Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred is facing criticism for sarcastic comments made at Oakland’s expense, seemingly mocking A’s fans for staging a “reverse boycott” last week.
“It was great,” Manfred said of the protest, which saw 27,759 fans pack the Oakland Coliseum, voicing their disgust over the team’s expected move to Las Vegas. “It’s great to see what is, this year, almost an average Major League Baseball crowd in the facility for one night. That’s a great thing.”
Facing significant backlash, Manfred felt the need to address those remarks, arguing his quotes to The Athletic were “taken out of context.”
“The comment I made about the fans on a particular night was taken out of context of those two larger remarks,” Manfred clarified while appearing at Friday’s “workout day” ahead of this weekend’s London Series between the Chicago Cubs and St. Louis Cardinals. “Unfortunately, one night doesn’t change a decade of inaction.”
The A’s relocation bid has gained significant steam in recent weeks, with Nevada governor Joe Lombardo recently allotting $380 million in state funds to build a new stadium. Of course, a number of hurdles still exist, many of them laid out by former executive David Samson, who suspects MLB would prefer to hold out for an expansion team, reluctant to waste Vegas on the largely irrelevant A’s.
Even by their own low standards, the A’s have been a unique kind of awful this year, owners of the league’s worst record at a dismal 19-58 (.247-win percentage). Plagued by poor attendance and a stadium on its very last legs, Oakland has made embarrassingly little effort to field a competitive roster, looking every bit like a team with an MLB-low $60.5-million payroll.
While Manfred isn’t wrong in his assessment of the A’s, correctly characterizing their boycott as too little, too late, his eagerness to plant roots in Vegas is difficult for some to stomach, a bitter pill for embattled Oakland fans mourning the impending loss of yet another sports team.
About Jesse Pantuosco
Jesse Pantuosco joined Awful Announcing as a contributing writer in May 2023. He’s also written for Audacy and NBC Sports. A graduate of Syracuse’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications with a master’s degree in creative writing from Fairfield University, Pantuosco has won three Fantasy Sports Writers Association Awards. He lives in West Hartford, Connecticut and never misses a Red Sox, Celtics or Patriots game.