It was a picture-perfect but bittersweet afternoon in the East Bay yesterday, as after 57 years as tenants of the rapidly decaying concrete eyesore then and now known as the Oakland Coliseum the facility’s remaining major league tenant, the Athletics, closed out their final home campaign. It was a completely meaningless game by baseball standards, one that the home team did win, and over the soon-to-be dethroned current world champions no less.
YAHOO! Sports’ Kendall Baker captured both the facts and the emotion with appropriate terseness in his newsletter this morning:
A’s closer Mason Miller sealed the 3-2 win over the Rangers with two of the fastest pitches he’s ever thrown (103.5 mph and 103.8 mph), the latter of which was the fastest pitch in the history of the Coliseum.
The scene on the ground: From Yahoo Sports’ Jeff Eisenberg…It was last call at the venerable Oakland Coliseum, but none of the regulars was ready to leave. Thousands of green-and-gold-clad die-hards remained at their seats and soaked in the nostalgia, long after the final out.
A woman along the third-base line held aloft a homemade sign that read, “Today there is crying in baseball.” Proof that she was right was all around her, as a grown man in a World Series cap wiped tears from his eyes and a young girl with an A’s chain around her neck bawled uncontrollably.
A man in a Rickey Henderson jersey lit a joint in the right-field bleachers. A group of friends a few rows away stood with their backs to the field and snapped a selfie together. Someone else raised a middle finger while shouting expletives at A’s owner John Fisher.
Those melancholy, sentimental scenes marked Oakland’s farewell to big-time sports. A fiercely loyal, often underappreciated sports town had its heart ripped from its chest three times in the past five years at the hands of team owners who sought greener pastures.
“Imagine that a loved one was murdered, and you’re told you have to go to that funeral 81 times,” said Bryan Johansen, who has been going to A’s games at the Coliseum for 40 years. “That’s what this entire season has been like. And it has only gotten more intense as the days pass.”
I was an early adopter of the Oakland A’s if for no other reason than my dad insisted on having my first-ever in-person experience at the original Yankee Stadium seeing one of the final games that the Kansas City A’s played, a season-ending road series where the tenth and last-place A’s were playing a god-awful Yankees team that finished ninth. On a day where three teams were still alive for the pennant in the next-to-last season before divisional play began, we schlepped to the Bronx to watch some really awful baseball. But my dad was a Brooklyn Dodgers fan, and this was the first time since when they and the New York Giants left for California a decade earlier that a major league city was going to be left without a team (yes, the original Washington Senators moved to Minnesota in 1961, but they were immediately replaced by a same-named expansion team). And even though at that point in his life he had never been farther west than Buffalo, he identified with what he suspected was the pain of the true A’s fans in Kaycee, even though in reality the actual count of such zealots was a fraction of those who mourned the moves of the Dodgers and Giants. And he made sure I realized I would be watching one of the last times the words KANSAS CITY would be worn on those funky green and gold uniforms with white shoes.
That garp carried over to Oakland, and in one of their first-ever home games Catfish Hunter threw a no-hitter. Joe DiMaggio was a coach on that team. The relocated A’s rapidly improved as the likes of Hunter, Reggie Jackson and others matured, eventually winning three consecutive World Championships, one heartbreakingly against the Mets. A second pennant three-peat occurred a decade later, capped by a emotionally gripping Bay Area series sweep against the Giants that was interrupted by an earthquake during the Giants’ first home game.
It was shortly after that that I attended my first game at the Coliseum, during an era where the Raiders had carpetbagged their way into the Los Angeles stadium of the same name and where Oakland’s version had been upgraded to a baseball-only shrine with an open outfield, a beautiful view of the mountains over a single-deck bleachers, which I got to enjoy on a day as chamber-of-commerce gorgeous as yesterday. My only other game was decades later during an era when the team and the ballpark were already in decline. I took the BART and walked over a rickety bridge overlooking a loud construction site where a four-figure crowd silently watched them get shut out on an overcast April afternoon.
So yep, I felt for those whose emotions came pouring out yesterday. Plenty of older Giants and Dodgers fans of my father’s generation tried to empathically express their support for the suffering and seemingly abandoned A’s faithful. But the reality is that this departure more mirrors that which the San Diego Chargers inflicted upon their fan base within the last decade, and one where the opportunity both to continue to still support and mourn the team simultaneously will exist.
The Chargers actually telegraphed their intent to move at the end of the 2015 season, an event which SPORTS ILLUSTRATED’s Lee Jenkins captured with similar sentiments to the ones the YAHOO! writers and others conveyed yesterday. That move was delayed by a year, giving folks like Jenkins a similar arc to the season-long funeral that A’s fan Johansen described. And when they did finally head north they spent three seasons occupying a far smaller venue, in this case the Home Depot Center that was serving as the pitch for the Los Angeles Galaxy MLS team, as they awaited the construction of SoFi Stadium. Just as the A’s will be doing as they have a pit stop through at least 2027 as they, like the Chargers, will be playing games less than an hour and a half away in the minor league bandbox known as Sutter Health Park, which they will ignominiously share with the Giants’ Triple A franchise.
While the plurality of fans that showed up to those Chargers games were those of the visitors (still the case now for the most part at SoFi), a goodly number of disenfranchised San Diegans did continue to go. The same option that A’s fans will have. And as ground hasn’t even broken for their eventual Las Vegas strip palace, it’s entirely possible that the anticipated 2028 debut of the Las Vegas A’s might be put off.
And if somehow this team, which actually has a few budding stars once again like Miller, Lawrence Butler and Brent Rooker, becomes competitive again, real fans of the team and the sport might actually have to reconsider their feelings. Clearly, Rooker evokes the emotions of real fans, as Baker’s column captured:
There’s no frills. I think a lot of stadiums have kind of become less about the actual baseball game and more just about an entertainment product. And I think what the Coliseum offers is, like, here’s just a bunch of seats and here’s a field, and there’s gonna be a baseball game happening, and that’s why everyone is here. And that’s really cool.
He’ll find a way to play in other venue. And I have to believe some fans will find a way into it to root for them. Which to me means the REAL crying is still yet to come.
Courage…