My big move was Tuesday, but moving never lasts a day. I haven’t really slept … and I definitely haven’t watched any sports, which makes it hard to put together a roundup of fun sports things.

So instead, I’m putting together a newsletter about Sports Moves. Not, like, crossovers, but when athletes and teams find a new home. We’ll get back to our regularly scheduled programming Monday as I get settled in.

I did a pretty bad job moving this week. I left things behind, I failed at spackling, I accidentally got the power company to disconnect service a day early and had to do critical moving tasks in the dark. But no matter how bad it got, I consoled myself by remembering that there is at least one person worse at moving than me: John Fisher, owner of the Ex-Oakland Athletics.

See, before moving, I made sure that my new home existed. John Fisher did not do that. He scheduled his move-out date three full years before his new stadium will be ready, forcing his Major League Baseball team to play three full seasons in a minor league ballpark in a completely different city. But even that seems to be a best-case scenario, as it remains unclear whether Fisher will ever build his new stadium, let alone in three years.

Every time the A’s unveil a new part of their plan, it’s deeply humiliating. Just reveal after reveal of embarrassing stuff that no other big league sports team would agree to. And yet, the reality is worse than what they’re telling us: The A’s move is developing into one of the biggest unforced errors in American pro sports history, a simultaneous baseball tragedy and financial catastrophe that Fisher brought upon himself.

Fisher essentially reenacted the plot of “Major League.” His team had the lowest payroll between 2022 and 2024, which led to the team having the worst win percentage from 2022 to 2024, which led to the team having the worst attendance from 2022 to 2024. The losing supposedly justified Fisher’s plan to move the team, which he not-so-secretly wanted to do all along. But at least the evil owner in Major League was a hot lady who earned her massive wealth by seducing and marrying a billionaire. Fisher is just the son of the couple that founded Gap. (Yes, gold diggers > nepo babies, and it’s not even close.)

Fisher was so eager to leave Oakland that he announced the move before the team had started construction on its new stadium. In fact, the casino on the proposed stadium site wouldn’t even be demolished until October 2024, six months after the move was announced.

And so the A’s are spending the next three seasons playing at the home of the Sacramento River Cats, the Giants’ Triple-A affiliate.

I really don’t think we’re talking enough about how nuts this is. Not only did the A’s voluntarily agree to play in a minor league stadium … they agreed to play in a minor league stadium in a city in a different state from where they’re eventually moving … and they agreed to play there for three full seasons.

There have been similar-ish scenarios — like the Houston Oilers playing in Memphis for a season en route to Nashville, the San Diego Chargers playing in Los Angeles’ MLS stadium for two years, and the Montreal Expos playing a large portion of their final seasons in Puerto Rico — but the A’s will be in their temporary home for longer than any of them, and their situation seems worse than what those teams experienced.

A’s players openly hate playing in a minor league stadium. Oakland’s Sacramento’s A’s’ star pitcher Luis Severino signed the largest contract in team history before the season, but has repeatedly complained about the park, saying, “It feels like a spring training kind of game every time I pitch. … We don’t have a lot of fans. Our clubhouse is in left field. So, when we play day games, we have to just be in the sun. There’s no air conditioning there, too. It’s really tough.” Severino, a two-time All-Star, genuinely sucks in Sacramento — he has a 4-2 record and a 3.03 ERA on the road, and a 1-9 record and a 6.65 ERA at “home.” Asked about the splits, he said it’s “because we play in a big league stadium on the road. At home, we don’t have that.”

You remember how he signed the largest contract in team history? It ends in three years. He will play out his entire team-record contract in Sacramento, a place he cannot stand.

Despite committing to three full seasons in Sacramento, the team refuses to call itself the “Sacramento A’s.” They’re just “The Athletics.” Unsurprisingly, the A’s are not particularly popular in Sacramento. They can’t even come close to selling out a minor league stadium! They’re averaging 9,745 fans per game — just 69.5 percent of the stadium’s listed capacity of 14,014, and that’s assuming the team’s attendance figures are accurate, which they probably aren’t. And that average is trending downwards, with the team’s 12 lowest-attended games all taking place since the start of June. (That could also be due to the extreme heat in Sacramento during the summer, something Fisher presumably knew before now.)

OK, so the Sacramento thing is a bust. But it’s temporary, right? They’re still planning to move to Las Vegas in 2028, right? Right??? Right??????

The A’s just held the groundbreaking ceremony at the Vegas stadium site in June. I assumed construction had been well underway before the ceremony, considering the A’s officially announced their move almost two years prior and had been playing in Sacramento for months. Not the case!

That June groundbreaking event was weird. The construction equipment on site appeared staged, and Vegas-based journalists later reported that it had been rented for the event and was not to be used at the site. The A’s were embarrassingly behind schedule, and they couldn’t even put up a good front to make it look like they were farther along than reality.

Simply put, Fisher does not seem to have the money to build the stadium. The projected cost has already gone up from $1.5 billion to $2 billion — that’s a lot of money! — and construction is only getting more expensive due to inflation and tariffs on materials. Local government is “only” kicking in $340 million, putting Fisher on the hook for the rest. His net worth is reportedly $3 billion, meaning he’s spending more than half of his fortune on the stadium, but most of that wealth estimate comes from the projected value of the sports teams he owns. And you can’t pay construction workers or buy materials with Sports Team Estimated Value. You need cash.

So Fisher is wildly selling off his assets to pay for the stadium. In May, he sold off a $100 million equity stake in the A’s. In June, he announced he’s selling his MLS team, the San Jose Earthquakes. He also made major sales of his Gap stock in 2023 and 2024.

Ultimately, Fisher is playing a financial shell game. He can only afford to build the stadium if he gets investors to buy stakes in the A’s at a high valuation. But the A’s’ biggest selling point is their move to a new stadium in Las Vegas, which is in limbo without investors. And why would you invest in an over-budget, behind-schedule project helmed by a desperate doofus with no foresight?

People who work in pro sport move a lot. Both athletes and coaches are regularly expected to pick up their entire lives and move across the country to start working right away.

Pro athletes usually live out of hotel rooms when they get traded. This article by ESPN’s Ohm Youngmisuk pulls back the curtain on how NBA players pack at the trade deadline, and I have regularly thought about R.J. Barrett’s French Bulldog caravan since reading it:

Brown stuffed three pairs of shoes, the Birkenstocks he wears daily and as much warm clothing as he could into two suitcases. Two weeks later, a friend brought three of the more than 20 cowboy hats Brown owns to Toronto …Barrett, who was born and raised in the area, packed two bags after being traded by the New York Knicks to the Raptors on Dec. 30. Barrett grabbed another suitcase when he returned to New York for a Raptors game against the Knicks on Jan. 20. And because Toronto is less than an eight-hour drive from New York, Barrett’s family drove his car and his four French bulldogs to him.

But nobody moves more often than college football coaches; when they’re not scheming ways to move up the coaching ladder, they’re getting fired. In 2017, ESPN’s Adam Rittenberg profiled Dick Pryor, the guy who coaches call when they need to move from Pullman, Wash., to Statesboro, Ga., ASAP.

In January 2007, Pryor moved Western Michigan defensive coordinator Scott Shafer and his family to Stanford after the 2006 season. The next January, Shafer’s wife called again. They were moving back to Michigan, as new Wolverines coach Rich Rodriguez had hired Scott to run the defense in Ann Arbor. When Michigan fired Shafer after only one season, Pryor moved the family to Syracuse, New York.

And now, many college athletes move three or four times over the course of their careers, in addition to moving several times over their high school careers. SI’s Pat Forde just wrote about what he calls “the Migration Generation” of amateur athletics.

Within this transient ecosystem, there are rational explanations for many of the stops on Storr’s journey from home in Kankakee, Ill., to Las Vegas to Chandler, Ariz., to Bradenton, Fla., to Queens, N.Y., to Madison, Wis., to Lawrence, Kan., to his present location, Oxford, Miss., … relocating to the Deep South for the first time after touching all the other major geographic areas of the United States. “It’s a unique town,” Storr says. “It’s literally a college town—that’s all there is. But I like it. I’m just trying to lock in.”

I am now a resident of the exceptionally uninteresting state of Connecticut. (It’s okay, I’m an exceptionally uninteresting person.) I probably should go check out my new home state’s one pro sports team, the Connecticut Sun.

They probably play in Hartford, the state’s centrally located capital. No? Weird. OK, they’re probably in New Haven, the famous city with the pizza everybody there won’t shut up about. No, not there either? Surely, they’re near UConn, hoping to capitalize on the popularity of the UConn women’s basketball team. Not even close? What about Bridgeport, the state’s largest city by population? No?? OK, starting to run out of ideas here. Maybe they’re in that little strip of Connecticut near New York that’s home to several of the wealthiest zip codes in America. Really, not there, either? Let me just google how long it would take for me to get to a Sun game … AN HOUR AND 45 MINUTES? WHAT IS THIS STATE???

But just as I move to Connecticut, the Sun might be moving on. The team is reportedly up for sale. As the WNBA grows in popularity and financial heft, what’s the future for one of the most unusual franchises in pro sports?

The Sun play at the Mohegan Sun casino in southeast Connecticut. (I liked the ads for Foxwoods better.) The Mohegan Tribe bought the team in 2003, making it the first WNBA team not partnered with an adjacent NBA team. The casino is technically located in Montville, population 18,000. It is dwarfed by Green Bay, Wisc., the smallest U.S. city with a major pro men’s sports team. “I took this limo ride to Mohegan in the dark and there’s not many lights on Route 2 or whatever it is and I’m thinking, ‘Where the hell am I?’”, said Mike Thibault the team’s first head coach. “And all of a sudden, you turn the corner and there’s this big, huge complex, lights and the river and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve never seen this in the middle of nowhere.’”

It’s actually a good strategy for casinos to be in the middle of nowhere. If someone comes to the casino from New York or Boston, there’s nowhere else for them to go! You’ve gotta stay and spend your money! But it’s not ideal for a pro sports team. You have to fly into Hartford or Providence if you’re coming from out of state, both about 50 minutes away from the arena.

The Sun also have terrible facilities. They practice at the Mohegan Tribe’s community center, and regularly share the court with various recreation events for tribe members. Former Sun player Kelsey Bone posted about trying to practice while “[60 six-year-olds] are on the other side playing dodgeball and tag!”

While the Sun have a passionate fanbase and were the first WNBA team to make a profit, the money in women’s sports is huge now, and there’s obvious potential for a WNBA team moving into a larger market. The league recently announced three expansion franchises in Cleveland, Detroit and Philly, charging new ownership groups $250 million to buy in.

The move seems obvious: Go to Boston. The Sun have sold out games at TD Garden each of the last two seasons, and we already know Boston loves basketball. Even active Sun players are advocating for the team to move there.

But a potential ownership group from Boston said that Sun ownership is only interested in investors who will help keep the team in Connecticut. And Sun management shot down rumors that they met with the governor of Rhode Island about moving the team to Providence. The Mohegan tribe may just want to sell a stake in the team to cash in on the growth of women’s sports since they bought the Sun 20-plus years ago.

You know what? I’m just gonna keep rooting for the Liberty.