MLB owners voted 30-0 on Thursday to approve the A’s relocation to Las Vegas, and team owner John Fisher said having a unanimous vote was important to him because he “wanted to make sure that all my partners in this great game understood and supported the direction that we were going in,” according to front-page piece by Casey Harrison of the LAS VEGAS SUN. He wanted to “make sure that there wasn’t anything I had missed that somehow somebody might disagree with.” Fisher: “That’s really been meaningful and positive to me.” He added, “When you work on something for a very long time -- 18 years, and the last six focused on Oakland, with just the last two-and-a-half on Las Vegas -- you get to a momentous day like today and there’s just a lot of emotions and a lot of things going on that I think will take me a long time to begin to process” (LAS VEGAS SUN, 11/17).
NO HONOR AMONG THIEVES: In S.F., Ann Killion in a front-page piece writes the unanimous vote is a “sign of obvious collusion among owners,” and “another indicator that this corporate monopoly should not be exempt from this country’s antitrust laws.” The owners “waived their own chance at a massive relocation fee, accepted and parroted lies from Fisher and his minions, ignored the reality of the situation, all to protect one of their own.” Killion writes those events “sends a pretty clear message” that the people who run MLB “do not care about you, the fan.” Killion: “They do not care about the integrity of the game. They do not care about the viability of a historic franchise. They care only about circling their gold-plated wagons and taking another sip of Macallan single malt, while stuffing public tax dollars in their pockets” (S.F. CHRONICLE, 11/17).
SELLING HIS STORY: USA TODAY’s Gabe Lacques wrote Fisher is “already trying to flip the narrative” about moving from Oakland to Las Vegas. Fisher in recent weeks has “spun the tale” that he “left it all on the proverbial field/negotiating table, that this uprooting from the Bay to the desert was a no-choice proposition after the franchise tried for the better part of two decades to find a new home.” That means that his 29 fellow owners and MLB itself are “publicly obligated to nod soberly and play along” (USA TODAY, 11/16).
