The only owner who really brought down the team was Finley during the late 70s and early 80s.  That cheapskate alienated most of the talented players from the early 70s and allowed the team to sink into new depths of suckdom and fan apathy.

I like looking over and seeing his silver hair poking out from behind the dug out. I love the way he hugged each guy as they entered the clubhouse after the clincher and welcomed the beer Swish poored on his head.

He feels like a fan, and he doesn't feel like some mystical old business man, high in a tower somewhere. You see him, you could run into him on the way to get a soda, he feels like one of us. It helps make the team feel like it is ours, not some corporation.

That is what I have always liked about this team. They feel like a bunch of fans playing the game, they just happen to be playing on the big stage. And Lew reinforces that image by being so visably involved with the guys, the team and the fans! I really like that!

Well... if the new park becomes a swamp within the next century or is overwhelmed by a cloud of deadly arsine gas... yeah, that'll probably hurt the team a bit...

But I still hate the player.  Wolffish bought the team, after being Shottffmann's designated ballpark guy, fully intending to leave Oakland.  Lew spouted the lie yet again the other day, about sincerely trying hard to make an Oakland park happen.  Clearly he subscribes to the "Big Lie" theory, where rather than hiding your falsehood you repeatedly shout it from the mountaintops until people either believe it or weary of rebutting it.  You can sell a lot with that strategy...even wars.  In any case, Wolff claimed to be trying Oakland-only for a year, and rolled out a preposterous meant to fail plan on 66th Avenue (one key: in Fremont, Lew hid the plan as long as he could while buying up surrounding land.  In Oakland, he announced it day one then complained it had then become hard to buy the land at pre-development prices.  Imagine that.)  Within six months Lew was complaining in the press about Oakland, meeting with Fremont, and (we now know) repeatedly trying to deal with the Giants for San Jose rights, despite his denials.  It boggles my mind that anyone would still take Lew's word at face value on land/park issues.  Wolffish knew before they bought the team that the ticket to tripling their purchase value lay in a new park outside of Oakland.  It is not coincidence that in fact the A's value has nearly doubled since the Wolffish purchase, just on the Fremont park news.  

Wolff's no fool.  He's right that he stands to make much more money with a Fremont mallpark than anything he could have done in Oakland.  And that may be good for the franchise, as far as money to invest in payroll and so on (we'll see...for now, Wolff gets zero credit for increasing payroll in a recent era where teams' national revenue share has skyrocketed, with a club that was already profitable).

But this move is horrible for at least the modest income segment of the current fan base, and for everyone who values highly the Oakland part of the name and place.  Baseball in the Selig era has moved inexorably towards the boutique market for in-park fans.  The Oakland A's resisted that trend for a long time...and won besides.  Lew Wolff and John Fisher, though, couldn't move fast enough to trash the history and beat a path out of town to the greenest of greener pastures.

It could have worked in Oakland...it could at least have been tried under the new team and City regimes.  Wolff the business man make the shrewd decision; Wolff the face of A's ownership to fans is a despicable bastard whom I'll never forgive for taking maybe 75% of the ballgames away from me and my kids.

I honestly think it was a really bad move to keep the third deck closed during the playoffs because we as A's fans would have sold the Coliseum out anyway, and the ownership stood to make even more money by opening those seats for sale. Hopefully, that will change this year.

Now on the other side of this issue, I really like Lew Wollf and have even made his acquaintance a few times in passing. He is very genuine and easy to approach, and seems to really be a "fan".
You don't see that too much these days and it also seems that he a has a tremendous with the players, making frequent appearances in the clubhouse with handshakes and hugs.

Finally, the stadiun issue has been huge for alot of fans and I am very grateful that the A's are not only getting a new stadium, but also that they are staying in the bay area. Everyone kows what a new stadium will do for our ballclub, especially when it comes to keeping our own players.......good job Lew!

Schott and Hoffmann brought Wolff into the picture to try to move the A's to San José (if not out of the Bay Area entirely). Since he was unable to overcome the Giants' "territorial rights" the plan now is to build the ballpark (theoretically paid for by residential and commercial development) as close to San José as possible while still being in Alameda County. Neither this nor the previous ownership has really been interested in building a ballpark in Oakland.

Obviously, I'm upset that the plan would put the new ballpark in an area that would be close to inaccessible for many A's fans. My guess is that Wolff expects to make up for loss of fans from other parts of the Bay Area with additional fans in the South Bay. More importantly, he hopes to attract more corporate sponsorship from Silicon Valley.

Will this plan work? Only time will tell. But it obviously makes it harder for me personally to attend games.

How about if, instead of tarping the entire 3rd deck, they had tarped the crappiest sections for watching a game, regardless of deck - leaving open, for example, the fantastic seats in 316/317. They could even have kept the concessions open on the 3rd deck too and avoided some of the absurd lines that built up last season.

Yes, it would have cost slightly more, but money was never the issue (witness the willingness to pay a huge amount to strip/replace the tarps for Raiders games even during the play-offs).

It would have given Lew his Fremont dry-run (a.k.a. "intimate fan experience") without pissing off a significant, albeit predominantly low-market, section of the already limited game-attending fan base.

The sting in the tail of this for me was that the maifestly absurd justifications that were given for the tarping made it clear that Lew's word wasn't worth a whole lot. I don't think he's maliciously anti-fan, but I do think that anything that happens that benefits A's fans will incidental to his primary goal of making money in real estate development.

Did anyone see that Pepsi commercial where the guy rolls into the coliseum and it is full of trucks and the tarps say, Home of the Pepsi Ball?

My point is, it could be much worse, we all thought it would be much worse, and the reality is, they look pretty good!

People hate change. That is simply the reality. The tarps represent the first bit of change in this ownership, so people want to find as much fault as possible, in the hopes of stopping all future changes.

Well lets all just try and remember that whatever changes come, they will most likely be what is best for the team and organization. And they could be much, MUCH worse, aka... Portland!

long live the Haas family!

O-A-K-L-A-N-D ATHLETICS!!

how many times did the giants and a's almost move over the years?

now, this wolfe dude wants to move my A's?

why didn't he go buy a team that wanted to move?

i appreciate being albe to voice my opnion on this topic (thanks AN)!!

The current ownership team have been duped by a large corporation that got stuck with unused & devalued real estate when the dot-com boom went bust and were looking for a beard to raise the value of their poor investments they made when things were flush in the mid/late 1990s.  I fully expect the new spot to be essentially a living advertisement for said corporation, with baseball and its heretofore hallowed tradition taking a distant backseat to the real purpose of the enterprise, which is going to be generating exposure and revenue for Cisco Systems.

You could say that this is the wave of the future and that our team will just have to move to Portland or Vegas or Caracas if it doesn't happen, but if the future is all about this monstrous hybridization of corporate influence and power to turn all of our existence into revenue-seeking opportunities for the biggest fish in the pond, then I'm all for colonizing an unpopulated planet and getting the hell up off of this rock.

That said, I never liked Fisher, the Gap being one of the most notorious sweatshop-labor-supported clothing manufacturers from back in the day, and Wolff strikes me somehow as someone who if you put on the sunglasses those people are wearing in John Carpenter's "They Live," you'd be able to see the sheep's clothing very clearly.

I must be old school and obsolete, because I believe in ethical business structures that don't glom onto the most tasteless option available when the going gets tough like it has at the Coliseum since the degRaders returned from L.A.  Plus, keeping the tarps on the third deck caused the hallways below to become overcrowded and impassable, especially during the playoffs, which is just a further embarassment and indignity to our team... they could have, as someone suggested in this thread, opened up a few choice sections to alleviate the mess the closure was creating in the lower decks and in particular the concession areas and walkways.  

It seemed to me that the tarping of the third deck was introduced to further degrade the fan experience so that the owners would have a clearcut, immediate excuse to say, "See?  The Coliseum is just unworkable all around, a good fan experience is just not part of the equation here and we just have to move out ASAP."  The ol' create the problem/provoke the reaction/provide the solution deal that corporations and governing bodies are famous for.  And don't tell me that's a worthless conspiracy theory because the prime motivation of corporations is to manipulate people into believing that the products that those corporations produce are somehow relevant and necessary to people's lives. Which is why so much of life in modern capitalism is about all advertising and no product.

All right, rant over, I apologize if I made anyone angry or resentful, I'm just sad because the current ownership doesn't seem to want Oaklanders like me in on the future of this team.

I'm all for it.

Closing the 3rd deck, IMO, was crap. The A's should simply have not sold any 3rd deck season tickets, not opened up the 3rd deck for most games, but sold advanced/day-of-game tickets and opened the 3rd deck for the dates of their choosing, e.g., Opening Night, Yankees and Red Sox series, Fireworks Nights, etc. Not hard to figure out which dates would sell out; not necessary to tarp the whole deck all season.

For the 3rd deck blunder, Wolff's crew gets only an A-. But a solid A- from me.

It takes a big effort on my part, but I try to seperate the fact that the new ballpark will make my personal situation (and the situation for everyone who isn't rich and/or doesn't live near Fremont) worse, from the idea that it makes the long-term situation for the team I support better.  Needless to say, I'm not always successful.

Finally, I should amplify something BlameChannel53 mentioned earlier--while it's nice to say that the A's are increasing payroll, they aren't doing as much as they can/should in this regard.  In 2006, the A's posted an OI of $16M, and grew the value of their franchise 26% (the latter is 4th highest in MLB); in 2005, they pocketed an additional $6M.  While the A's debt load has decreased slightly, I'd be interested to know from the team why we're not seeing a more substantial investment in the on-the-field product.

I am not as eloquent with words as some of you, so I refer you to the posts of FSU, Emperor Nobody and azagatooth.

One of the greatest things about the A's (going back a little) was they were the team of the people. You used to be able to get tickets for a very reasonable price, and the fans at the ballpark were all there for the team and for baseball. That is still mostly true, but i fear that the majority of us will be unable to go to games in Fremont, just as many many loyal giants fans are (well, were initially at least) unable to go to Giants games.

My biggest problem with the Fremont plan is less that is it is Fremont (though i really wish they could stay in Oakland) and more that is represents the corpratisation (sp?) of baseball. From what I can tell the new park is more about selling Cisco than it is about the game.

Umm, insert witty and well worded conclusion here.

1. Since Wolff has taken over the A's, what has the city of Oakland done, at any point, to suggest they would support and/or work with the A's on a new stadium in Oakland?
2. If the A's didn't move to Fremont, what suggests that staying in Oakland would be more possible or likely than moving out of state?

One, tarping the 3rd deck is an FU to the fans, no matter what anyone says. If you only tarped the third deck for games against the Royals and Devil Rays, fine. But why would you do it for games against the Yankees and Giants? Even PLAYOFF GAMES?!? "Hey East Bay A's fans, we got 50,000 seats for the ALCS games, but we're gonna turn away 16,000 of you at the gate! Neener neener neener!" This is retarded, and a clue that they are thinking about their own pocketbook and not the fans.

Two, I was at Game 2 of the ALCS last year, and even when the A's fans were cheering their hardest, it sure didn't seem that loud from the standing room only section. I was thinking, what the hell is up with my fellow fans? Why is it so quiet? Well, I don't know why, but I know it woulda been a hell of a lot louder with fans in the third deck instead of tarps.

Third, Wolff moving the team to Fremont is more a product of the climate that Selig has created in Major League Baseball than anything that Wolff specifically came up with. Selig's been trying to get the A's a new stadium for years, and when Joe Morgan and friends tried to buy the team, the owners nixed that bid because that group wasn't rich enough. Selig is alllllllllllllllll about the money, and when he saw Wolff wanted in, well, it was just a matter of like-minded folk joining forces.

So yeah, basically, I hate Wolff, but I hate Selig more. Money money money money money. I think Wolff might actually be a fan of the team, but people who have that much money know how to put on a bit of a show in order to fool people into giving them more money - "Hey, look at me, I'm a big fan of this team! I only want what's best for them!" That's how he made so much money in the first place: he knows the right things to say. Who cares if it's honest? It'll get the money in his pocket!

I am a bit of a cynical person, if you couldn't tell.

I find it ironic that a fan base that has embraced a new, and at the time of its inception, different strategy of baseball, yet whines and cries when they say they're moving the team 20 miles away into a sweet new park. I know a lot of this is sentimental attachment to the Coliseum and fear that the new "Mallpark" will turn into Pac Bell/SBC/AT&T, and no one in the stadium will care about baseball. We'll be playing on our laptops and on our cell phones and we won't be able to have our own row in the third deck and wah wah wah. As bad as it sounds, we need those kind of people if we're going to sell out or get close to filling the park on a regular basis. Or how about we just close the stadium off to the 5,000 or so "real fans?" And as much as I love the Coliseum, it's easily one of the most run-down stadiums in the Major Leagues. While ticket prices are going up, an A's game is still cheaper than most games around the league.

And I'm saying this as a resident of East Contra Costa County. It takes me over an hour to get to games as it is, and I really don't mind riding BART for a few more minutes or taking BART and some form of public transportation to get to Cisco Field. I love this team and 20 more miles won't change a damn thing.

Another thing that bugs me is saying that Lew Wolff is just some carpetbagger only looking to make a buck. I really don't get the "just in it for money" excuse. It's a business, just like every other. Wolff saw an opportunity to make some money, and he took it. I see absolutely nothing wrong with that. We got lucky and had the Haas family, but that's an extreme rarity.

Let's put it this way. Would you work for free? Granted, Wolff has more money than most of us combined, but that's what you're asking him to do. I feel he's done an efficient job, putting a lot more money into the team than the past ownership, while still making it profitable. And I'm pretty damn sure none of us can complain about the on-field product.

Yes, I admit, I'm young and never got to see Rickey or Vida or Reggie or Eck or Stew. I was barely 3 when we won the 89 World Series. Most of my warm and fuzzy memories of the Coliseum stem from recent memory. I can't say that I've had season tickets or have sat in a certain section for X years. I guess you can look at my views that way.

As much as I love this team, and love the Coliseum, I'm pro-Fremont. Get off Wolff's back.