Moneyball and the End of the Oakland A’s
This essay is adapted from the latest videos in “The Moneyball Legacy.”
Last year, after the Athletics’ move from Oakland to Las Vegas was approved by the MLB owners, US Representatives Barbara Lee and Mark DeSaulnier, who both represent Northern California, introduced a bill in Congress that would require teams that relocate to compensate the cities they abandon.
In some ways, it was a perfect encapsulation of modern liberal politics: somehow both a pipe dream and a compromise. It was simultaneously impossible to imagine the bill becoming law; and even if it did, the bill wouldn’t actually STOP teams from leaving their fan bases behind — it would just make it more expensive to do so. In other words, the law was designed to signal a stern but impotent disapproval, because actually solving the problem would require imposing the slightest of restrictions on private ownership of the means of production, which is of course the sacred red line that liberals dare not cross.
In yet another poetic piece of irony, they called this bill the Moneyball Act. Obviously the name was chosen as a nod to the success the Oakland A’s had from 2000 to 2003 — the years generally covered by Michael Lewis, in his bestselling book Moneyball. Most A’s fans remember that period fondly. It was the last time they made the playoffs four years in a row, and the last time they won 100 games in a season. It was, in fact, the only team the franchise has had consecutive 100-win seasons since 1931, when they were still in Philadelphia.
And yet the irony is that the pro-owner ideology outlined in the book is the very same ideology that ultimately led to the team to abandon Oakland.
This might seem like an unfair exaggeration. After all, everything about this team is different from the Moneyball A’s: They have a different owner, a different manager, a different GM — Billy Beane isn’t even in the front office anymore. All the players are long gone… so what does Moneyball have to do with this current baseball tragedy?
Well, the real story of Moneyball is generally misunderstood, by baseball fans and non-baseball fans. It is generally remembered as the story of a struggle between cutting-edge stats and old-school conventional wisdom. Or sometimes it’s remembered as a battle of an innovative small market team against the big market Goliaths. That’s more or less the explicit point that Michael Lewis was going for.
But the real story of Moneyball, and the key to understanding its relevance to the current crisis facing the A’s, is the conflict between labor and capital, workers and owners. It’s not a coincidence that the book came out in 2003, after a decade of unprecedented salary growth in the league. Remember: free agency didn’t even exist in baseball until the late 1970s. Then, the 1980s had been marked by illegal collusion among the owners to artificially suppress player salary. So the 1990s was really the first time in the 100-year history of the game that players had the agency and power to freely shop their services to the highest bidder. The union won a major victory in the 1994-95 strike by fighting off a proposed salary cap, and salary growth exploded.
The ideas in Moneyball represented a counterstrike, a reassertion of the power of owners. Rather than bid competitively for talent, guys like Billy Beane were going to figure out how to protect the owners’ bottom lines in the face of free agency. Indeed, right around the time the book came out, player salary growth slowed: From 1984 to 2004, the average MLB salary went up by 600%; in the two decades since, it’s gone up at 1/6th the pace. Meanwhile, franchise values — the share of value retained by owners — have skyrocketed. The average team value has roughly quintupled since Lewis’ book came out.
In other words, Moneyball was about the capitalist class reasserting its dominance, a dominance so impenetrable that if one of them wants to take his team and move it to Las Vegas, then there’s nothing — not player objections or fan outrage or the intervention of Congress — that can stop them.
The History of Modern Athletics
The Athletics first arrived in Oakland back in 1968. Originally from Philadelphia, the team spent 13 seasons in Kansas City, before being lured to Oakland by the construction of the Oakland Coliseum, which the city of Oakland and Alameda county had built jointly as a multipurpose stadium with the hopes of attracting pro sports to Oakland. The Raiders started playing there in 1966, and then the A’s moved in a couple years later.
The Athletics really had three different periods of sustained success in Oakland, under three different owners, showcasing how ownership has changed in Major League Baseball, and how those changes impacted the game on the field. The first period was in the 1970s, under the controversial Charlie O. Finley, who was a flamboyant self-promoter — he replaced the team’s elephant mascot with a mule he named after himself, for example. And Finley was notoriously unpopular with his players. For example, he refused to make an annuity payment for his ace pitcher Catfish Hunter, even though it was guaranteed by Hunter’s contract, because he didn’t want to pay taxes on it. A breach of contract dispute was brought against Finley, and Hunter was declared a free agent a couple years before free agency really existed in baseball.
But because free agency didn’t exist for most of Finley’s tenure — and Finley WAS considered a very good scout of talent — he was able to assemble a dynasty that would win three straight World Series in the 1970s. It was the last baseball team to three-peat until the Yankees in the late ‘90s, and in addition to the success, that team had character: They started wearing the bright green and gold jerseys, and players like Hunter and Rollie Fingers grew elaborate facial hair at a time when other teams banned that look. The A’s seemed to reflect the vibe of Northern California, and their character helped forge the team together with its new home. It probably didn’t hurt that they were one of the first baseball dynasties with multiple Black stars — guys like Reggie Jackson and Vida Blue and Bill North — at a time when Oakland’s Black population was rapidly increasing, reaching almost half the City by 1980. But Finley wouldn’t keep the team together…
Once free agency came to baseball and the players started to gain a little power, Finley decided to sell the A’s, potentially to buyers in Denver, but the city of Oakland actually blocked the move, by refusing to let the team out of their lease on the Coliseum. (FWIW, this is part of why publicly owned stadiums can be good for fans, in spite of the new consensus that billionaires should pay for stadiums themselves.) But anyway, instead the A’s were bought by Walter Haas, Jr. the head of the Levi Strauss Co. And Haas’ reign over the team was really the best a sports team can hope for from an owner: benign indifference.
In Moneyball, Michael Lewis refers to Haas as a “philanthropist” and repeats the myth that the A’s lost money under his ownership. Of course, the whole “losing money” thing is something owners always say — it’s really an accounting trick and they rarely offer any real evidence of this. Plus, it doesn’t take into account that Haas bought the team for less than $13 million, and then his estate sold it 15 years later for $85 million, which is a pretty impressive ROI. And that $85 million sum was generally considered a low price, because the Haas family wanted a pledge that the new owners would keep the team in Oakland.
Still, that does show that Haas seemed to view ownership as a matter of civic duty, and he did keep payrolls high, while simultaneously staying out of the way and leaving baseball operations to be run by experienced baseball guys like Billy Martin and Tony La Russa. They helped develop superstars like Rickey Henderson, Jose Canseco, and Mark McGwire, and the team again made three straight World Series from 1988 to 1990.
Haas was eventually replaced by Stephen Schott and Ken Hoffman, a pair of real estate developers who bought the team shortly after the strike and imposed the tight budget restrictions that Billy Beane was dealing with in the Moneyball era. In other words, it’s important to see the budget constraints that Beane was responding to in Moneyball as a consequence of the new ownership situation, and NOT as some iron law of nature about the size of the Oakland market. The A’s had one of the highest payrolls in the league under Haas’ ownership, and his predecessor, Sandy Alderson, as well as other teams around the league, had been gradually implementing the new ideas identified by sabermetrics with a bigger budget. After all, there’s nothing about sabermetrics that NECESSARILY means you have to be cheap, and other teams were implementing these ideas before Billy Beane came along.
But it was Beane’s ability to do it FOR a super cheap owner, to fight back against the rising player salaries of the 1990s, that made him such a star, and so interesting to Michael Lewis.
The Moneyball A’s
Crucially, the real key to Oakland’s success in the Moneyball era was NOT really sabermetrics — it was having a core group of young stars under team control. Guys like Barry Zito, Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder, Miguel Tejada, Eric Chavez, and Jason Giambi were stars by any statistics, and they were the ones who powered this third period of success for Oakland baseball. The reason the A’s could hold onto them as long as they did was simply that they hadn’t reached free agency.
In part because of the new owners’ refusal to allow Beane to build around the edges of that great core, this version of the A’s never cashed in on all that talent: They never reached the World Series, even with two MVPs and a Cy Young winner. From 2000 to 2003, the A’s averaged 99 wins per season, and won the division three times in four years — and could have won in all four, if not for the historic 2001 Seattle Mariners, which left Oakland in second place despite 102 wins that year. And yet, despite all that regular season success, the A’s never made it out of the Division Series. As Beane himself famously put it in the book:
And to some extent, he’s right. The playoffs are famously random, and Beane’s skill was in finding small edges that reveal themselves over 162 games, not predicting how a short series is going to play out. Every one of those Oakland Division Series’ losses went the full five games, meaning one different bounce or one bad call or one funky slide might have completely changed the outcome.
But I still think this “my shit doesn’t work in the playoffs” idea is kind of overblown. If you read Moneyball, Michael Lewis actually does a decent job pushing back on it, pointing out that the teams that win the postseason do the things that Billy Beane does: They work the count, they get on base, they hit home runs. The A’s issue is not really a STYLE thing; it was about a lack of resources.
If you look closely at the four Division Series losses, yes, you see a fair amount of randomness — after all, that’s just part of playoff baseball. But you also see a team that, despite its great young core, has a pretty flawed roster, limited by those cheap owners and the constraints Billy Beane has to work around.
2000 was the A’s first playoff appearance in 8 years, and truthfully they weren’t that good yet. That was Jason Giambi’s MVP year, and he was their only really great player — yet they still pushed the Yankees to five games, even though their ace pitcher that year was Gil Heredia, who got knocked around in the decisive Game 5. Still, that was a breakout season for Miguel Tejada, Eric Chavez, and Barry Zito, who was called up that July. The future was bright.
It was the next year, though, 2001, that was the real start of the missed opportunities. Again they were matched up with the Yankees, and while they were separated by 7 games in their regular season records, the gap was even bigger. Oakland projected as a 104-win team that season, while the Yankees were only supposed to win 89, based on their Pythagorean expected W-L record. And the A’s won the first two games behind great pitching performances by Mark Mulder and Tim Hudson.
The third game, though, would be remembered for one specific play, in the bottom of the 7th, with the A’s down 1-0 and a runner on first with two outs:
Now, what everyone likes to say about The Flip play is that Jeremy Giambi, the runner thrown out the plate, should have slid. And yes, obviously, he should have… but remember: Billy Beane’s strategy with guys like Giambi wasn’t just valuing on-base percentage — it was getting guys cheaply by valuing on-base percentage at the EXPENSE of other skills, including baserunning. Part of the reason Oakland had been able to acquire Jeremy Giambi for nothing but a fringe pitching prospect and the league minimum was that he was known to be a bad baserunner.
It feels silly to defend Jeremy Giambi for this play, but I do feel a little bad for him — he actually had a GOOD series in the 2001 ALDS. He reached base in all four games that he started. He had the fourth-best OPS and on-base percentage of anyone who played all five games for the A’s. Should we really kill him for not being able to score from first, after a Hall of Fame player made an iconic defensive play? That wasn’t Giambi’s game — which is why Oakland got him in the first place.
In 2002, it was the defense that let down the A’s. With a 2-1 lead in the series and a chance to close it out with Tim Hudson on the mound, a collective breakdown in infield defense completely turned around Game 4. In the fourth inning, with two runners on in a tie game, Oakland went error, wild pitch, hit batter, then another error. That last error, sadly, was on Scott Hatteberg, who botched a throw to the plate, costing the A’s a run. It’s sad because overall, Hatteberg did a pretty good job that year adjusting to first base, a position he never played before. But in a big moment, he made a crucial mistake — again, the foreseeable result of a strategy that willingly sacrificed defense, as Billy Beane very openly did.
By the end of that inning the score was 9-2, and the Twins would win 11-2 and even the series. The A’s were eliminated the next day, and not helped by the performance of Billy Koch, who gave up three runs in the ninth inning of a game Oakland ended up losing by one. Koch was the closer Billy Beane brought in that season to replace Jason Isringhausen, on the theory that closers were interchangeable. Well, it turns out they weren’t so interchangeable: Koch struggled all season for Oakland, and let them down in the crucial deciding game.
And look, I don’t want to pretend that this was all inevitable. There WAS a ton of randomness in all these series. We haven’t even talked about the 2003 Division Series against Boston, which was the most heartbreaking of all: Once again they went up 2-0 in the series, then they lost an extra inning game on walk-off homer, then in Game 4 David Ortiz hit a come from behind double in the 8th inning to win by a run, and then Game 5 ended with Oakland stranding the bases loaded in the ninth inning down by a single run. Obviously when you have a five game series with so many one-run games and walk off hits, there’s a lot of luck involved, which is what Billy Beane was getting at with the “my shit doesn’t work in the playoffs” line…
…but as another great General Manager liked to say: Luck is the residue of design.
And you can see, in all these Division Series losses, the residue of Beane’s design, which was in turn the residue of restrictions imposed by a penny-pinching owner who was not willing to invest in that exciting young core the A’s had. No, you can’t keep your All-Star closer, because all closers are the same. No, you can’t add a first baseman who has played first base before, because we can just sacrifice defense. No, you can’t afford a pinch runner who remembers to slide at home plate, because what are the odds THAT ends up mattering? Well, the result of all that was a team that couldn’t get out of the first round of the postseason before that core disappeared.
The Great Real Estate Swindle
Steve Schott and Ken Hoffman, the penny-pinching owners who held Oakland back in the Moneyball era, made out pretty well: In 2005, they sold the team for about $180 million, more than twice what they paid for it just ten years earlier. The managing partner of the ownership group who bought the team was another real estate developer, Lewis Wolff, but the money mostly came from John Fisher.
We’ll get to Fisher in a minute, but the presence of all those real estate developers really says a lot about what modern sports ownership consists of. Because more and more now, owners use baseball teams, and the antitrust exemption that comes with Major League Baseball, as a tool to extract economic rents from the community.
For a while this came in the form of cable TV carriage fees, but increasingly it comes in the form of real estate. Ownership of a team becomes a Trojan horse by which owners can get access to prime public land, and often public funds with which to develop a neighborhood around a new stadium. Recently built baseball stadiums, like Globe Life Field in Texas and Truist Park in Georgia have come as part of public-private developments that give the owners access to new housing or shopping centers. In New York, we see Steve Cohen using his ownership of the Mets as an inroad to possibly built a casino next door. These are the ways that owners can cash in on their team, regardless of on the field success.
And it was quite clear, when Fisher and Wolff bought the A’s, that their plan was something similar. After all, everyone realized the Oakland Coliseum needed to be replaced. The Coliseum was never the best place to watch a game, and as time went on it got worse and worse. Schott and Hoffman had tried and failed to get a new stadium built before selling the team, and by the 2010s, there were reports of regular sewage backups and possum infestations, and it had long been obvious to everyone that the team needed a new stadium.
The question was just where the new stadium was going to be, and who was going to pay for it. Lewis Wolff owned a lot of property in San Jose, California, and seemed keen to relocate the A’s to San Jose. The main problem, though, was that San Jose was technically part of territorial rights of the OTHER Bay Area team — the San Francisco Giants — meaning the Giants would have to give the A’s permission to move there, which they weren’t going to do.
The fight dragged on for years, with multiple possible new stadiums being proposed, in various different Bay Area locations — but it was never entirely clear which of these proposals were serious, and which were bargaining chips for A’s owner. For example, the team spent years pursuing a venue in Fremont, which seemed like a ploy to a lot of people, since that was the Bay Area city that was closest to San Jose that the Giants couldn’t technically block. So a lot of people thought the A’s were just threatening them: If you don’t let us move to San Jose, we’ll just move as close as possible anyway, so you might as well negotiate with us.
What these negotiations reveal is the power of private ownership. Ever since buying the team, John Fisher’s official party line (echoed first by Wolff, then by Team President Dave Kaval) is: They would love to stay in Oakland, they are desperately TRYING to stay in Oakland, if only the city or the state would work with them to make it happen. A lot of the criticism of Fisher in all this focuses on whether or not that’s true, but the point is that it doesn’t really matter. Under capitalism, the power belongs to the owner, regardless of his sincerity. The A’s needed a new stadium, and Oakland wanted a new stadium, but the person with final say is some do-nothing owner, whose financial interests are more important than anything else.
The Post-Moneyball A’s
While all this was going on, on the field, the team was becoming little more than a pawn in these real estate negotiations. When Fisher and Wolff bought the team in 2005, they not only kept Billy Beane on as General Manager — they gave him an ownership stake in the team. Now Beane stood to directly benefit from protecting the owners’ bottom lines. And the marching orders under Fisher and Wolff were the same as they had been under Schott and Hoffman: Keep payrolls low and costs down, since the goal isn’t really to win games, but to get someone to build the team a new stadium, whether in Oakland or San Jose or somewhere else.
But without any financial commitment from the owners, and with the Moneyball core aging into free agency, Billy Beane couldn’t really sustain the success of those early 2000s seasons. He certainly tried, though! Starting in the 2005 season, right around the time that the new owners came in, Beane began a period of prolific trade activity, in the hopes of finding cheap, young, undervalued talent, by which he could recapture the success Oakland had had from 2000 to 2003.
Before the ‘05 season, he traded Tim Hudson to Atlanta and Mark Mulder to St. Louis. The Hudson trade didn’t really work out, but the Mulder trade returned three good players, led by Dan Haren, who had three good seasons in Oakland…
…before he too was traded after the 2007 season. That trade brought back Carlos Gonzalez, who was traded a year later, along with Huston Street, to get Matt Holliday, who Oakland had for a few months before trading HIM three months into the 2009 season.
That same offseason as the Haren trade, after 2007, Oakland also traded Mark Kotsay and Nick Swisher, the prize of Billy Beane’s 2002 draft, who was heavily covered in Moneyball as a potential future star. And Swisher DID have a pretty good career — but most of it was not with the Athletics.
The Nick Swisher trade brought back Gio Gonzalez, who could have formed the backbone of another great young rotation with Rich Harden and Joe Blanton… except that Blanton and Harden were both traded at the 2008 deadline. The Blanton trade didn’t bring back much, but the A’s got Josh Donaldson in the Harden trade, who would put together two good seasons in Oakland before he too was traded to Toronto. Gio Gonzalez was also traded to the Nationals after his first All-Star season in 2011.
If all that is a little hard to keep track of, the point is that Beane was wheeling and dealing. Like a house flipper trying to time the local market perfectly, he was trying to pick up talented players but then flip them before they reached free agency or even started getting paid in arbitration. And Beane WAS pretty good at finding good, undervalued players, like Haren and Donaldson and the Gonzalezes. You can almost do a Six Degrees of Separation for any good baseball player from that era, who either was traded to Oakland, or was traded FOR someone who got traded to Oakland. The ideas in Moneyball WERE good at helping to identify good players.
But with the new ownership group unwilling to sign free agents, or even sign extensions for the good players he traded for, it was just impossible to build a consistently winning team once that Moneyball core was gone. They managed just one playoff appearance in the eight seasons from 2004 to 2011, and they were without a winning record for the last five of those seasons. They managed three playoff appearances from 2012 to 2014, but once again they couldn’t keep the core together for long, trading Josh Donaldson and Sonny Gray and Yoenis Cespedes. After three straight last place finishes, they had two more Wild Card appearances in 2018 and 2019… before trading Matt Chapman and Matt Olson and Chris Bassitt.
In other words, when you look at the last two decades of Oakland A’s baseball, you don’t see the thing that Michael Lewis describes in his book: a low payroll team that’s consistently competitive through shrewd analytics. No, you see a team obstinately refusing to invest in the on-field product, that every six years or so is briefly relevant because they’ve managed to stumble into enough talented young players at the same time. But don’t get too comfortable with them, because it’s only a matter of time before they are traded.
And to be very clear, this is not the fate of all low payroll teams. The Guardians, the Twins, the Royals, the Rays, the Tigers — all of them have been far more successful than Oakland over these years, because even their owners have some willingness to invest in the team. But not the A’s! And the fans have not taken kindly to that. In the 18 years prior to John Fisher buying the team, the A’s drew over 2 million fans 11 times. But since then, they’ve hit that number only once — since the pandemic, they haven’t even crossed 1 million, even as the league’s overall attendance levels have mostly rebounded.
John Fisher
Which brings us back to John Fisher. In 2016, after the Supreme Court finally put an end to the San Jose flirtation, by saying that it was within Major League Baseball’s authority to give the Giants veto rights, Wolff left the team and sold his shares to Fisher, who was now completely in control of the quest for a new stadium. But negotiations never went anywhere. There was a proposal in 2005 that went nowhere, in 2010 that went nowhere, in 2017 that went nowhere… in 2018, Fisher and Kaval started negotiating with Oakland over a proposed stadium at Howard Terminal (which was really similar to the 2010 proposal that stalled out), but when they couldn’t get federal money for that, they started negotiating with Las Vegas in 2021.
As each of these deals failed, a lot of people have raised the question of how seriously Fisher really tried to keep the team in Oakland, and how much he really cares about A’s baseball. But I’m not sure these are the right questions. Fisher is a pretty unexceptional person, your basic rich failson. The third son of the couple that founded the GAP, he grew up like a lot of rich kids: He went to Exeter and Princeton, started a few failed businesses — his only real job seems to have been in the mailroom of the Republican National Committee. He’s not a Machiavellian villain; he’s just your standard dumb rich guy.
He got his start in baseball by managing his family’s small investment in the San Francisco Giants in the 1990s. He wasn’t there long, but I think basically he’s spent the last two decades hoping someone would build for him what the Giants built for themselves when Oracle Park opened in 2000: a charming stadium on waterfront property surrounded by a thriving and growing neighborhood. But he doesn’t want to pay for it himself — he wants the city or the state or the federal government to do it for him. And so when Nevada put together a public-private partnership, which included public funds, to lure his team to Vegas, he went for it, even if none of the details have really been ironed out.
It’s not as if Oakland wasn’t willing to replace the Coliseum — as I said, they offered multiple alternative plans. But that’s the thing about stadiums nowadays. They are basically public policy questions, involving decisions about traffic and transit and state taxes and the environment and jobs. You can’t just buy an old lumberyard in the Bronx and build Yankee Stadium anymore.
But, because of how our economy is set up, the most important policy question is: What’s the best way to ensure a profit for the unemployed heir to the Gap fortune? That might seem ridiculous, but ultimately it’s the same logic behind Moneyball: that baseball teams should be run for the benefit of owners, not fans or players or communities.