Former Athletic, now-Mets broadcaster blasts A’s for ‘appalling’ handling of move

There is no way around it. The current state of affairs surrounding the Oakland Athletics is so bad for baseball. This is a franchise that gave us the Bash Brothers, Moneyball and the cleanest uniforms money can buy. However, frustrating politics and an even more frustrating owner have led to the A's relocating to Las Vegas in 2028. This will be their last year in Oakland before three in Sacramento.

The A's will play in the same stadium as the San Francisco Giants' Triple-A affiliate Sacramento River Cats as their second tenant for three full MLB seasons. They will not be known as the Sacramento A's, but just the A's or the Athletics. I didn't think baseball could handle a relocation worse than getting the Montreal Expos to the nation's capital to become the Washington Nationals, but this is right up there.

With news of the A's relocating to Sacramento dropping on Thursday afternoon, former Oakland pitcher Ron Darling opined on the situation during the New York Mets' telecast on SNY. Darling is best known for calling games for his first team New York, but he did close out his big-league career with five seasons in Oakland from 1991 to 1995. He has many great memories there. Darling is not happy.

Here is a clip of Darling being "appalled" by what the organization has done over the past six months.

This should be a time of the year to celebrate baseball, not deal with on-going frustrating nonsense.

Ron Darling finds what has happened to the Oakland A's to be 'appalling'

Somehow, someway, baseball finds a way to make it harder to be a fan of their product. The games are getting harder and harder to access on TV. Blackout rules don't make any sense. We not only have one of the game's oldest franchises being essentially a lame duck for four years, but seemingly every other day we get another PR nightmare about Shohei Ohtani's tenure with the Los Angeles Dodgers.

If you want to grow the game and make more kids want to play this great sport, this is not what you do. Sure, baseball could work out wonderfully in Las Vegas. The NFL, NHL and WNBA have been big hits over there. We should expect Las Vegas to get an NBA expansion team at some point. However, we are losing yet another team from Oakland to another city. I feel so bad for their fans...

All we can hope is that the A's will be able to reinvent themselves in Las Vegas. While I may go for a complete rebrand, that is not going to happen unless we get a new owner at the helm. John Fisher is worse for professional sports than James Dolan and David Tepper combined. This isn't an arms race to see who can be the worst owner in the Big Three North American sports league. It is incredibly sad.

The A's don't do a lot of winning to even begin with, but nobody is losing more than their fanbase.