What If Oakland Owned the A’s?

If you’re anything like me, you won’t be able to watch this year’s Major League Baseball (MLB) Opening Day without thinking about the Oakland (Sacramento?) A’s. Every other team’s fanbase—except for maybe the lowly Chicago White Sox—will begin the season with some level of excitement, but for Oakland baseball fans, today marks the beginning of a sad new chapter. While the A’s flashy new stadium is slowly built by Nevadan workers (and taxpayers) on the old Tropicana casino site on the Las Vegas Strip, the A’s will play out the next three seasons in a minor league stadium in West Sacramento. Today, the Oakland Coliseum, worn and decaying and beautiful, will sit empty. Oakland baseball is no more.

There’s a world where the story doesn’t have to end this way. What if, instead of a billionaire who doesn’t care much about the team, the ballpark workers, or the town, Oakland itself owned the A’s? What if instead of an owner roster that bears too much resemblance to the Forbes 400 list, all of baseball was publicly owned?

On April 20, 2023, Las Vegas–based sports reporter Mick Akers broke a bombshell news story. After years of uncertainty and back-and-forth, Gap fortune heir and Oakland A’s owner John Fisher had inked a deal to acquire land on the Las Vegas strip for a new stadium, setting in motion a chain of events to officially move the team out of Oakland. Although Fisher and his PR team had signaled for years he would move the franchise elsewhere unless the City of Oakland paid a king’s ransom to develop a new stadium site, many were holding out hope that he wouldn’t actually do it—that the A’s couldn’t possibly be uprooted from Oakland at the whims of one man. Especially not the man who devised a plan three decades ago to buy his grandfather’s favorite team so it wouldn’t move across the country.

After the story broke, thousands of A’s fans began protesting their team’s owner, rallying around one simple demand: that John Fisher sell the team to someone who will keep the A’s in Oakland. As the Nevada legislature and the Las Vegas city council laid the groundwork for a huge injection of public funding into a private stadium at the behest of an army of John Fisher’s lobbyists, local unions started their own campaign to push back. These union workers called out the hypocrisy at play here: While Nevada’s underfunded education system continues to lag the rest of the country, local and state officials in Nevada were happy to fork over billions of dollars in public money for a private sports venture with little guaranteed in the way of meaningful community benefits. (This parasitic public-private “partnership” has sadly been the norm in American professional sports for quite some time, as Neil DeMause has traced over the past three decades.)

Despite all of this, the ruling class in charge of the league quickly moved to grease the wheels of the A’s departure. MLB commissioner Rob Manfred, backed by the billionaire owners of the other 29 major league clubs, made it clear that the league was in lockstep with Fisher’s decision to abandon Oakland—so in lockstep, in fact, that MLB would waive the A’s $300 million relocation fee. In November, MLB team owners voted unanimously to approve the A’s relocation timeline. To add insult to injury, Fisher’s executive team decided to temporarily relocate the team to a minor league ballpark nearly 100 miles away in West Sacramento until the ballpark in Las Vegas is (supposedly) ready in 2028.

It was under these circumstances that the A’s played their last-ever game at the Coliseum in September, in front of a raucous, tearful crowd of 47,000. Every single Oakland player who played in the Austerity A’s final Coliseum game earned the MLB minimum salary in 2024. The A’s won, 3-2.

How could all of this happen? How could a franchise with such a rich history, such a proud and diverse fanbase, and such high profit margins be stolen from its fans? The answer is quite simple. John Fisher, the billionaire franchise owner of a ballclub he doesn’t care about all that much, devised and executed a multiyear plan to defund the club’s payroll, kill the product on the field and attendance along with it, and move the team to Las Vegas. Despite the East Bay being a larger market by every metric, Fisher and his buddies remain convinced that Las Vegas will be a more lucrative home base for them.

Public ownership already exists in the US.

The closest thing we have to a public ownership model in the four major American pro sports leagues is the Green Bay Packers, owned by a nonprofit corporation formed 100 years ago to save the team from bankruptcy. Anyone can buy a share of the Packers when they go on sale, and there is a limit on the number of shares any one person can own (the average is just 9.6 shares). Shares have virtually no value—and pay no dividends—other than to give their holder the ability to vote on a limited set of issues concerning the team.

The most important, and indeed radical, feature of this model is that it means that the Packers are the only major pro sports franchise in the US without a billionaire owner who can exercise unilateral control over the franchise’s affairs. The team’s immense profits stay in Green Bay: Every cent is either reinvested into team operations or invested in the community through the team’s foundation. This means the Packers stand out among their peers in not typically demanding or requiring large, no-strings-attached infusions of public money, although the public did vote to approve a temporary sales tax that ended in 2015.

A much less known but much more material example of direct public ownership is the Columbus Clippers, the minor league AAA affiliate of the Cleveland Guardians. The Clippers are owned by the municipal government of Franklin County, OH. (Defector’s Michael Waters wrote a great piece in December 2022 on the origins of the Clippers’ public ownership that you should definitely read.) Their structure is unique in American professional sports: Franklin County commissioners appoint members to an independent board that operates a public corporation whose sole asset is the Columbus Clippers. The team, acquired for $25,000 nearly 50 years ago, is now estimated to be worth between $30 and $40 million, making it one of the most valuable minor league ballclubs in the country. The team consistently turns a profit, is a fixture of the community, and invests every penny back into the general fund of Franklin County or into a reserve fund.

We also can’t forget about the Harrisburg Senators, a minor league baseball team that was saved from relocation by government takeover in 1995. In the mid-90s, the Senators’ owner threatened to move the team to another city after Harrisburg refused to build him a new publicly funded stadium. Instead of allowing the Senators to leave town, the City of Harrisburg stepped in and bought the team for $6.7 million. Public ownership didn’t last forever, but it was an important success. With the city in the midst of a financial crisis in 2006, it sold the club for $13.25 million. Crucially, the terms of the deal guaranteed that the club would stay in Harrisburg for the next 30 years. To this day, Harrisburg hosts AA baseball. And good baseball at that: Juan Soto, whom the New York Mets recently signed to the most lucrative contract in MLB history, played for Harrisburg as a 19-year-old back in 2018.

Public ownership would benefit nearly everyone.

It is empirically true that the American professional sports industry has never been bigger or more profitable; indeed, over the past few decades, American pro sports franchises have grown more valuable, year over year, essentially without exception or interruption. As it stands, those who benefit from this explosion in value are wealthy owners, who reap a bountiful and untaxed reward from their “unrealized” capital gains. Nowadays, owners hardly ever sell their pro sports team unless a scandal forces them to. Why the hell would you sell? It’s no wonder that private equity wants in on the deal.

The current ownership model means that communities have seen negligible economic benefits from pro sports leagues’ sustained growth and profitability. Bear in mind that a great deal of this profit is made possible by public investment in infrastructure, namely, of course, the billions of dollars of public money poured into sports stadiums and facilities, often directly against the wishes of the public. But a publicly owned alternative could actually lift up community members and build community wealth, unlike the false promises billionaires have made as they’ve reaped billions on the backs of taxpayers.

Municipally owned and operated corporations are far more common than the average American might realize, providing electricity, water, and a vast array of other goods and services to millions of people across the country. Unlike their private counterparts, these corporations have an obligation not to their shareholders or a greedy and temperamental billionaire owner, but to the public good.

Let’s consider how a version of the Columbus Clippers’ model would work in Oakland.

The City of Oakland or Alameda County (or both!) could create a municipal board governing a nonprofit corporation that owns the Oakland A’s, with democratically elected local officials appointing people to the board. To incorporate even more democratic control, board seats could be apportioned to key stakeholders, such as labor unions representing stadium workers or local tenant unions representing nearby renters. The A’s could even take a lesson from the Packers and raise funds for investment through selling a per capita–limited amount of voting shares in the ballclub, allowing these small-dollar owners to elect representatives to the board.

To a far greater extent than even the Columbus Clippers, the Oakland-owned A’s—a major league ballclub in a completely different echelon of profitability—would likely be a safe and lucrative investment. A publicly owned franchise could be designed to recycle every cent of profit back into the community by reinvesting in the on-field success and off-field facilities of the team, and, like the early years of the publicly owned Columbus Clippers, steering excess profits into the general fund or into specific public programs. Through owning a profitable and growing asset, municipal owners would be empowered to inject funding into areas of public need, such as public schools, municipal transit, or affordable housing. Much better uses of baseball profits than whatever Mets owner Steve Cohen is doing at his hedge fund.

Public ownership would create room for expanded collective bargaining rights and better labor standards for workers subject to the whims of exploitative contractors such as Aramark. The broader public would be granted a much larger and more democratic role in influencing major ballclub-related decisions that would broadly affect the community—such as investing in building a new stadium or acquiring land to connect the stadium site to a train station.

Of course, public ownership is anything but a perfect solution. Like any public project, the success of a publicly owned sports team—in winning games and benefiting the community—would be contingent on good governance. At least with public ownership, however, there would be real democratic guardrails. Under private ownership, fans and community members are left with little recourse. Owners can do as good or as bad of a job as they’d like, knowing that either way, the valuation of their team is likely to appreciate all the same. With a bad private owner, all everyday people can do is watch (and watch, we do!).

Public ownership is possible.

In the short term, there is zero chance that Oakland specifically could come to own the A’s specifically, unless the move to Las Vegas falls through. But if the idea of public ownership catches on with the wider public—or even with municipal elected officials tired of shelling out public money and political capital to fund private sports ventures—there’s a viable path to winning widespread public ownership of American sports. Right now, however, the idea faces major roadblocks: Public ownership is effectively banned in all four major American sports leagues (though the leagues had no problem changing similar rules to open the floodgates to private equity ownership). Cities and states continue to dole out billions in handouts to woo wealthy owners without demanding anything in return, much less an equity stake.

Although professional sports and other forms of entertainment may seem frivolous in the face of today’s most pressing issues, I would argue that our commitment to imagining and envisaging a brighter and more democratic economic future has never been more important. Indeed, the practice of collective imagination is part of what’s under attack. And so, as the 2025 baseball season opens and as the prospect of an expiring Collective Bargaining Agreement looms over the sport, let’s dream big about baseball. Let’s dream of a future where oligarchs rule neither our federal government nor our national pastime. And most importantly, let’s dream of a future where the New York Yankees never make it to the World Series ever again.

If you ask Eleanor

“I may think at times that we are on the road dealing with very important subjects regarding the United Nations and its agencies, but I learned in Miami on Tuesday that even in a meeting for the United Nations the audience must be told at intervals what the latest baseball score is. Then when it was announced that the Dodgers had won and that there was wild excitement and celebration in Brooklyn the people in our audience cheered for the Dodgers and completely forgot the UN!”

– Eleanor Roosevelt, My Day  (October 7, 1955)