An American Travesty

Haven’t written here in a minute— been busy at the day job and have a couple exciting pieces in the works for some much larger newsletters in the space. Cheers to ~150 new folks who have joined since I last published. As more folks serendipitously discover United States of Amazon, I promise that this newsletter is truly about the biggest stories at the intersection of tech, commerce and democracy.

But every once in a while, I reserve the right to treat this as my own personal blog to just tell a story. So this edition is about a town, a large family and the fuckin’ callous assholes that tore it all to pieces. Per usual, the one thing you need to know in the Amazon ecosystem this week + a cocktail recipe follows.

How can you not be romantic about baseball?

Today is Opening Day, the most immaculate spectacle of pure Americana. Irrational hope springs eternal on the crisp March breeze…everywhere except Oakland.

The Athletics limp into the season with a roster of dime store renegades assembled like a wardrobe exclusively bought on Shein. The most generous projections predict the team will lose 100 games. Their abomination of a stadium—which they may not even be able to play in after this season—still leaks sewage. Relations with fans are so fraught that the team has had to block replies on its official social media accounts. The highlight of the past three seasons is a certain misdemeanor that took place in the top row of section 334. The team’s owner is such a cynical affront to the American pastime that Ken Rosenthal quipped that his very existence “threatens the integrity of Major League Baseball as an industry.”

There’s little to say about the soulless ghoul behind the curtain that hasn’t been said already. Reliever Trevor May said it best in a rant worthy of Hunter S. Thompson:

So instead, I’ll tell a story about a kid from Long Island lost in the California wilderness and the family that took him in…..

My (now) wife and I landed in Oakland almost ten years ago, with no dream or cardigan but an untrained rescue bulldog that Kate shrewdly adopted weeks before we moved 3,000 miles from home. Our first stop was a bedroom in an Airbnb labeled by the owner as a “house in transition” for transients needing a place to crash for a month or two in the Bay, a fact we learned after we arranged the booking. Across the hall lived a 40 year-old guy whose engagement in Kansas City had fallen apart, prompting him to toss his dog in his truck and drive west, leaving his job, home and former life behind.

So here we were, starry-eyed 22 year olds fresh out of school shacking up in a commune with people in various stages of mid-life crisis with a dog dropping 2+ deuces a day on a stranger’s rug, being scolded for not knowing how the fuck to compost. Welcome to California, kid.

I had no real intention of staying in Oakland…..until we looked at one place in San Francisco, a basement apartment near Alamo Square that could only be decsribed as a long hallway with a kitchen at the end of it. Even in 2014, the rent was >$2,000— Kate and I laughed to each other wondeing who in their right mind would ever consider such a place at that price. As we were leaving, two young women walked in, took one look and basically offered to sell their pancreases to the broker to get the place.

Exasperated, we booked a late afternoon showing at an apartment complex in downtown Oakland. As fate would have it, the A’s had a 1PM day game and we had a few hours to kill. And so a love affair began.

I’d grown up a New York sports fan but my arrangment with the Yankees was always tenuous at best— I like nothing more than a plucky, gym rat underdog and the Evil Empire doesn’t exactly fit the bill. When we first showed up at Oakland Colosseum, I fell for it all. Amidst the crumbling microcosm of America’s infrastrucutre, I saw a far more zealous sports fandom than I could ever imagine. Our centerfield outfield section was maybe one-third full but it seemed the whole outfield knew each other. Furthermore, they knew the bartenders, the concession guys, the ushers…many of whom I’d learn later had worked at O. Co for decades. It was like I’d stumbled into someone’s living room masquerading as a baseball stadium.

Over the subsuquent two years, we went to many more A’s games in many other sections of the stadium and the same dynamic held. We brought our dog twice decked out in gear, once where she marked her turf on the centerfield warning track and then galavanted over for a photo opp with Sean Doolittle. Whenever we wanted, a $10 afternoon of great times with great people was at our beck and call.

Our story of course pales in comparison to the scores of families who grew up in the East Bay for generations, the kelly green and gold imprinted on their souls. But consider this, if the Oakland A’s greater family could leave this much of a mark on a callous kid from New York in just two years, imagine the holes left in the hearts of the true diehard fanbase that had been with this team through earthquakes and acts of God committed by Derek Jeter.

Watching A’s ownership go out of their way to gaslight both the elected representation of Oakland and core diehard fanbase has been one of the most mystifyingly and pointlessly cruel spectacles I’ve ever witnessed. It’s been a case study in the depraved distance from common humanity that only an ungodly amount of money can buy.

We only lived in Oakland for two years, in an apartment off of Lake Merritt. When we left, they charged the next tenants $600/mo more than we had paid. Looking at the price histories on places in Jack London Square or Temescal is a unique exercise in self flagellation for millennials— as recently as the early 2010s, $1M+ starter homes and luxury condos went for $200K.

Broadly speaking, Oakland is a fascinating paradox. Across its Overton window— which essentially ranges from center-left to fully left of the dial— nobody seems entirely happy with the direction things are going. At any given moment, the town seems on the verge of tearing itself apart with civil and often profoundly bizarre political strife. Mothers sit on the sidewalk with their children waiting for buses because a place that at times seems a caricature of the left has taken the progressive position of removing all of its benches. When I first returned a year after we moved, I was struck by the insane rate of turnover amongst businesses downtown.

Yet somehow, the quotidian vibes that permeate the joint are the best you’ll find anywhere. On a 60-75 degree sunny Sunday afternoon— more or less the weather 10 months out of the year— there’s truly no better place than the banks of Lake Merritt, swamp rats and all. Whether it is the greyhounds flowing at Van Kleef or Mad Oak, the chef at Abura-Ya leaving chicken in the fryer to come out and slap the bass at an impormptu block party or some weird punk ruck shit in a warehouse, the town just knows how to have fun.

The A’s, Raiders and Warriors were largely the glue that held the place together…..and now all will be gone. When the Warriors won their first title in 2015, dudes did donuts in Cadillacs downtown and poured bottles of champagne on a crowd, high-fiving cops less than a year removed from the Ferguson protests. During the victory parade, Marshawn Lynch and MC Hammer rode on a snail float that breathed fire.

The Warriors left all that and most of their diehard fans—largely working and middle class East Bay families who powered the WE BELIEVE run— to build a stadium that was slightly more convenient for venture capitalists to go to with their, very real, not at all paid for girlfriends. I’d say Fisher pulled a hold my beer with the A’s Vegas move but there’s no chance he drinks the peasant’s swill.

Over the last decade, several of baseball’s brightest young stars have come up through the Athletics farm system. The team has not made an earnest attempt to keep a single one.

In the summer of 2014, Billy Beane dealt young all-star and franchise centerpiece Yoenis Cespedes to the Red Sox for Jon Lester, a clear three month rental player who Oakland couldn’t afford to keep long term. In retrospect, this was the last desperate gambit from a man who knew he’d never again be afforded the luck and luxury to field a championship caliber team. As much of Beane’s Moneyball guile became commoditized, the A’s were reduced to a poverty franchise.

Lester got lit up by the Kansas City Royals in the wild card game, left in free agency for the Cubs and won the world series two years later. The A’s never again made a move that looked like it was done with winning in mind.

When Josh Donaldson signed as a free agent with the Toronto Blue Jays that offseason, he took out a full page ad in the Oakland Tribune, not so subtly implying that he would have done anything within reason to stay. He won the 2015 American League MVP in Toronto.

Now the A’s are moving to Vegas without any real, discernible plan for how to do so, a pawn in a billionaire failson’s quest to fulfill some sense of self-actualization on his fucked up hierarchy of needs. In his wake, thousands of fans for whom the Athletics are a way of life have to watch an eviscerated zombie of a franchise lose 12-3 to the Astros and Rangers night in and night out.

How can you still be romantic about baseball?

Amazonia 

My quick take on the week’s most interesting story in the Amazon ecosystem

Clinique, Welcome to Amazon: Estee Lauder launched Clinique on Amazon yesterday in a move that’s gotten shockingly little pickup in the retail press. The move is undoubtedly good for Amazon, a win for the American consumer and a smart time for Estee to swallow their pride and align with Amazon’s prestige beauty push.

Courting masstige FORTUNE 1000 holdouts, espeically in daily, routine based products is arguably more strategic for Amazon that heading off Temu at the pass downmarket. But while much is made of the deluge of Chinese sellers, rising fees and lax Amazon enforcement—and rightfully so—-an influx of big brand name holdouts entering the game presents plenty of challenges to Amazon native brands in the ecosystem.

Hero Cosmetics largely exists because of the temporary reluctance of big box drugstore beauty to fully ape into Amazon. With Clinique, Estee has both a massively established brand and gargantuan ad budgets to box out a new, more slightly upmarket version of Hero that might be getting cute ideas. Every day, the SMB American dream on Amazon gets a little bit harder.

Cocktail of the Week: The Cadillac Margarita

Every year, Brooklyn’s finest event, Margarita Rumble coincides with my birthday weekend. While they’ve cowardly reduced the number of margaritas from unlimited to 15 (we used to be a proper country), it’s still a great time.

At home, I have all kinds of margarita variants that I often whip up from watermelon basil to pitaya raspberry to a frozen avocado cialntro jam. But this week, I’m offering up my favorite riff on the classic. Let’s do it:

• 1 oz. tequila

• 1 oz. mezcal

• 1 oz. Combier (cheaper than Cointreau and equally good here)

• Tiny squeeze of fresh agave syrup

• Juice of one plump lime

• Floater of Armagnac poured over a spoon

Two notes here— I find the half tequila, half mezcal to be the ideal margarita mix. It still tastes classic but you get a kiss of smoke without overwhelming the expected flavor profile.

The traditional "cadillac” margarita floats with Grand Marnier which I find too sweet. That said, the silky richness of a cognac or armagnac on top of the acid of a margarita is just damn delightful. Is it stupidly indulgent or the mark of an aristocrat who like to party? Yes.

If you’ve made it this far on this roller coaster, a small ask. Please forward this to one other person who likes the Oakland A’s, commerce, technology or democracy….or hates dudes like John Fisher

Back to our regular(ish)ly scehduled programming next week