On the evening of Monday, June 12, 2023, a mere 4,848 baseball fans showed up at the Oakland Coliseum—a stadium that seats 63,000—to watch the Oakland A’s beat the Tampa Bay Rays. The following night, with the same match-up, attendance more than quintupled, to 27,759. In an essay published in The Oaklandside on June 14, Cameron Kelly wrote:
[Tuesday’s] game itself had little to do with the size of the crowd. Nor was it the A’s six-game winning streak, which has dragged them up from the dregs of “one of the worst teams of all time” to a regular level of awful, as most of the tickets for this game were sold weeks ago. It wasn’t any particular player, nor any special giveaway (at least, not one put on by the A’s), nor was it even the expectation of seeing a good baseball game.
What brought all those ticket-buyers to the Coliseum on Tuesday was an impassioned protest against the impending move of the hometown team to Las Vegas. Fans, and the media, dubbed the protest a “reverse boycott.”
Screenshot of SFGate headline and photo, June 14, 2014: “ ‘An Oakland tragedy’: A’s fans’ raucous ‘reverse boycott’ started with a single tweet”
The “single tweet” had been posted on April 10 by Stu Clary, an A’s fan who lives not in Oakland but 48 miles away in Vacaville, and who at this writing has just 501 Twitter followers. Clary coaches a high school baseball team and calls himself “the unofficial mayor of Vacaville.”
Signed the petition.
— Stu Clary (@hecanfoos) April 11, 2023
Something I’ve been thinking about: a “reverse boycott” day of protest:
We pick a random weeknight game and sell it out, showing that can support is not the issue
All fans arrive with signs demanding Fisher keep the team in Oakland and/or sell the team
“Fisher” is team owner and Republican Party donor John Fisher, the billionaire youngest son of Gap founders Don and Doris Fisher. “Can support” may be a typo for “fan support.”
When I searched for a history of “reverse boycott,” I found only links to the A’s protest—with one exception. In August 2021, the recently unionized workers at Colectivo Coffee in Milwaukee organized a reverse boycott “to encourage customers to support the company and the new union,” according to a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article. If you’ve spotted earlier usages, leave a comment with links.
UPDATE: See Ben Zimmer’s comments for earlier appearances of “reverse boycott.”
Boycott is an eponym—named for Charles C. Boycott, (1832–97), an English land agent in Ireland—that originally meant “withdrawal from social or commercial interaction or cooperation with a group, nation, person, etc., intended as a protest or punishment.” That sense was eventually extended to include “a refusal to buy certain goods or participate in a particular event.” Boycott didn’t do the boycotting; rather, he was the target of Irish tenant farmers, who withheld their labor to protest evictions. (See “Charles Boycott: The Man Who Became a Verb,” Amusing Planet, January 12, 2023. If Charles’s family hadn’t changed the spelling of their surname, we might today be talking about boycatts instead of boycotts.)
A reverse boycott, then, involves interaction, cooperation, participation, and showing up, as the 27,000-plus A’s fans did last week.
Their fervor appears to have had little effect on the fate of the team, which has called Oakland home since 1968 and which was the subject of the Moneyball book (by Michael Lewis) and movie (starring Brad Pitt). (The team was founded as the Philadelphia Athletics in 1901 and moved to Kansas City in 1955.) Rob Manfred, the commissioner of Major League Baseball, essentially shrugged and said he felt “sorry” for A’s fans; a former A’s pitcher, Brandon McCarthy, responded by calling Manfred “fucking pathetic.” (McCarthy: “This toad is the steward of a glorious sport, dripping with history and he feels entitled to mock fans who are making their voices heard as he sits by and caters to hiding billionaires?”)
No matter: On June 15, Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo signed into law the bill that pledges $380 million in taxpayer money toward a $1.5 billion stadium in Las Vegas. “MLB owners must vote to approve the relocation and Fisher must secure financing for what he says will be $1.1 billion in team outlays for the stadium,” Gabe Lacques reported in USA Today. “The team recently revealed that its new home ― on the current site of the Tropicana Resort, wouldn't be ready until 2028.” (Punctuation sic.)
And then? Check out veteran sportswriter Ray Ratto’s satirical take in the Defector blog, which pretends to looks backward from 2028. My favorite graf:
As the project continually changed and fell behind schedule, A's ownership—first John Fisher, then the Fisher Family Trust when John was ousted in a contentious Thanksgiving weekend gathering that came to be known as The Great Cranberry Sauce Revolution, and then creditors JP Morgan Chase—began asking for increased subsidies from the state and Clark County, including a seven percent respiration tax that passed the legislature by a voice vote two Christmas Eves ago when assemblypersons were nailgunned to their chairs until they agreed to vote yes.
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A footnote: Unsurprisingly, boycott is not a popular trademark. I did find a registration for Boycott Coffee, a Memphis coffeeshop that probably would prefer that you reverse-boycott the business. From the About page:
Boycott Coffee is not an act of abstention - rather, it’s one of activation. We call on you to question how coffee is really made & who it belongs to along the value chain. To revolt and protest alongside the producers, traders, mill workers, carriers, roasters & baristas. We support a community that doesn’t dilute narratives of transparency and sustainability, but holds each of us accountable as we strive to make coffee better for the people who grow it, serve it, and enjoy it
We exist to enrich problems experienced within coffee communities so that we can discover and promote solutions.
The newspaper databases have many examples of "reverse boycott," often describing a kind of retaliatory boycott (e.g., the Soviet Union's boycott of the 1984 Summer Olympics in L.A. after the U.S. boycotted the 1980 Olympics in Moscow). It's also been used as a way to encourage people to make purchases from certain retailers (sometimes also called a "buycott" or a "buy-in"). Here's an early example of that usage from 1920.
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https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-buffalo-times-reverse-boycott-curing/126726363/
Buffalo (NY) Times, Mar. 26, 1920, p. 18, col. 3
Reverse Boycott Curing Gougers
By Jim Marshall, N.E.A. Staff Correspondent
SPOKANE, Wash., March 26. -- Led by a dean of the Episcopal church and the original woman "Bull Mooser," 3,000 Spokane women are battering down the high cost of living here with a consumers' league, a reverse-English boycott, a weekly bulletin of prices and a slogan.
The league is supported by dues of 25 cents a month from each member.
Instead of boycotting merchants who charge too much, the women seek out those who cut prices, boost them in the weekly bulletin, which is mailed to all members, and enable the cut-raters to sell large volumes at low profits.
The slogan -- which is considerably worrying some local stores -- is "No thank you -- it costs too much!"
The league is headed by Dean William C. Hicks, of the Episcopal church here. The organizer and guiding spirit is Mrs. Sarah Flannigan, who attained fame some years ago as the only woman delegate to the original Bull Moose convention in Chicago.
A dozen Spokane drygoods and grocery firms have rushed into print recently to assure the league that they're with 'em. But the women aren't taking anyone's word for it. If a price seems too high the slogan is gently wafted across the counter -- and the next issue of the bulletin carries the word along.
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Posted by: Ben Zimmer | June 19, 2023 at 08:37 AM