The end game for John Fisher

A year and a half ago, I wrote about the unconscionable John Fisher, the inept, soulless owner of the formerly-Oakland A’s. When the team announced that it would be temporarily crashing on Sacramento’s couch, I pointed out that the incompetence of this ownership knows no depth or bounds: they they will always find new ways to screw up.

Now we are near the mid-point of that first season in Sacramento, and Fisher hasn’t disappointed. In fact, the creativity of his innate incompetence continues to surprise, as the team has refused to even adopt the name of their host city: they are not called the "Sacramento A’s", but rather just "The Athletics" — devoid of a city name entirely. Sacramento is a baseball town, but it’s also a proud spot with a rightful chip on its shoulder, overlooked among California’s larger cities despite its obvious importance to the state; Fisher refusing to so much as put the city’s name on the team’s chest is a grievous misread of the town’s character. And it gets worse: because the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority has formally sponsored the team, fans in not-to-be-uttered Sacramento must endure the further indignity of "Visit Las Vegas" signs plastered all over their own outfield. Add to this the highest ticket prices in MLB, and in just a few months John Fisher has achieved in Sacramento what took him years in Oakland: fans that hate his guts. And not only is attendance predictably bad in Sacramento, the on-field product is also affected, with ace Luis Severino openly talking about how much he dislikes the minor league park.

Okay, so Sacramento is a listing wreck; how are things coming along with the team’s new home in Las Vegas? If anything, it’s worse — and there are so many problems with the Vegas stadium as conceived, it’s hard to know where to start. The small site and scorching summer temperatures have necessitated a fixed dome, which is infamously problematic in baseball; the on-strip location is terrible for locals; the attendance projections are delusional; and the planned on-site Bally’s hotel/casino is unlikely to ever be built.

And these were the problems that were clear two years ago; since then, everything has more or less moved against Fisher’s plans in Vegas. First, on the demand side, Vegas has hit economic headwinds, for myriad reasons: Vegas has gotten much more expensive; gambling is not exclusive to Vegas as it once was; international tourism is way down. Any decline to tourism doubly hits Fisher: not only is he relying on tourists for a laughable 8,000 fans per game, but with the Vegas economy itself so dependent on tourism, any decline will surely affect the local entertainment dollar as well.

On the supply side, it’s even grimmer: steel tariffs have surged, and construction costs are up across the board. And the tight schedule makes it more expensive: by not having yet started construction but with an immovable date of Opening Day 2028, stadium construction will end up costing much more. So the stadium that was once going to cost $1.5B is now north of $1.75B — and on its way to $2B.

I bring all of this up now because this past Monday was a "groundbreaking" for the stadium — which earned its air quotes when the needlessly hardhatted dignitaries drove their shovels not into the actual ground, but rather an indoor planter (?!). This is already pretty bad, but groundbreakings are after all PR events, and performative digging is to be expected. However, if there’s one dimension you can count on John Fisher to be truly groundbreaking, it’s in new levels of incompetence, and he delivered on Monday: as Doug Puppel of The Engineering News-Record reported, the construction equipment in the background was rented as props for the day. Yes, in this Potemkin groundbreaking, even the construction equipment was a sham. Why not use, like, actual construction equipment? Because there isn’t any — and there isn’t any, because construction hasn’t actually started. And construction hasn’t started because John Fisher doesn’t have the money.

But wait, isn’t he a billionaire? Yes, but across essentially three illiquid assets: his Gap inheritance; the San Jose Earthquakes; and the A’s. In terms of money towards the project, he has the (infamous) $350M from the state of Nevada, and then $300M in debt from Goldman Sachs. The only new source of funding in the past year is a $175M deal with Aramark — though as David Samson points out, a deal with a concessionaire as a part of stadium construction isn’t that notable. (Also, aside: Aramark sucks.)

All of this leaves John Fisher needing (at least) ~$1B. It’s easy to get numb to dollar figures, so take it from someone who has raised a bunch of venture capital: that is a lot of money. As I discussed over a year ago, he can find capital in one of three ways: he can take on debt, he can sell equity, or he can pony up.

Debt is the instrument one would normally go to for a large construction project, as it’s non-dilutive financing. But as Todd Saran’s thread from 2024 elucidates, those who underwrite debt — banks — are going to look at cash flow: they need to know that they can get paid back! Debt analysts are going to care quite a bit about (say) the A’s fanciful attendance projections. Traditional lenders will find plenty to puke on in the A’s plans (and the $300M in debt from Goldman assuredly has some gnarly conditions that assures that they will get theirs). Now, there may be some other pockets of debt out there. Over at The Rickey Report, Alex Espinoza looked into some MLB sources of funds, but these too are finite. Many people believe that "MLB won’t let Vegas fail", but the numbers in Vegas are too large for MLB to bail Fisher out alone — and the two facilities that seem to be available from MLB to extend debt to a single team amount to just ~$225M.

If debt options are exhausted, the other possibility — and the one that John Fisher has been chasing for the last two years — is to sell equity. This is what a venture-backed business does to raise money: it sells off a piece of itself, using the proceeds to run the business. However, there is a basic problem with selling equity in the A’s to fund the stadium in Vegas: someone needs to buy it. And someone buying equity needs to make money, which they will do by selling their equity later at a higher price. So when you’re buying equity in a private company, there is the obvious question: what is the price, anyway? (That is, what is the company worth?) And what will it be worth in the future? (What is the company’s growth in valuation?) The kinds of questions that equity investors ask are different from banks: namely, not how can you pay me back but how are you growing? Problematically for anyone looking at buying equity, the A’s aren’t growing, they’re shrinking: they have not only nuked their entire fanbase (and clearly not won any new fans in Sacramento!), they have had replies off on all of their social media accounts since 2023. It is hard to imagine a bigger red flag for a consumer-facing brand: a brand that has so thoroughly alienated so many customers that it lives in fear of customers entirely.

That said, for a sufficiently low price, equity investors could be enticed, and this is where it gets sticky for Fisher: despite the encouragement of A’s fans, he does not, in fact, want to give up a controlling interest in the team. For the math to work, the valuation needs to be eye-wateringly high: Forbes pegged the value of the A’s at $1.2B (when they had a stadium!) and the Orioles sold for $1.725B last year, but neither of those valuations is really high enough for Fisher to raise the kind of dough he needs without giving up control. According to CNBC reporting, the A’s were looking to raise $550M at a $2B enterprise valuation which is both absolute lunacy and exactly what Todd Saran predicted eighteen months ago. This price is delusional because it’s pricing in a bunch of things that haven’t happened yet (like building the stadium!), and the A’s will be on the hook for any cost overruns — and if they default on their debt in the process, the equity will be worth zero. (If you are, like me, a David Samson fan, you hear that "zero" followed with rhetorical florish like "zilch!" and "nada!") Added to all of the other problems in this deal: it’s been out there for a long, long time. If you are the kind of person or institution who is a candidate to participate in this deal, you have already seen it — and passed on it.

If debt and equity are both off the table, this leaves the last option, and to those with a cursory view of the A’s, it’s the easiest and most obvious: this dude is a billionaire — can’t he just…​ write a check?! And here we get to the illiquidity of those other assets: his Gap inheritance and the San Jose Earthquakes. There are lots of reasons why Fisher would rather not part with either: not only does it run counter to his base instinct of hoarding his wealth, but he will also owe significant federal and (presuming he still lives in San Francisco) California state taxes. But it’s an indicator of just how exhausted the other paths are that this does indeed seem to be the path that Fisher is taking: it was announced earlier this month that he is looking to sell a controlling interest in the San Jose Earthquakes. This isn’t the only MLS team up for sale (the Vancouver Whitecaps are also on the block), and it’s not clear how much he’s selling (just that it’s a controlling interest) or at what price, but the team is worth $600M — there’s surely money to be raised by selling the stake. There’s the Gap, too: at Friday’s close ($21.90), Fisher’s 45.8M shares are worth ~$962M. All of this wealth is very significant, but the assets are not enough to get Fisher all the way there: even if he were to unload the totality of these holdings (at, say, $1.5B), he would owe so much in tax (up to ~37%!) that it would significantly reduce the capital available to the stadium. And he would still be on the hook for any construction overage — and without any financial backstop whatsoever.

So Monday was significant in that it has broken ground on something very important: the end game for John Fisher. I don’t think Fisher will find a substantial investor (it’s hard to find the dumb money when you are, in fact, the dumb money), but it’s not inconceivable that he will liquidate a significant amount of his own assets to pay for the stadium and its inevitable overages. I view this as unlikely, but I would honestly be delighted by it: not only for the fortune he would owe in taxes, but also because he would be staking his own inherited wealth on his desert folly — and there would be a very real possibility that he would lose it all. It would be gloriously fitting for John Fisher, whose two existential fears are clearly that he is an incapable dunce and that he will fumble his birthright, to manage to confirm both in a single, spectacular disaster.

But the far more likely outcome is that Fisher fiddles while Sacramento and Las Vegas burn. In Sacramento, season ticket holders — having been badly burned by the John Fisher experience — will not re-up. The MLB players union, long underserving its own membership by allowing this travesty, will demand significant changes for next year. Fisher himself will hold out for an equity investor in the A’s, finding a way to botch (or delay) a sale of the Quakes. In Vegas, the progress on the stadium will be essentially nil, awaiting not merely the financing but the many missing pieces needed to begin construction. As time passes on the quiet site, it will be obvious that they are stalled, even by the comically vague schedule standard that the A’s have set for themselves.

Finally, at some point in the fall or perhaps early winter, it will all snap: it will be incontrovertable that there will be no opening day in Vegas in 2028. As he has done so many times before, Fisher will first try to imply that a later timeline was the plan all along — but with Sacramento unsustainably molten, I suspect that MLB’s patience may finally be exhausted. If past is any prediction, Fisher will blame both Sacramento and Las Vegas (or perhaps an Oakland conspiracy?), decry how hard all of this has been on him and his family, and begin talk of a new location — or (more likely) a new city.

On the one hand, this will be the moment that Salt Lake City has been waiting for, but on the other, I suspect that the chorus of warnings from Oakland about John Fisher will carry to Utah — especially when joined by new voices from Sacramento and Las Vegas. MLB, at long last, will force the sale. This is still in the future, of course, but it’s now foreseeable: what John Fisher broke ground on on Monday is — I believe — the end game of his ownership. I just want to be there when the new ownership turns the replies back on!