The Oakland A’s are being petty again

Last year, the A’s offered Giants fans the “opportunity” to trade in their Giants hats for A’s hats. As usual, aiming it at the “bandwagon” fans they despise so much, but...seem to want as fans of their own? The logic wasn’t clear.

Anyway, they rolled that out again this year - despite the fact that if you’re a San Francisco Giants fan in the year 2018, you probably aren’t exactly a bandwagon fan anymore. You lived through the pit of despair that was the 2017 season.

Maybe this year’s target was those fans who couldn’t hang with a team that lost 98 games, but I think you’re going to need more than a free hat to win them over. A winning team with a franchise player might help, but sure, let’s keep trying PR stunts.

This weekend the A’s released a press statement saying that they were going to charge Giants fans attending Bay Bridge Series games nearly double to park at the Coliseum.

While this wasn’t ultimately enforced, and correlation does not imply causation, turnout for Sunday’s game was noticeably down from previous years. At least according to Jon Miller and Dave Flemming on the game broadcast. Also Alex Pavlovic, who noted the low attendance via tweet:

I’m not going to say that A’s vs. Giants games are the biggest draws of the season at the Coliseum, but they’ve got to at least be close. Maybe it’s not a good idea to announce that you want to fleece fans of the opposing team if you want them to show up.

Additionally, one person responded to the post on Twitter implying that it was a public relations stunt by the A’s organization to distract from the fact that they’d raised the cost of parking overall by $10 from last season. If that is true, it was really an insult to both fan bases.

And ultimately, as anyone familiar with the Bay Area will tell you: