Baseball, Fandom, and Neoliberalism in Oakland.

ARI PARTRICH

Sports are a social practice. Professional athletics, in any given civilization, unassumingly embody the conditions of that given civilization. Two Septembers ago, I was wandering through Oakland, California, the former home of the Athletics, to witness, bluntly, this: the sociopolitical conditions that have defined baseball history. From the ubiquitous Stake ads lining ballparks, to the soulless corporate entities overseeing them—the MLB, MLBPA, and ownership—I believe that America’s Pastime, developed under capitalism, reflects no place, no community, no change, but, rather, the stupid America from which it is produced. This is not some hardliner’s revelation. Management constantly fails baseball’s most avid consumers, but all the same, these mourning devotees are, again, consumers: people whose interests begin and end with spectacle. No argument for community development—especially via a multibillion-dollar stadium, a flashy new uniform, or a promising new owner—can be made through a discourse inextricable from an inconsiderate and destructive enterprise.

“The grassroots organizers for the Stay-in-Oakland project fit snugly within this context, and unfortunately so, given the sheer literalness of their status: paying customers at the Oakland Coliseum, doomed to either watch their franchise be gambled away, or do the gambling themselves.”

I bought the liberal image of Oakland baseball, this toughened, working-class fandom packaged by mourning consumers and sold by the media apparatus. In the waning days of the 2023 MLB season, when I traveled to California, it was basically because I had seen Moneyball a few times and been subscribed to left-coded sports press like The Athletic. This was an image of professional sports that proposed, implicitly, that fans had a say, that they were active participants in the product on the field, and that the governing bodies of the league were spineless in their collusion against not only Oakland’s fans, but the players with whom they had meaningfully bonded. This was evident in the A’s stomping-grounds, where tight-knit fan clubs like the Oakland 68s appealed, in scrappy initiatives, to change the product they paid for, even if it meant making majority owner John Fisher sell the team. 

I saw two baseball games in Oakland. A post-industrial city with a rich history in class struggle was experiencing what felt like an actionable, mobile crisis. Their team, their team, was moving to Las Vegas. Not only were they moving, but to a decadent symbol of post-industrial development. Oakland’s uphill fight to save its team, its pride, took on an air of legitimate struggle. I believed, partly, in a defeatist myth, that proper discursive orientation was what mattered most in a fight: not winning and losing. The real winners, the people, were to be vindicated later in history. But in many places, this feeling is tied to a conception of community resources which is illusory and completely detached from any potential localized worker power. Oakland included.

Protesting, movement-building, campus organizing are lofty bastions of leftism, seamless in theory and unsexy in practice. There is humor, if not heartbreak, in recognizing the same liberal optics in the context of Oakland professional baseball. A common criticism of marching, or publicly appearing, as a form of protest, is that it is ultimately a spectators’ event, where like-minded people watch their personal horrors of the world unfold with a big flag at their hip that says “I am against this.” The grassroots organizers for the Stay-in-Oakland project fit snugly within this context, and unfortunately so, given the sheer literalness of their status: paying customers at the Oakland Coliseum, doomed to either watch their franchise be gambled away, or do the gambling themselves. Momentarily, this can bring a needy bloc of people to the forefront of a fray of fans, nationwide, just trying to see and enjoy a ballgame. That is why I had been convinced to go in the first place. And yet, this hyperreal omnipresence is subject to rapid disintegration once the spectacle, the images and appearances paramount to and in service of the status quo, no longer serves the interests of capital. 

“When I visited Oakland, The BART was little more than a fun trinket, whisking merry revelers to and from the baseball mecca. Another spectacle to aid my experience. These construction projects forced marginalized people outward in order for me to enjoy my rides.” 

As I write this, the aptly and futuristically placeless “Athletics”—officially locationless, but playing, temporarily, in Sacramento until their Vegas stadium is completed—have effectively washed themselves of Oakland. They milked us for all we could give them. There was no final ‘gotcha’ from the fans nor ownership. It was merely business-as-usual for the bosses—with a new, adversarial framing device to shape and profit off of. They certainly fooled me. I was a happy customer—flew across the country to see it. Spectators, Athletics majority owner John Fisher, and the MLB’s commissioner Rob Manfred each played off of one another and acted in response to Fisher’s will. The community of Oakland, through a passive acceptance of its conditions, inadvertently framed itself as dependent upon this will; no demands were established by the fans independent of his narrative, and they wound up under his thumb just like everyone else. 

Professional baseball is littered with broad discontent, and it all leads back to the exploitative movements of human and physical capital in protection of the MLB. That is why the structures built around saving Oakland baseball have formed with liberal political alignments. The issue undoubtedly is unfettered capitalism, but the movement is not radical. This discontent should be broached with direct material challenges to its root cause, the culpable owners and their exploitative ventures, not merely through the avenues conveniently provided for fans, like selling the team or buying a new ballpark in Oakland. Solidarity from other fans as well, such as myself, is fool’s gold. But solidarity from groups equally implicated in, and impacted by, Fisher’s practices culminates into real power, which can be reared against Fisher and Manfred for the betterment of Oakland, not just its professional baseball team. 

The fans of the Oakland Athletics were always going to be the losing horse in this race, because there were no horses nor any race. Economic conditions have damned the future of professional sports to the simulated realm: online gambling, national exposure, expensive club seating in stadiums, and further accommodations for patronizing and parasocial mouthpieces who will follow their teams anywhere, at all costs, and with legitimate nationalistic fervor. These speculative, often decentralized markets surrounding professional sports have become bigger than the sports themselves. So much of the commerce that occurs beyond the arena hinges upon the product being available to these new, or more-prominent, suitors, who then shape and reshape it in their own aristocratic bubble. Why would Oakland have an MLB team in such a climate? More importantly, why should they?

“This model of compounding memories, oscillating between good-team and bad-team, creates and ossifies grey, inactionable cultural nowheres. It is in such a nowhere that the Athletics currently live and die.”

Oakland’s modern identity, much like the rest of the country, was forged during and after World War II. The city was a hub for wartime commerce, with shipyards and manufacturing plants attracting a proletarian workforce. After the war, Oakland—needed in World War II, but unnecessary during the Cold War—became obsolete, suffering significant deindustrialization. The decline of the city’s industrial base led, most famously, to a general strike in 1946, where about 100,000 residents fought back against postwar narratives that painted labor unrest as selfish or unpatriotic, instead asserting their collective power against local business owners and, more largely, the national trajectory toward anti-union governance. In response to these crises, capital sought what geographer David Harvey terms a “spatial fix”—investing in new urban developments to both absorb surplus capital and temporarily stimulate economic activity. Urban renewal projects, like the Nimitz Freeway and the BART, displaced supposedly unprofitable working class communities in West Oakland, further driving racial and economic inequality in exchange for a narrower, more quantitative conception of urban development that solely benefitted the cabal of capital commanding over working people’s lives. When I visited Oakland, The BART was little more than a fun trinket, whisking merry revelers to and from the baseball mecca. Another spectacle to aid my experience. These construction projects forced marginalized people outward in order for me to enjoy my rides. 

These disparities have repeatedly catalyzed social movements in Oakland, only to be met with renewed disinvestment and gentrification. Chief among them was the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, founded in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. Responding to cycles of police violence and entrenched poverty, the Panthers built community programs that provided food, healthcare, education, and protection: initiatives that, retrospectively, would provide a national model for grassroots development. But the structures governing Oakland’s working class have never really served the people who sustain them. The same year the Panthers were founded, the Oakland Coliseum was completed: a stadium that, rather than addressing the city’s inequities, embodied the “spatial fix” — another site for working people, many from the city’s outskirts, to build and maintain for only a fraction of the profit. The Coliseum signaled a development strategy rooted in spectacle and commodification, diverting resources toward large-scale projects while ignoring systemic need. Meanwhile, the Panthers’ vision of community-driven development was criminalized by the very officials who championed the team and its new home—most brazenly symbolized by Bobby Seale’s losing mayoral bid to John H. Reading, the mayor who oversaw the A’s relocation from Kansas City to Oakland.

Individualized memories of the team are a key driving force in the movement to keep the Athletics in Oakland, or, rather, are what it intends to preserve, not history nor their community. By framing their argument around the ever-presence of the Athletics, and not the larger issues with baseball and within Oakland surrounding their departure, their only measure of importance is memory. They, the fans, have discursively positioned themselves with people who fear Oakland’s supposedly rampant crime, agreeing upon the same foundations—fear, nostalgia—when they conceal a larger injustice. While it remains valid for each person who experienced it, the experience of the spectacle remains a closely manicured tool of ownership. Those memories are there in order to be consulted whenever the team does something reprehensible. They represent the space the owner holds in one’s mind. Positive memories of the past are weaponized to justify the reprehensible behavior of the present. This model of compounding memories, oscillating between good-team and bad-team, creates and ossifies grey, inactionable cultural nowheres. It is in such a nowhere that the Athletics currently live and die. 

“If the team was called John Fisher’s Athletics, and not the Oakland Athletics, would fans feel the same? If the latter can so quickly become the former, why invest in the latter altogether, or even consider it as such?”

The working-class ethos of Athletics fans does not combat such oscillations, rather sweetening and mystifying them in an opportunistic glint. Again, when the team is good, good memories about the product pile on. Because of this, fans feel encouraged to act on behalf of “their” team for the betterment of these moments. They cannot recall a time without this push-and-pull. This almost takes a reformist and social democratic shape, where the exploitative core is painted over as wholly progressive by organizations seeking incremental change. This aspect of the fandom, this self-started complementary work, is weaponized against fans through memory, and the struggle detaches from the betterment of the community and into polishing the narrative, whose positive memories of the spectacle dictate the future of the community and not the contradictions presently underlying the system. Maybe that is what collective grieving is in a neoliberal society mediated by commodities: building a future out of the ghosts of the past. The pneuma of these ghosts, the deeper exploitation of the MLB, is likewise obscured by the collective experience of the product—a product that is monitored and approved by ownership. If the team was called John Fisher’s Athletics, and not the Oakland Athletics, would fans feel the same? If the latter can so quickly become the former, why invest in the latter altogether, or even consider it as such? Are relatively long-lasting symbols and signifiers enough to truly be Oakland themselves? The Oakland 68s exist now, even without the Athletics in town, so why were the Athletics framed as the necessary party, as the product which weaved them together? The team, or Fisher, had not overtaken the spirit of Oakland, the Athletics had not become the city’s fix for community development—just as no other sports team does that for their city—and that is for the better. 

The contrarian in me wants to call John Fisher a good owner and a bad community member. Is that really any different than any other CEO? They can all justify their ruthlessness by virtue of their talent at being executive, making economically sound choices and following labor laws—doing the bare minimum to the highest degree—not their service to any constituent. The product we, as fans, enjoy shrouds our perception of what exactly professional baseball is under capitalism: a series of seen and unseen transactions in an attempt to make a profit. 

Again, I am not saying anything a disgruntled fan has not said ad nauseum when their team is bad (sans the radical tone), but I am insisting, even further, that the grief itself is commodified, that even a potentially radical tone is permitted so long as it funnels back into consumption, into the next ticket, the next petition to fire general manager Nico Harrison in Dallas, the next organization of Oakland Athletics fans held inside or around the walls of the very space being ripped away. The Athletics fans in Oakland know this, but cannot escape these discursive oscillations: between proving Fisher right by not showing up to games, and lining Fisher’s pockets on his way out of Oakland by proving him wrong and showing up in droves with “SELL” T-shirts for a “Reverse Boycott,” as described to me by a fan who had attended. The spectacle becomes the forum for discourse, for detachment from any community-wide subjectivity. Responsibility cannot be community-wide when we’re winning, and on the owners when we’re losing. If culpability materially rests at the feet of billionaire owners, then let it be so at all times.

“Their efforts underscore a certain need, not for nostalgia, but for a wholesale historical reframing of what community means in Oakland, how it is and has been built, and who is responsible for its future.”

In ESPN’s 2009 documentary on the “Bad Boys” Pistons, the narrative of Detroit is constructed, more than anything, in order to satisfy the memory of bourgeois suburban Michiganders. Most notably, the moments in which the film discusses the sociopolitical state of Detroit before and after their championship in 1989. There are two glimpses into the status of Detroit throughout the film: allusions to the 1967 riots, how they left Detroit empty and in disrepair, and other allusions to how crowded and cheerful downtown was during the 1989 championship parade. 

In a liberal society governed by austerity narratives, all good things are fragile, staged as brief spectacles of individual heroism. The Bad Boys are supposed to be catalysts. They are remembered as catalysts for change, because soon after the heavily fortified parade, when everybody went home, that memory stuck with its suburban pilgrims riding the interstate back to their white picket fences, still again igniting the supposedly-collapsed city in a flame of postindustrial austerity narratives as they fled. These austerity narratives are made real, because the impact of the Pistons to Detroit is also made real. The spectacle, from the game to the parade, reifies suffering by temporarily wiping it from the collective space where it occurs. The Pistons were not so good that they could reconstruct Detroit for a day; rather, they were so good that suburbanites could forever ignore the destruction they caused. Oakland’s fans are fighting fire with fire—ownership’s opportunism regarding a move to Las Vegas, versus their own opportunism regarding any hope for the ownership class to abide by their will. Their efforts underscore a certain need, not for nostalgia, but for a wholesale historical reframing of what community means in Oakland, how it is and has been built, and who is responsible for its future. 

I do not want to suggest that it is presently impossible, under our conditions, to enjoy professional sports. I do want to illuminate the various mystifications of sports in modern, neoliberal society. These are mystifications which overlay our entire existence as Americans. Theater comes through our televisions and phones to affirm our status locally or domestically, at the cost of affirming very real violence elsewhere. This does not pose merely a problem to be solved, but a symbiotic relationship—one that implicates consumers inasmuch as it demonizes outsiders—to deconstruct and reconfigure in order to empower the workers who are exploited by it.

Professional sports do not compel us to rebuild cities or repair social rifts; they train us to accept the status quo and mistake spectacle for substance, where ownership carries no responsibility so long as the show goes on. To truly enjoy the baseball beneath, the spectacle must be destroyed and abandoned. Within the sporting world, emotions and actions are bounded by limits imposed from above, yet the workers and fans who sustain these spectacles deserve to enjoy, resist, and transform professional sports on their own terms.

“Community development begins where the spectacle ends: in reclaiming labor power, asserting spatial autonomy, and nurturing a collective memory untethered from corporate narratives.”

The final act of this Oakland Athletics saga is a lesson in how neoliberal capitalism devours even grief and community. Oakland’s heartbreak has been repackaged as commodified grief, another transaction in the spectacle of professional sports. Every rally to “save our team” only reinforces the owners’ agenda: a well-oiled spectacle that travels wherever profit calls, while beyond the sphere of discourse, marginalized workers become collateral damage. When I visited California, there were people who were not allowed to speak frankly to me. They will never make any press release. But their absence carries the real story in its silence. Amid the relocation controversy, the hush of the Oakland Athletics’ stadium staff—ushers, concessionaires, and maintenance employees—underscores the profound disconnect between the spectacle of professional sports and the labor that sustains it. While fans organized visible protests, the voices of those whose livelihoods were directly impacted remained largely unheard. In fact, they, the people manning the spectacle—a largely black staff, mostly either very young or very old—by my account, had their own community. Workers were relaxed and gabbing cheerfully with one another as I looped around the stadium. There was a legitimate sense of familiarity—an old worker walked down the main corridor with personalized greetings for each fellow worker he saw. In that moment, I witnessed an important walk, a walk that quietly upheld the whole spectacle. This was the tangible, powerful social community that was being lost. 

For years, the national public was sold austerity narratives about what Oakland could not afford, even as deals were cut in exclusive upper-class spaces like Las Vegas. In the end, the simulation of sports capitalism apparently wants shrewd corporate coolness—not the raw, unprofitable authenticity of Oakland’s community subjectivity. But Oakland’s identity is not defined by a franchise or by the league’s favor. Freed from the team’s grip, the city must unplug from this simulation and organize on its own terms. To say “I am against this” in Oakland is to declare, “I am from Oakland, and I am losing my spot on the national stage”—and what a blessing that is! Community development begins where the spectacle ends: in reclaiming labor power, asserting spatial autonomy, and nurturing a collective memory untethered from corporate narratives. Let this air of discontent drive real development—people are angry, and they have a right to be. Oakland’s loss of the Athletics is painful. It feels like an erasure. But it is also a clarion call for everyone who stuck around, workers and fans alike. Will that pain become just another commodified story, or will it spark development that no corporate playbook can contain?

SW.