One word. 27,759 people.
By the spring of 2023, Oakland fans had spent years watching their team get stripped down, their ballpark left to decay, and their owner, John Fisher, shop the franchise to other cities. When the A’s announced a land deal in Las Vegas that April, most people assumed the fans would do what fans usually do: stay home.
They did the opposite.
The reverse boycott
The fan group Oakland 68s organized a reverse boycott for a Tuesday night game on June 13, 2023. The idea: pack the Coliseum and prove the team could thrive in Oakland — under an owner who wanted to be there. They raised more than $27,000 from fans and teamed up with local clothing brand Oaklandish to produce kelly-green T-shirts with a single word on the front, sold for $5 each. Roughly 7,000 were handed out.
“Sell! Sell! Sell!”
27,759 people showed up — one of the biggest crowds of the season, on a weeknight, for a team on pace for one of the worst records in modern baseball. The chant rolled around the stadium all night. The A’s even won. Photos of a sea of green SELL shirts ran everywhere, and later that year the Baseball Hall of Fame added one of the shirts to its collection in Cooperstown.
What happened next
- Apr 2023A’s announce a land agreement for a stadium in Las Vegas.
- Jun 13, 2023The reverse boycott. 27,759 fans, thousands of green SELL shirts.
- Nov 2023MLB owners unanimously approve the move to Las Vegas.
- Sep 2024The A’s play their final game at the Oakland Coliseum.
- 2025–The team plays in West Sacramento while a Las Vegas ballpark is built.
The shirt didn’t save baseball in Oakland. But it did something rare: it made an owner’s choices impossible to ignore, on national TV, in front of his own ballpark. It showed that fans are not the problem — and gave every one of them a way to say so without saying a word.
Why every team
Oakland isn’t the only fan base that feels this way. Payrolls slashed while ticket prices climb. Stadium ultimatums. Relocation threats. Years of losing with no plan to stop. If your owner has stopped listening, the message is the same everywhere — so we made the shirt for every MLB, NBA and NFL fan base.
Every shirt is just SELL, in white, on your team’s color. No logos, no team names. Wear it to the game. Get your section to wear it. One shirt is a complaint. Ten thousand is a headline.
Sources: KQED, NBC Sports / AP, Las Vegas Review-Journal, CBS News Bay Area. The original shirt was made by Oakland 68s and Oaklandish; Sell My Team is an independent project and is not affiliated with either.