OAKLAND, Calif.-- The Athletics had long ago carved out a Jekyll-and-Hyde legacy as one of Major League Baseball's most successful — and sad-sack — franchises.
Under their belts: nine World Series titles and 19 seasons of futility punctuated by 100 or more losses.This, though, is different.Now, legions of A's fans view the team as the sport's most treacherous under the ownership of billionaire John Fisher, an heir of the family that founded The Gap in 1969 — one year after the A's moved to Oakland from Kansas City.
Just a few years after embracing “Rooted In Oakland” as their motto, the A’s this week are coming to the end of their 57 see-sawing seasons in a city regularly overshadowed by the mystique of its storied neighbor, San Francisco.“I know these times coming to the games are always going to be among the best years of my life," longtime A's fan Will MacNeil, 40, rued as he contemplated an ending that is crushing a community's soul.“And for a billionaire owner to rip it away from me, it's frustrating.”The A's exodus from Oakland will give the team the dubious distinction of being the first Major League Baseball franchise to have moved on four different occasions.
After starting in Philadelphia in 1901, the A’s moved to Kansas City in 1955, then to Oakland in 1968, with California's capital city of Sacramento and Las Vegas next in the peripatetic pipeline.No place has been the A's home for as long as Oakland, where they're the last professional sports team in a two-county region known as the East Bay — home to 2.8 million people living across the water from San Francisco.
Through the years, the baseball team became an emblem of East Bay's grit and flair.The A's glory years included the colorfully attired, mustachioed “Swingin' A's” during the first half of the 1970s, the muscular and swaggering “Bash Brothers” of the late 1980s, and the scrappy underdogs of the 2000s that yielded a real-life fairy tale in the film, “Moneyball...