Image credit: © D. Ross Cameron-Imagn Images
Greetings, my friends.
Soon, baseball will return to all of its legendary venues, from Wrigleyville, to Chavez Ravine, to the space between Riverfront and 5th next to the West Gateway Place Apartments.
I applaud the decision to vote me onto MLB’s executive committee, finally awarding me the respect and esteem I deserve. It’s no small task moving an MLB franchise from one city to another and then, in several years, another. It’s been rough out there. The people who were mad before? They’re still mad. In fact, there may be even more, even madder people than before.
They are in no danger of stopping me now, and really, they weren’t before, either. You think a little chanting and column-writing is going to stop the wheels of business from turning? This is America. Throw as many of your bodies into the machine as you want. You’re just making it more powerful.
But I am not here to empty my large business brain onto the table. I’m here now, performing my duties as a member of the executive committee—not of MLB, but of humanity. To quote the mayor of a small, recently dying Alaskan town, “Events have conspired to threaten our very existence.”
Perhaps in my old age or intense isolation, I’ve softened on the issue of other people. Having seen wave after wave of people tell me to “sell the team” or “keep the A’s in Oakland” or “eat shit,” I realized something: People like things.
And not only do they like them, they want to have them, and they want to have them forever. There’s beauty in that, and more importantly, there’s what I’ve come to understand is humanity in that. But nothing lasts forever, not even our planet. Soon, that lesson will arrive at 150,000 miles an hour.
By now, you’ve heard about what’s coming: In seven years, a meteor classified as a “city-destroyer” has a small percentage chance of hitting the earth with the strength of an eight-megaton nuke.
I know, I know. I heard it, too. “A city-destroyer? But that’s where baseball lives!”
How are we, baseball’s owners, supposed to maintain our revenue streams if the cities in which they operate are piles of charred rubble and our top demographics have been atomized? But look beyond mere business and ask yourself: How are we, as a people, going to survive?
Fortunately for all of you—all of us—one MLB owner you know and love has recently come into some land in the desert.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. “What does John Fisher know about subterranean sand-based pseudo-societies meant to recapture what life was like before tsunamis, dust clouds, and roving gangs of hockey mask-wearing marauders that drink gasoline engulfed the earth?”
The answer is: Everything.
What do you think I’ve been doing all these years when I wasn’t talking to anyone, explaining myself, caring about anything, listening to anyone, or being held accountable for my actions?
I was of course planning for the two-percent chance of this exact scenario.
“There’s billionaire recluse John Fisher again,” the townspeople would say, spotting my silhouette in an upstairs window of my mansion. “What’s he ever done for anyone other than steal our baseball teams and donate millions to politicians who will build a better world for everyone with a secret poverty elimination program called ‘The Poorge’?”
Well, I’ll tell you what I was doing. I was getting my team out of harm’s way.
That’s right, while you were all accusing me of never investing in my own team, saying I punished people for speaking out against the move to Las Vegas, and remaining silent as I was called a dork by humankind’s vicious, bowtied skeptics, I was busy calculating exactly where the meteor was going to hit. And after years of research and screaming at confused scientists on the phone, I figured out what none of you could: That meteor is headed straight for my house.
You wouldn’t believe the response when I told people.
“Of course, Mr. Fisher. Superb idea,” they said. “Of course we will have the dissenting board members secretly killed.”
Well, imagine my surprise later when I asked some of the un-killed board members about their response or if any of their colleagues had gone suddenly missing and they said they had no idea what I was talking about.
It turned out, not everyone was onboard with my very complicated plan scrawled on a chalkboard with mostly fingernails. That’s something you have to expect in the billionaire recluse community—just because someone is nodding doesn’t mean they agree with you. They could just be placating you in an effort to gain access to your precious sand reserves. And it didn’t take long to figure out who was responsible for this subterfuge.
I remember around Christmas when Dave Kaval came over for a meeting he kept calling a “wellness check.”
You should have seen his face when he saw my research: A track made of LEGOs that carried a beach ball downward into a 3-D printed scale model of our planet.
“Kaboom,” I said as the beach ball made impact.
Dave blinked aggressively at my recreation of the disaster.
“So you see,” I explained, “it’s headed right for us.”
“Wow, great stuff as always, John,” Dave said.
I knew he would be a tough sell, so I was relieved to have him on board.
Two days after Christmas, he resigned. Out of nowhere!
He said he was staying behind in California, the area clearly marked as “THE DEATH ZONE” in permanent marker on my model, to take part in “new opportunities at the crossroads of business and government.”
And what crossroads will there be, Dave, when businesses have been crushed into oblivion and the government is whichever pile of rats is the tallest?
That’s what I yelled at him, verbatim, during another meeting at which he demanded his lawyers be present—his “lawyers” being a pair of white-clad, musclebound attendants holding human-sized butterfly nets.
So, Dave was out. It was a pattern I had to get used to with my various business partners and employees: Tell people my plan to save them, watch them nod and smile, and then hear later how I’d been utterly betrayed. It was like they were just working for me for the money!
Even the A’s players! I spent over a billion dollars trying to get my team out of harm’s way. And how did they thank me? By wearing those wristbands protesting the move.
What choice did I have but to have them secretly killed? That order was of course whisper-down-the-lane’d into releasing or benching them. I tell you, even when you’re a billionaire, it’s hard to get what you want.
Why didn’t I warn everyone? Hey, I tried. I was up for nine straight nights working on my letter to the people of earth, begging them to act in time to save our planet. I handed it off to an aide, who handed it off to a higher-ranked aide, who inserted it into the pneumatic tube system installed throughout my mansion as my exclusive communication with the outside world.
“But John, how do we reach you?” reporters ask.
“Through the tubes!” I reply, then pedal away furiously on my Renaissance-era flying machine I bought for an amount of money that would fix your entire life, regardless of what your problems are.
Anyway, I sent the missive off and everyone gave me great feedback. By which I mean, their feedback all included the word great: “This is great, John.” “You are so great, John.” “We are greatly concerned, John.” I was so pleased. Finally, I had given humanity a goal that would not only save it… but bring us all together: The tall and the small, the athlete and non-athletes, the billionaires and whatever the alternative to that is. All of us, putting our hands in the middle and saying “yes” to saving the world.
Well, by the time that letter hit the airwaves, I couldn’t believe what I was reading. I dropped the spoon I was using to eat a bowl of pure Nevada desert sand when I heard it being read on MLB Network:
Though I wish I could speak to each one of you individually, I can tell you this from the heart: we tried. Staying in Oakland was our goal, it was our mission, and we failed to achieve it. And for that I am genuinely sorry.
Looking ahead, I hope you will join our beloved A’s as we move forward on this amazing journey. I hope I will see you again sporting the Green and Gold. And I hope we will make you proud.
That was nothing close to what I wrote:
My fellow citizens of earth: We must act swiftly and as one if we are to save the world we’ve built. As you know, within the decade there is a worrisome chance that a meteor will strike our planet, killing millions. My research has uncovered that the point of impact will be none other than my very home.
Each night, I point my telescope in the direction of the sky beast intent on killing us all and I curse its progress toward our peaceful existence. But we have the advantage: Time. Join me in my mission to save us all by helping dig a large hole in the Nevada desert, where we will build a subsurface hive to prolong our species survival—no matter what space throws at us next! For your efforts, you will receive season tickets for the Las Vegas Athletics, market value three and a half buckets of sand*.
*Sand will be our currency in the future.
Do you have any idea how hard I worked to get the wording just right? To make clear that my plan was all about saving people and not just myself? To not seem like a doddering old hermit clacking out his opus on the typewriter his father used to write the memo letting him know he was being promoted from his job at a failing real estate company to being president of his family’s investment management firm?
Well, some public affairs lackey in the chain of command got a hold of it and made it sound all “corporate” and “professional” and “not like a prophetic heralding of our celestial-born annihilation.”
I knew at that moment that I was on my own. I had to become even more of a recluse. Even more silent of a shadow. Even less present in the community.
I had plotted out several years of work needed to complete the project, and in that time, I’d still get the A’s out of town to soften the blow of their departure to Las Vegas and just in case the meteor started moving faster. So, it was off to Sacramento, which all of you sniggered at, calling us low-class for playing in a minor-league stadium, not a thought given to the possibility that I was saving everyone’s lives.
Nooo no no, you all had to keep making your snarky little comments and saying all I did to get rich was inherit money from parents, the founders of Gap. Why bring that up? Because it’s a hundred percent accurate? Whatever. You know what the real “gap” is? The one between you all and basic decency.
When those fans ambushed me at that hotel lobby in Arlington, I tried to explain.
“It’s been a lot worse for me than you,” I said. The burden of knowledge can easily crush the human soul like a meteor landing on your house.
But they just kept telling me to “sell the team.”
“Please,” I scoffed. “No one has enough sand for that.”
So, here we are, fellow earthlings. Sure, the bunker is underway. And to be honest, once I get my furniture, my sand pit, and my now even more complex and intricate research model in there, there’s not going to be a lot of space for you anyway.
I think, sometimes, about how I got here: Because Bud Selig wanted to sell the A’s to his frat brother from college, who happened to be my business partner.
But I also think a lot about life itself: Racing jetcopters with my friends after school. My father telling me to stop trying to arm-wrestle my way to victory in business negotiations. Using my ownership stake to keep the Giants from moving to Florida. I mean, who moves a team for money reasons and not as part of a plan to not be obliterated? At least the other MLB owners believed me enough to grant me unanimous permission to move to Vegas. Well, they might have. Most of those guys have a surrogate do their voting while they’re busy committing white collar crimes and collecting endangered species’ teeth.
I’ve done a lot. I’ve helped a lot. And I tried to help you, but you made me the villain. So I will spend eternity alone, beneath the delicious sand of Nevada, with all the time I want to reflect on what life is really about: Being so rich that no one can even talk to you.
NOTE: Any sand found in or around this envelope is the property of John Fisher and must be mailed back at the recipient’s expense.
Thank you for reading
This is a free article. If you enjoyed it, consider subscribing to Baseball Prospectus. Subscriptions support ongoing public baseball research and analysis in an increasingly proprietary environment.