Reclusive A’s owner John Fisher breaks silence to say he’s not selling

The Charmin-soft interview mostly produced talking points that Fisher has pushed out through Kaval for years. The owner repeated Kaval’s hard-to-believe claims that the planned A’s stadium in Vegas would allow the ball club to actually field a competitive team because of increased revenue. The goal, according to the owner, is to “win the World Series within our first six years,” which is the same timeline that the NHL’s Vegas Golden Knights accomplished. But the A’s aren’t breaking ground in Vegas until at least 2028, meaning they’re five years away from being six years away.

Fisher mostly meandered through generalities about how wonderful this new stadium will be for the team, the city, and “for all of baseball and really of sports.” Even when he was pitched a softball about business lessons he applies to the team, the A’s owner couldn’t help but respond with business-school babble — great people plus good product equals success, or what amounts to it with the A’s.

Fisher did offer one concrete claim: The A’s will lose $40 million this year. Even taking Fisher at his word without access to the A’s books, that is a whopping number. The team claimed that it lost $9 million “in cash basis” in 2022, and that it has lost $175 million over the last six years. (Fisher repeatedly mentioned the $175 million figure in the interview.) Basic arithmetic shows that $40 million would be far higher than the average purported loss during that time period. 

It also wouldn’t be a proper Fisher interview without a gut-punch to A’s fans. The Gap heir declared he has “not considered selling the team.” It’s something that fans have been calling for all season with chants that have been impossible to ignore, unless you’re the NBC Bay Area broadcast. He also denies actively tanking, and seems to believe team success comes from natural ebbs and flows of an invisible hand more than active financing from ownership. At least he called A’s fans “tremendously passionate.”

There was also another big bummer, though this one was for those who enjoy rich men publicly fighting: Fisher has smoothed things out with Raiders owner Mark Davis. Back in April, Davis used his vendetta against the A’s for holding the Raiders hostage at the Coliseum to rail on Fisher’s move to Vegas, which Davis did with the Raiders in 2020.

“All they did was f—k the Bay Area,” Davis said at the time, without a hint of irony.

This could have been an opportunity for Fisher to show any signs of personality and respond to the angry statements Davis made. Instead, he announced his first apology since he halted weekly COVID payments to minor league players. He took responsibility for the way things went with the Coliseum and hopes to forge a relationship with the last guy who moved a team from Oakland to Vegas.