On Friday, Oct. 25, the New York Yankees play the Los Angeles Dodgers in the first game of the 2024 World Series. It’s a matchup between the two most valuable teams, in the two biggest cities in the country, with some of the highest payrolls in sports: $324 million for the Yankees and $342 million for the Dodgers. The series promises to display the best baseball has to offer — and that promise lies in stark contrast to the sorry state of the Oakland Athletics, historically one of baseball’s more prominent teams. 

Just a month before the World Series starts, the A’s — who spent only $53 million on their roster this year — played one final game at their home stadium, the Coliseum. That’s because their owner, John Fisher, lured by the prospect of new sports-betting-fueled markets, doesn’t want the Oakland A’s to be the Oakland A’s anymore. He wants to move the team to Las Vegas after a multi-year layover in Sacramento. Putting aside the fact that Fisher’s plan is poorly conceived — there is no stadium in Vegas to move to, the A’s will be playing in a minor-league stadium until there is and the Nevada media market is significantly smaller than Oakland’s — the move is bad for baseball. The A’s will leave behind a fanbase that, while embittered by 19 years of non-investment, remains loyal to the team. They also leave behind a storied history and some of the most celebrated players and characters in baseball, like Rickey Henderson, Reggie Jackson, Dennis Eckersley and Vida Blue.

It’s not as if Fisher is a small-market underdog suffering at the hands of rich teams like the aforementioned Yankees and Dodgers. He’s worth $3.1 billion dollars, twice as much as Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner. Fisher could field competitive teams if he wanted to — but he doesn’t. He wants to run the Oakland A’s to maximize his own profits, the way he’d run any other corporation. If there’s money to be made in relocating operations, Fisher will do so. He’s not a terrible person. He’s just following the logic of profit. In fact, it would be naïve to expect anything else from the proprietor of an  enterprise worth more than a billion dollars.

The issue is that sports occupy a different place in society than IBM or PepsiCo do. Sports are about the emotional connection between team and fan, about the stories that come from superhuman performances, perennial losers finally winning the World Series or from a late-career resurgence. 

It’s currently the case that the owners have all the power over their franchises, but there’s no reason to think that has to be the case. Major League Baseball is exempted from antitrust law by a 1922 Supreme Court decision, a decision which was upheld 50 years later in Flood v. Kuhn. In the latter, Justice Harry Blackmun describes baseball as a uniquely American institution: it’s “the ‘national pastime’ or, depending upon the point of view, ‘the great American tragedy.’” If that’s really the case, shouldn’t owners have a responsibility to the institution and to the country, not just to their own bottom line?

In an ideal world, team owners would be more like patrons of the arts than businessmen. But as long as baseball is privately owned, it won’t be possible to fully rid the game of the profit motive. Baseball has always been a business, and there’s a lot of money tied up in it. Profit isn’t necessarily bad for the sport either. The recent rule changes that sped up the pace of the game were driven by falling viewership and a desire for bigger television deals. But regulating team owners could constrain the worst of profiteering impulses. A hypothetical Protect the National Pastime Act might limit the ability of owners to pick up and move and provide incentives for fielding a competitive team.

Such a law, passed by Congress, could solve a couple of problems. Team values would fall if the option to leave for greener pastures was heavily restricted — but assuring communities of their teams would have its own value for the league. Perhaps fan advisory boards could have a say in the decision to move on, or elected officials could exercise some kind of power over the process. As a carrot for the owners, Congress could offer matching funds to encourage poorer franchises to spend on their rosters. This added incentive would have the effect of bettering the game — accomplishing something that the current league setup seems unable to do — and making sure that teams stay loyal to their communities. As a certain baseball fan whose Brooklyn Dodgers moved away later told Los Angeles media, “The idea that [the team] was a private company who somebody could pick up and move away and break the hearts of millions of people was literally something we did not understand.” Bernie Sanders “thought the Dodgers belonged to Brooklyn,” and while that might not be a realistic model for modern sports, it’s certainly how fans think of their teams.

Sports matter to people, and it’s bad when their teams get taken away. The story of the Oakland A’s illustrates that. I’m a Yankees fan; the Yankees are of course never going to move. But the basic premise remains. If New York somehow did become a bad media market, Hal Steinbrenner would take the team to San Antonio. Franchises ultimately need to take all the money they can get from their consumers. The fans have deep, heartfelt relationships with their team. It’s an emotionally abusive relationship. Regulating Major League Baseball would limit the damages.

TEDDY WITT is a first-year in Berkeley College. He can be reached at teddy.witt@yale.edu.