A’s fans again made their voices heard, and with force, on Opening Day, signaling what a long and difficult year it will likely be for the MLB club. 

The A’s drew an announced attendance of 13,522 for their season opener Thursday against the Guardians, easily the smallest crowd of any opener across the league and roughly half of Oakland’s total for its 2023 opener. But while the turnout was sparse inside the Coliseum, thousands of fans gathered in the stadium’s parking lot to voice their displeasure with the planned move of the A’s to Las Vegas. Instead of going inside for the game, many of those fans chose to stay in the lot for a block party, where they watched the game on a projection screen and waved “Sell” flags (above), calling on team owner John Fisher to part with the franchise.

Oakland fans had already established a tradition of activism, staging prior events such as last year’s “reverse boycott.” But the latest demonstration again showed the deep passion that still exists for the team in the Bay Area, regardless of Fisher’s relocation plans.

“I have not missed an Opening Day in 25 years,” Anson Casanares, vice president of influential fan group the Oakland 68s, told NBC Bay Area. “[But] why would I spend my money inside? Why spend my passion inside if they are trying to leave here?”

Bumpy Road Ahead

The A’s ranked by far last in MLB attendance last year, with a per-game average of 10,276. With the poor start to 2024—further shown by the 8–0 loss to Cleveland—and the existing fan unrest, a smaller number this year is all but certain. But there are more hurdles ahead. 

The club faces the potentially awkward situation of staying around this fan unrest for another three seasons, as Oakland is a leading candidate to host the A’s for the 2025–27 seasons while the new Las Vegas ballpark is built. The Vegas relocation, meanwhile, has its own issues, with plenty of questions emerging about the planned stadium site along the Strip and a newly released set of ballpark renderings. 

The women’s NCAA tournament is getting back underway with Sweet 16 action after record viewership in the second round—thanks in large part to Iowa and Caitlin Clark—and more new audience marks are almost certainly on the way.

Games involving No. 1 seeds South Carolina and Texas headline Friday’s broadcasts, which will face competition from the ongoing men’s tournament, but on Saturday two heavyweight matchups will get national spotlights all to themselves. ABC is carrying a doubleheader, beginning at 1 p.m. ET, of No. 3 LSU vs. No. 2 UCLA and No. 5 Colorado vs. No. 1 Iowa, which should play out before the men’s Elite Eight tips off shortly after 6 p.m.

Already, intrigue in Clark led to 4.9 million viewers tuning in to Iowa’s closer-than-expected win over West Virginia on Monday night, making that second-round game the most-watched women’s March Madness telecast outside of the Final Four. For comparison, that’s more than three times what Iowa’s second-round game drew last year: 1.46 million for a win over Georgia, at the time an early-round record for women’s March Madness. 

With that huge Iowa boost, round-of-32 games this year averaged a record 1.4 million viewers, up a staggering 121% from last year. All that came on top of 3.23 million people tuning in to Iowa’s 91–65 rout of outmatched 16-seed Holy Cross in the first round. Since advancing to the Sweet 16, Clark has been in the news all week, receiving an invite to Team USA’s Olympic camp, starring as the subject of a 96-page tribute magazine from ESPN, and even getting a $5 million offer to compete in the Big3 basketball league.

Dream Matchup

Ratings for this women’s NCAA tournament were expected to set records—as long as Iowa remains alive—and now last year’s record 9.9 million viewership number from the LSU-Iowa championship game might be broken, and certainly challenged, sooner rather than later. “The bar has been raised a bit from the performance of the first two rounds,” says TV ratings expert Jon Lewis, founder of Sports Media Watch, predicting up to 9 million viewers for a theoretical LSU-Iowa rematch in the Elite Eight, if they both win Saturday.