All right, I guess it's time to write down how I feel, but I warn you it isn't gonna be pretty or palatable.  If you're happily imbibing snifter after snifter of the Kool-Aid currently being dispensed by the ownership of this organization, itself under the seemingly hypnotic power of a large and faceless computer corporation, then I suggest passing this one by.  Enjoy your refreshments.

I am deeply hurt, simply wounded by all of this, and the Oakland aspect is but one facet of my sense of betrayal and discontent.  The reality is that for me, everything this team and franchise has represented has just been cast away.  The diehard, baseball-breathing Oakland fans, lacking in number but never enthusiasm, cast away. The arguably glorious history of the team in Oakland, cast away. The model efficiency and proletarian dedication to "the little things" that make us competitive against the grotesque injustices perpetrated by the big-spender teams, cast away. The Moneyball approach, essentially cast away.  A sporting event free of the loathesomely intrusive consumerist aspects so prevalent at other venues and really throughout the rapidly-putrifying culture of this country, cast away.  Once we were one of the top 4 teams in the game on the sheer competence of our GM and his assistants and the guile and prowess of our gutsy, working-class-hero type players.  A few decent starting pitching performances and a couple of clutch hits from the big prize, from the mountaintop. So close, and getting there the right way, on our own merits and grind-it-out sense of mastery and purpose.  Now we are about to be relegated to a position as the house band in some computer company Marketing Director's shopping mall fantasy, the Yankees with bytes and bandwidth substituting for TV deals.  Say it ain't so.

The Oakland aspect is obvious, no need to beat it to death.  I live here and treasure this most underdog of cities, forever stuck in the shadows of its glitzy neighbor to the west; a ghetto-fabulous St. Paul but with nicer weather, realer people and a better baseball team than its number-3-tourist-destination-on-Earth Minneapolis across the bridge.  So ironic that the only stadium with a view of Oakland is the Giants' place, now that the Oakland team is abdicating.

One reason to love the team has been the way the ballclub has mirrored the city so well: the grit, the standing up to the big guys with all the guns (think the Black Panthers, or Barbara Lee -- D, Congressional District 9, Oakland -- the lone vote against the war appropriations on Sept. 14th, 2001, birthing the phrase "Barbara Lee speaks for me!"), the falling-down stadium facility with the Black Muslim Bakery fish sandwiches (thanks jeepers)... rarely has the unique, uncommercially unhomogenized flavor of a city come across in its team in such an unfiltered way, right down to the clever, proud-to-be-the-prepared-underdog ad campaigns we have seen in recent years.  Welcome to Oakland, the most diverse urban community in the United States... more Medical Cannabis Dispensories than military recruitment centers.  Never has such a great place to live gotten such a bad rap, largely due to the racism still so prevalent in outsiders' views of Oakland, which they believe is some sort of Terrordome/Mad Max movie with gangs of African-American youths marauding all over.

But there's more than enough blame to go around on the moving-to-Fremont issue, it's not just Wolff, it's so many things: Jerry Brown's idiotic fixation on building upscale-fantasy loft housing that no one will ever live in, Ron Dellums failing to make the A's a campaign issue when doing so might have helped a solution to be reached so they could stay, Robert Bobb (former City Manager and A's advocate) leaving, Al Davis returning and making the city his biz-nitch, the failure of the casual fans to come out for more than just the playoff games these last 6 years, the list goes on and on `til the proverbial break o'dawn.  It was inevitable that for the team to make any money and continue to put a contending, championship-quality product on the field, they couldn't stay here as things stood.  No amount of civic pride or Oakland-allegiance could stop that, and I understand. Even if it really does seem obvious that Wolff wanted to move closer to his beloved San Jose and was gonna do that even if Oakland brought him a plan and the financing to enact it on a silver platter.   For the record I think a carpetbagger's a carpetbagger, and would no more approve or condone Wolff's actions (no matter how seemingly beneficent) than I would (as a left-wing person) vote for Hillary Clinton as a Senator from New York.  I guess I'm a deluded purist/idealist, a throwback to a now-bygone era of integrity-as-raison d'etre.

My biggest problems with this deal, the real sense of betrayal and disgust, come from what the new facility will look like and what the game experience portends to be for the prospective fan.  I guess I must be an old coot, but I loathe cell-phones being used in public places.  I believe technology has its place but that baseball is a sacred analog experience, invented in the 19th century, that shouldn't be subjected to some computer firm's future-shock-inducing profit motive curve.  Laptops and PDAs should not be necessary gear for a day on the green watching a baseball game, they can be optional but not necessary.  I go to a game to watch the game with the eyes I was born with, not to be inundated with electronic selling opportunities every time we score a run. To make these devices a central facet of the in-game experience is to create a second-class citizenship for anyone who for whatever reason does not possess such devices.  No matter how enticing and cool the technology looks as they flash it on giant presentation screens to make you want it more than you do life itself.  When we hit a HR I wanna hug and hi-five the total stranger next to me, not be funneled into a personalized replay-with-ads scenario based on what CDs I bought on Amazon.com last week.

They are talking about seat-specific screens, ones that will detect from your cell phone what products you like and target-advertise you at your seat.  Jesus Christ.  What's that, personal mobile spyware for a new generation?  You don't get enough unwanted spam e-mail at home already, now they want you to be subject to somebody's carefully-constructed marketing moment every second you're on the premises?  I say fuck that.  Fuck it.  No way.

The 200-foot video screen outside the place sounds lovely.  Gee, let's wait in traffic for hours for a vaunted, special opportunity to watch more TV.  The idea seems to be to intentionally create scarcity with the tiniest seating capacity in MLB, then exploit the scarcity without having to actually sell the people you have lured actual seats.  Maybe they won't watch the game at all, maybe you can just drop them down via trapdoor into The Cirkus of Cisco Systems Purchasing Playground, where they can demo every last product made by your company until their fingers fall off.  And, to top it all off, they're talking about PSLs, which is really short for Perfectly Stupid Lemmings, in reference to the kind of person who will willingly pay for the right to pay for something.

What this all tastes like is the next logical step in the corporate takeover of everything on Earth, which began long ago but saw its most recent Grand Quantum Leap Forward in sports when the stadiums went from being named for the cities they were in to being named for corporations which had purchased the "naming rights".  Now, we get the next wave, where the identities of the team and the sponsor are so intertwined, and the products so cross-hybridized, that there is no "team" anymore, just a meta-logo like when McDonalds' Happy Meals have Star Wars aliens on them whenever the latest Star Wars film comes out.  If you look at the logo they put out at the site, "Future Home of Cisco Field" is predominant and the A's logo is at the bottom, more like an afterthought.  The house band at the mall, the shrine to themselves these Cisco people are planning to build with an incidental baseball team as their beard.  People were so afraid the A's would have to move to Las Vegas, but now it appears as if Cisco has brought Vegas, or at least its garish, consumption-as-all-pervading-focus-of-existence aesthetic, to Fremont.

Whatever happened to the sanctity of hallowed tradition, like baseball used to represent, can anyone tell me?  Whatever happened to the concept of "ill-gotten gains," and how they were to be avoided even as they tried with all their power to entice the uncorrupted?  This little project may double the A's payroll, but are they even going to be the "A's" anymore? Or some Frankenstein monster that appears to wear the Athletics' uniforms but with Cisco's brain and corporate-competitive muscle?  Like the Yankees but with snazzy, bleeping computer gear instead of a TV network deal supplying the largesse needed for Empire.  I don't approve of Empire, because it inevitably leads to a fatal imbalance of distributed resources and situational power, and I don't want to be one, or root for one.  The very prospect scares me.  Away.

Friends, I know a lot of you can't or won't agree, and I understand.  All things must pass. But if this represents the future than I don't wanna go.  Count me out.  Especially if they are gonna add insult to injury and let the product suffer until they leave Oakland, then bulk it back up again with the addition of big-money talent to go with the big-money facility when the move finally happens. Based on what I am sensing (who's our DH now, Brandon Buckley?), I can't be entirely assured that isn't the plan right now.

I'm sorry, it tears my heart into a million pieces, but I feel like I may be done with the A's.

"There's nothing real in the world anymore," someone once said, or something like that. Say it ain't so.