking for other places to have your team, because you are the owner, play. To be clear, you have it in your means to build a new baseball stadium just about anywhere in the world. Three billion dollars would be a nice pot of money to put a diamond in that other city by the bay. 

But that's not the way you roll. You need the city to come up with the cash and the infrastructure to pay for your illusory temple to the Gods of Baseball. Rather than strike a deal that would keep the A's in Oakland until you can get any kind of sweetheart package in Las Vegas, you found the folks up in Sacramento willing to provide you with a minor league stadium in which you can field your team until such time as the greedheads in Sin City come around to your line of thinking. The line of thinking that anyone would be pleased and excited to be the recipient of the team you ground into the dirt over the past eight years. 

This is not the team you reference in your letter. This is not the Ricky Henderson, Reggie Jackson, Moneyball Oakland A's. This is not the twenty-game win streak A's. Around the time that everyone in organized baseball started using Sabermetrics to put a team on their field, the difference that made Oakland unique disappeared. The overriding issue returned to the obvious: money. You have to spend money to make money. You have to spend money to win games. 

John, you didn't spend the money. You priced yourself once again at the very bottom of the Major Leagues in payroll. By more than twenty million dollars. If you had been saving up to help get a new stadium built in Oakland, it might have made sense. Instead, you created a vacuum of talent. Vacuums suck. And even the most die-hard fans of the game were hard-pressed to find their way out to the ballpark. 

Now that Field of Dreams is dead. Your billions are safe, but not the weekly paychecks of the security, the vendors and all the ancillary businesses that were employed by the Oakland Athletics. Your fortune, handed to you by your father, is in pants. Not in baseball. Your future is secure. Your legacy as one of the worst owners in professional sports is secure. 

You made my son cry. I fully support his burning impulse to punch you in the head if he ever encounters you in some chance meeting. 

Thank you for your whiny excuse of an explanation. But it doesn't hold up. 

Thank you for nothing.