John Fisher

Note: This page is for owner John Fisher; for 1910s pitcher John Gustave "Red" Fisher, click here.

John Fisher became the managing partner of the Oakland Athletics in November 2016, when Lewis Wolff stepped down from the position. Fisher and Wolff had formed a limited partnership group to purchase the A's on April 1, 2005, with Wolff assuming the position as managing partner. They had worked together in various ventures since 1994.

Concurrent with Fisher's accession to the principal ownership position, Dave Kaval took over as team president, replacing Michael Crowley. Kaval had exercised a similar position with the San Jose Earthquakes of Major League Soccer, another business jointly owned by Wolff and Fisher.

His tenure was dominated by fruitless discussions about what to do to replace the Oakland Coliseum, the team's aging ballpark that had been disfigured by the demands of the now-gone Oakland Raiders of the NFL and had been the victim of inadequate maintenance over the decades. Various plans to build a new ballpark in downtown Oakland were floated, but all of them failed, and in 2023 Fisher announced that he had reached an agreement with the city of Las Vegas, NV for a new ballpark to be built there. This led other MLB owners, who were tired of the endless saga around the team's fate, to vote unanimously in favor of the move.

This looked straightforward, but it wasn't. Plans for a new home in Las Vegas were not as solid as originally reported, as the city was not interested in giving huge subsidies to Fisher to build the new park, and with the bridges now burned with Oakland, a temporary home had to be found after the expiration of the A's lease on the Coliseum at the end of the 2024 season. Meanwhile, the A's remaining fans were livid about Fisher's maneuverings, which they felt had not been made in good faith, and the slogan among them was "Sell the team!", asking Fisher to allow a new ownership group to try to fix the growing mess by keeping the team in Oakland. That did not work, and attendance over the final two seasons in Oakland was very poor, while Fisher settled on a makeshift temporary solution, which would be to move the team to Sacramento, CA for a few years, using that city's AAA ballpark until a new one was built in Vegas - if that ever happened. There were still many doubters about whether Sin City was a viable baseball market in the long term.

Related Sites

• Mlb.com article on the change of managing partners