The Day Oakland Athletics Died
The Day Oakland Athletics Died
FJF, always and forever
I attended a 46,889 person funeral yesterday.
Shortly after noon, a U-2 buzzed East Oakland and baseball legends Dave Stewart and Rickey Henderson threw out simultaneous first pitches. Then the final upper-level professional sports contest in Oakland got underway.
What John Fisher, the other 29 owners, Bud Selig and Rob Manfred, and Major League Baseball as a whole have done to Oakland is unconscionable. Just five years after the Oakland Raiders decamped for Las Vegas while the Warriors1 commuted across the Bay Bridge to San Francisco, the green and gold were ripped from Oakland. The teams 56-year residency came to a close against in an afternoon game against the Texas Rangers, and the A’s will supposedly join the Raiders in Las Vegas in 2028.
I have little to add to the excellent reporting that has been done on the various failures of team owner John Fisher, the MLB, and yes, the city and county governments in Oakland. The league allowed Fisher to intentionally field an underfunded team for years to drive down attendance and then cry that the market doesn’t support the A’s. The team is actively violating national labor laws by refusing to honor the stadium concession workers’ union contract. Alameda County and the city of Oakland failed to take Fisher’s relocation threats seriously until it was too late.
But we knew all that already. Instead, I want to write about the fan experience of attending the A’s final game in Oakland.
The reason I went to yesterday’s baseball wake was to be in community with tens of thousands of others from up and down the East Bay and far beyond, cheering together one last time for the A’s. I’ve fallen in love with Oakland, a city whose punching bag status in the halls of state government and on the front pages of the national media is beyond undeserved. I needed to be there yesterday to bear witness to yet another extraction of Oakland’s resources by those with money and power who never cared to understand Oakland at all.
I first got a taste of what the day was going to be like well before game time. Fans were warned to expect delays, so I boarded a BART train two hours before the first pitch. At 10:30 a.m. on a work day, the train cars were jammed tighter than during my commute, a green line train overflowing with passengers wearing their own kelly green. The older gentleman next to me took in my A’s windbreaker and shook his head in disgust as he told me how ashamed he was that the A’s were being stolen.
It took nearly an hour to make my way through the BART station and to the upper deck where I would be seated, a journey that usually takes ten minutes. Other fans had been tailgating in the massive parking lot — recall that the Coliseum was the final multi-use stadium in professional sports, so it has the parking lot of an NFL behemoth — since 8:00 a.m., the line to park causing interstate traffic to backup for miles.
The first story I overheard while wandering the Coliseum’s upper level was from a dad soaking in the atmosphere with his kids. He pointed out the spot where he proposed to their mom years ago, the couple having bonded over their mutual love of the A’s.
Seated far above the visiting dugout in section 306, I met people who drove for hours from Marin County and Tracy and Merced, fighting Bay Area traffic to pay homage to their team one final time. Others flew in from Chicago and Dallas, and thanks to the extension of BART to the Oakland airport, they were flying right back home after the game ended.
Players and staff added plenty of small flourishes to make the day feel less mournful and more celebratory. A few of the A’s changed their walk up songs to Bay Area anthems like “Thizzelle Dance” and “Put Me on Somethin’” to show their solidarity with the community. Oakland’s groundskeepers, whose work was so exemplary that they were used to train the other 29 grounds crews from around the league, managed to weave “Thank you Oakland” into the pattern of the center field grass.
Handmade signs adorned the Coliseum, with epigraphs such as “MLB Ashamed,” “Today there is crying in baseball,” and my personal favorite, “Doris Get Your Kid” intertwined with the ubiquitous SELL flag flown throughout the East Bay since the spring.
But despite the organization’s own fear mongering that fans would turn the game into a riot, the signs were the most visible expression of rage for most of the game, matched only by some light toilet papering after the final out in the ninth inning. Fans called out other fans who tossed plastic bottles onto the field and quickly drowned out the “Fuck John Fish-er” chants with “Let’s Go Oak-land” or “Sell the team,” determined to prove to the MLB once and for all that it’s not us, it’s you.
In a Hollywood twist, the Rangers’ leadoff hitter was Marcus Semien, an East Bay native and one of the dozens of promising young players traded away by the A’s thanks to Fisher’s stingy stewardship. He was one of many to wax poetic about the injustice of the A’s being stolen from Oakland. Others included a retired veteran who was featured on the jumbotron to share how the A’s were the only thing that got him through three tours of Iraq and a year of chemotherapy and A’s manager Mark Kotsay, who cried into the microphone while thanking fans for supporting his team.
The concession workers, who are losing not just their team but their jobs, went above and beyond to create a positive environment for everyone. I watched season ticket holders pose for photos with their section’s roving beer or churro vendor and listened to the team’s official MLB BallPark Pass-Port stamper patiently give well wishes to dozens of out-of-town baseball fanatics who were desperate to get their Coliseum stamp before its doors closed for good. One particularly generous concessionaire gifted me three hot dogs for nothing but a wink and a nod, disappearing back into the crowd before I could thank him.
Oakland’s players, whose lives are also being uprooted as they prepare to play out their major league careers in a minor league ballpark for an indeterminate stretch of professional vagrancy, showered the fans with love. Each pitcher made sure to tip his cap to the crowd after being subbed out, pausing above the dugout and soaking in the roar of the crowd as if he had tossed a perfect game. Not a single player had left the infield when I finally exited the stadium a full hour after the final at bat.
Yesterday’s game was filled with countless poignant and emotional moments, but there are two that are forever etched in my mind.
The first game in the middle of the eighth inning when stadium emcee Kara Tsuboi addressed the crowd for the final time. Visibly fighting back tears, she first thanked her security guard, camera crew, and son for supporting her over the course of a career spanning more than 1,000 A’s games since 2006. She then looked directly into the camera and proclaimed to the crowd “This doesn’t just end tomorrow. This love, this community, this is Oakland.”
Tsuboi was spot on. Billionaires can take our teams, hold our local governments hostage for stadium funding, and then blame us, the fans, when they leave. But no one, not the league, not city officials, not even the outsiders chomping at the bit to paint the A’s departure as another example of Oakland’s impending doom can rob this city of its communal spirit.
The other standout experience for me came after the game concluded. Riding another packed train back to my apartment, a trio asked me for directions to the ferry building. Since the best route there happened to include getting off at my stop, I offered to walk them in the right direction.
As we talked, I was surprised to learn that they were neither A’s fans nor Bay Area residents. Instead, the group hailed from St. Louis and happened to be visiting San Francisco this week. Upon realizing their trip coincided with the final A’s game in Oakland, they immediately bought tickets, motivated to show up and support the people of Oakland by the experience of having their own team, the NFL’s Rams, stolen by an absentee billionaire. These three random people from 2,000 miles away showed more compassion for The Town in a day than John Fisher and the MLB have over the course of the entire 21st century.
The relocation of professional teams is a uniquely North American phenomenon. Though the A’s have been in Oakland since 1968, they were formerly based in Kansas City and Philadelphia. Most baseball insiders believe Chicago White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf to be following the John Fisher playbook in an attempt to either force Chicago to pay for a new stadium or else get the league to approve a relocation to Nashville. The Seattle SuperSonics, Hartford Whalers, Montreal Expos, San Diego Chargers, and Arizona Coyotes are just a few of the other teams to have been ripped from their cities with no signs of a replacement.
The Oakland A’s were pioneers in so many ways, giving us the Bash Brothers, The Wave, MC Hammer, and the upscale stadium concession revolution. Unfortunately, Oakland has also played host to innovative forms of abandonment, becoming the first city to lose three teams from three separate leagues and the only city to lose the same franchise (the Raiders) on two separate occasions.
But for three hours on a cloudless autumn day tailor-made for baseball, none of that mattered. The A’s beat the Rangers 4-3, and for one final moment, Oakland was on top of the world.
Thing I Recommend This Week
Evermore: The Theme Park That Wasn’t | Jenny Nicholson (YouTube)
Losing the Plot: The “Leftists” Who Turn Right | In These Times
Video Game Ownership Is Already Dead | Aftermath
Jawbone: The trials of a 16-year-old can’t-miss startup | Fortune
Cold War in the Desert | Vice
I know I have a lot of subscribers from Notre Dame, so I also recommend checking out the recent Financial Aid Trust class action settlement.
Along with 16 other private universities, Notre Dame has been accused of illegally conspiring to artificially limit the amount of financial aid they awarded from 2004-2024. If you attended these schools during that time frame, you may be entitled to receive a settlement estimated at around $1,500 per person.2
I’ve never written in this near-real-time journalistic style before. What did you think? Leave a comment or send a reply and let me know.
Thank you as always for reading, and have a great weekend!
Most East Bay lifers I have met harbor little ill will against the Warriors. The team had already bounced between Oakland and SF, and the Warriors continue to show love to Oakland and the East Bay. A guy at my office made the point that the Warriors move to SF still left them closer to their former Oakland arena than the “San Francisco” 49ers are to the city of San Francisco.
I am not an attorney, and this is not legal advice.
This was such a cool format!! I love your usual, too, but the way you changed it up is really fun.