What Is a Texas Leaguer, Mr. Fisher?

Jock O’Connell

Battleground is a classic war movie. Shot in black-and-white and released in 1950, it depicts the plight of U.S. troops fending off a German attack on Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944. Reports had been surfacing of English-speaking German troops, dressed in U.S. Army uniforms, infiltrating American positions, and causing havoc among the defenders. In response, a system of passwords and countersigns drawn from American popular culture were devised to help distinguish friend from foe.

In one critical scene, American sentries stop a jeep ostensibly carrying a U.S. Army major and two privates. What’s the password? Texas. What’s the countersign? Leaguer. Still doubtful, one sentry (played by Van Johnson, the Ben Affleck of that era) follows up: What is a Texas Leaguer, major? The officer is unsure. Some sort of baseball term, he offers. Fortunately for him, the others in the jeep quickly prove they are authentic GIs.

Oakland A’s fans today may justifiably wonder whether their team’s principal owner, John Fisher, would have survived such an encounter. Despite his long association with the business of baseball and a lifetime of attending the games of the San Francisco Giants, there are serious doubts whether he truly has that visceral feel for the game that distinguishes those who merely wear the team’s cap or a player’s jersey from those who anguish for days over losses or could tell you that Charlie Finley’s middle name was Oscar. There is certainly no question whatsoever he has no real affection for his team’s players or their supporters. A’s fans have increasingly returned the sentiment by displaying their contempt for the owner as he

and A’s President Dave Kaval have steered the franchise into the desert, figuratively and now literally.

Baseball connects with fans because it has a soul. Messrs. Fisher and Kaval evidently do not.

The Wikipedia entry on the A’s history before their move to Oakland contains an interesting remark foreshadowing the team’s current state:

In 1954, Chicago real estate magnate Arnold Johnson bought the Philadelphia Athletics and moved them to Kansas City. Although initially viewed as a hero for making Kansas City a major-league town, it soon became apparent than he was motivated more by profit than any particular regard for the baseball fans of Kansas City.

During Johnson’s tenure, virtually every good young A’s player was traded to the Yankees for aging veterans and cash.

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But the purpose of this commentary is not to further vilify with words the team’s owner and its management. (Some may say that’s why God gave us middle fingers.) Rather, what prompts this commentary are the disconcerting impact Mr. Fisher’s baseball dalliances have had on the Port of Oakland and the need now for the port’s leadership to flash a new set of signals to the maritime shipping community attesting to their commitment to maintaining a vibrant seaport.

Let’s briefly review the essence of the controversy.

Fisher proposed to build the A’s a major league ballpark rivaling the Giants’ homefield across the Bay. It would be surrounded by towers of high-end condos, offices and retail outlets, and a glitzy entertainment district. It would be a boon to the City of Oakland, assuming the project’s financing did no serious damage to the City’s treasury or its credit rating.

This civic extravagance, so out of scale to anything else in Oakland, would be located right next to a major seaport served by an unending stream of large container vessels, fleets of tractor trailers, and railcars being shunted around by locomotives.

That juxtaposition immediately raised the issue of compatibility. The proposed site of the ballpark, several blocks away from the nearest regional transit station and literally on the wrong side of busy railroad tracks, posed daunting accessibility challenges. These were waved off as manageable by the project’s proponents, who then and even now worship at the altar of fantasy. 

Then there was the matter of whether the new neighbors could live in peace and harmony with the existing neighbors. People living across the street from industrial facilities, especially those that aspire someday to operate on a 24/7 basis, are not generally known to delight in their neighbors’ sights, sounds, and smells. More so in the case of the wealthy and well-connected souls who would come to occupy Fisher’s luxury residences.

Understandably, the Pacific Merchant Shipping Association along with a host of importers, exporters, and other organizations with a direct stake in the continued operation of the seaport objected to the gaudy gewgaw Fisher and his consiglieri were seeking to foist on Oakland.

But the subsequent debate was not framed to highlight the basic compatibility issue. What instead galvanized the attention of politicians, media pundits, lawyers, civic organizations, and consulting firms was the infinitely narrower matter of whether an underutilized Howard Terminal should be repurposed to serve a better and higher purpose.

Political reality being what it is, it was probably unavoidable that port officials would bow to pressure from City Hall to minimize the impact of Fisher’s bauble on port operations. So every effort was made to portray the controversy as a fight over the future of Howard Terminal and not over the future of the Port of Oakland.

It should be made clear that the Port of Oakland is not just a seaport. It is a diversified business entity that also encompasses Oakland International Airport, valuable real estate holdings in and around Oakland’s Jack London Square, and a modest electricity-generating utility that services port tenants. From a financial perspective, the Airport Division is the Port’s primary revenue source. The Port’s current budget documents for FY 2024 reveal that the Aviation Division is again projected to be the Port’s “major driver of operating revenue growth”, accounting for 49.1% of the Port’s operating revenues. By comparison, the Maritime Division’s share is expected to be 41.3%.

By seeking to confine debate to the status of the Howard Terminal and finessing legitimate concerns over the seaport’s future viability, the governing bodies at the Port of Oakland seemed to be sending a peculiar message: that maintaining a flourishing seaport was not necessarily a foremost priority. Indeed, one letter sent to Oakland City Councilmembers by the Port concluded with this telling statement: “The Port believes that the Proposed Project, if approved, will bring significantly more people to the Oakland waterfront and Jack London Square while ensuring that the seaport continues to grow its vital role in international commerce and the supply chain”.

Mr. Fisher’s gaze may have now passed from the Oakland waterfront to the Nevada desert, but the Port’s cavalier dismissal of the threat that his proposal posed for seaport operations leaves lingering doubts about the Port’s priorities going forward. Allowing questions to fester about the Port’s commitment to its seaport is hardly a signal it wants to be sending as it struggles to hold onto its container volumes and to regain first-call status with ocean carriers.

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Now back to the movie.

One of the featured players in Battleground was an actor and song-and-dance man with political aspirations named George Murphy. Like his contemporary Ronald Reagan, he had been president of a union, the Screen Actors Guild. Like Reagan, he ultimately made it to Washington by winning the same seat in the U.S. Senate that Dianne Feinstein would eventually hold until her death last month.

There’s a compelling story here about how much the political climate in this country – or at least in California – has changed over the last few decades.

In the General Election of November 1964, Murphy, a Republican, defeated his Democratic opponent, Pierre Salinger, who had gained notoriety as President John F. Kennedy’s press secretary. A native Californian, Salinger had been appointed by Governor Pat Brown to serve out the remaining five months of Sen. Clair Engle’s term following Engels’s death from brain cancer that summer.

Engle was a Democrat from Tehama County, a part of northern California that has since moved politically to the far right. Many of its residents now profess a desire to secede from California and form a new State of Jefferson. Donald Trump won the county with 66.6% of the vote in 2020.

As a further testament to how things have changed, the Democrat Salinger resigned his Senate seat two days before it formally ended. The Republican Murphy was then appointed by Democratic Governor Brown to serve out the remainder of the Democrat Salinger’s term, thus giving him a seniority advantage in representing the interests of the State of California in the U.S. Senate.

At the time, the musical satirist Tom Lehrer wrote a ditty about Murphy’s election that included the line: “Oh, gee, it’s great! At last we’ve got a senator who can really sing and dance.”

That was patently unfair. During his term in the Senate, the Republican Murphy supported the Voting Rights Acts of 1965 and 1968 and voted to confirm Thurgood Marshall to the U.S. Supreme Court.

But that was then.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in Jock’s commentaries are his own and may not reflect the positions of the Pacific Merchant Shipping Association.