The Oakland A's salute a sold out crowd after their final game at the Coliseum. Owner John Fisher is not pictured because he wasn't there. | Photo by Ezra Shaw/Getty Images

Welcome back to Talkin’ Gaysball where no soulless billionaire can ever take away Rickey, The Eck, Reggie, Catfish, Stew, Rollie, Tejada, Balfour Rage, or even Herb Washington…

Even at their saddest, sports should only feel like a metaphorical funeral.

For baseball fans in the East Bay, the A’s playing their final games in the Coliseum before abandoning Oakland forever is the genuine loss of a loved one.

It’s been gut wrenching to watch A’s fans struggling to hang on to the memories of their team as they fade away in real time while simultaneously processing the immense grief about to hit them at the end of the final game.

The anguish of this moment is very real, and it’s impossible not to feel awful for them if you have even the slightest bit of human empathy.

Which is to say: if you’re not A’s owner John Fisher, who couldn’t even be bothered to run his final letter to Oakland fans through spellcheck.

Although Fisher won’t ever think beyond his profit margin, his callous and willful suffocation of the Oakland A’s has other tragic ramifications throughout the game.

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For LGBTQ fans, it severs one of our connections to a vital part of gay baseball history as Oakland was one of the two teams that Glenn Burke played for during his too short career.

To be honest, it was an ugly part of gay baseball history. Oakland was where Burke was called an antigay slur by irredeemable bigot Billy Martin and where he brawled in the parking lot with homophobic hecklers after a game.

But part of grappling with history is being truthful about its unsavory parts—not in pretending they didn’t exist. Once the A’s begin play in Sacramento or Las Vegas, that separation from their longtime home will make it that much easier to ignore those ugly realities of their past.

What’s more, in recent years, the A’s seemed interested in doing right by Burke’s legacy, renaming their Pride Night after him and inviting his family to be honored on the field and throw out a first pitch.

That might have been the last genuinely good decision by A’s ownership.

Even with all the awfulness and hate that Burke encountered, the Oakland A’s were an important part of his story.

Now the Oakland A’s no longer exist. Just like that.

What’s especially hurtful about this is that we know of so few out LGBTQ players in baseball. Because of that, when we lose any connection to our history in the game, it’s disproportionally huge. Every loss is a big loss.

The A’s abandoning Oakland in the same year as the loss of Billy Bean feels like the LGBTQ community has lost a two massive emotional ties that have made us feel represented in baseball. It could take a long time to reestablish that.

Of course, Fisher clearly doesn’t care about actual paying customers in Oakland so it would be naive to assume he would be concerned in the slightest with his team’s role in LGBTQ sports.

It’s also important to emphasize that LGBTQ baseball history is a wounded bystander in this tragedy. Baseball fans in Oakland are the ones who are the real victims of Fisher’s greed and they need sympathy and support from every one of us.

Oakland A’s fans have endured 162 games of trauma and will be grieving the end of their team for years.

But since Fisher is the one who decided to abandon Oakland due to greed and incompetence, he should know that he has hurt our community as well. In a better world, he’d feel the consequences of inflicting pain on so many people.

Then again, in a better world, he’d have sold the team to someone who cared long ago and the only way we’d have heard of him was if we googled “The Gap failson.”

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