Thursday will be a tough day for fans of the Oakland Athletics. Maybe the toughest ever.
The storied Swingin’ A’s franchise that brought Reggie Jackson, 1890s mustaches, gritty World Series wins, Billy Ball and the Bash Brothers to the Bay Area will slink out of the Oakland Coliseum Thursday afternoon.
To make it clear, the owners of the team will slink out of the stadium sometime around 3:30 p.m. after the final out of professional baseball is recorded in the storied East Bay stadium that has play host to World Series games, NFL playoff football, epic concerts and the short-lived USFL.
Even as ownership is booed, the players, the concession workers, the security guards and other men and women who have worked at the Oakland Coliseum for decades will be heartily cheered one last time.
When the 2025 baseball season begine, the A’s will have been the last pro team to flee Oakland. The Raiders and Warriors left pre-pandemic in 2019. To put it mildly, fans are pissed. They believe the A’s could have stayed in town, but decided to kick them in the teeth instead.
Honestly, it sure seems that way.
The Coliseum is a gritty place that’s a monument to a bygone era. There is a lot of concrete. The seats are rusted and creaky. The men’s room have troughs. There are good sight lines, but the foul ball territory surrounding the infield of “Rickey Henderson Field” is wide enough to accommodate both bullpens. It creates a huge divide between fans and the action on the field in some places and in others makes the game more intimate.
“I’m one of the first players that had a field named after him,” Hall of Famer Henderson said Wedneday night. “It’s a great honor.”
If he could take a souvenir, he said he take third base, put it in his trunk and take it home Thursday.
Fans know it as the Last Dive Bar. And, fan Bryan Johansen maintains a Twitter account @lastdivebar devoted to preserving the memory of the stadium and needling A’s owner John Fisher in equal measure.
“This building is beautiful, in my opinion,” Johansen told SF Chronicle baseball writer Susan Slusser Wednesday as part of a longer piece on disrespectful fans tearing out seats to take home as souvenirs. “And it’s cherished.”
Full disclosure, I’ve been going to the Coliseum since the early ‘70s when my dad would take us to see the season opener every year. Back then, schedules were pretty rigid — we got the Minnesota Twins for most of those games.
But we also got to see Vida Blue, Bert “Campy” Camperneris, Joe Rudi, Sal Bando, Catfish Hunter and the incomparable Reggie Jackson. Growing up in San Jose in the 1970s, you had to pick a team and stick with it. Lots of kids I knew were Giants fans and 49ers fans. Who could blame them? The Giants had Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Juan Marichel, and Gaylord Perry. The Niners weren’t that stacked. They had John Brodie and Gene Washington.
The Oakland Raiders also called the Coliseum home. Not only was the team coached by John Madden, the team had Jim Otto, George Blanda, Cliff Branch, Gene Upshaw and were notorious through the NFL for their style and swagger.
There was another, albeit subtler, vibe that made Oakland different than San Francisco. The East Bay in the 1970s was a hub of manufacturing. GM had a plant in Fremont (it’s now Tesla). Pockmarked Highway 17 was lined with little machine shops, welders, tool and die guys and further north giant shipbuilders. Normal people like my parents often shared the road with Hells Angels zooming back and forth between San Jo and their clubhouse on Foothill in Oak Town. People worked hard and got their hands dirty. There were clubs on Old Oakland Road, that were like something straight out of Animal House. Berkeley was close, but it was also in its own universe.
In that sense Oakland was more like Detroit. And the A’s had moved from the midwest in the same year we did. Kind of perfect.
Across the Bay, San Francisco was more hip. Bank of America and Transamerica built massive headquarters there. There was Haight Ashbury, jazz clubs and coffee houses. Hair played at the Orpheum. The only place you were likely to find hair in the East Bay was in the scrambled eggs off the roach coach at break time.
I’m guessing its some part of that image that attracted my dad to the Oakland teams, and by extension that attraction extended to me and my siblings. I’m also guessing that he liked those Oakland teams for another very good reason, the weather. My dad moved his family to California to get away from the bone chilling Midwest cold of Detroit. Candlestick Park, home to the Giants and Niners, could be Midwest cold on a mid-July night. There’d be few visits to Candlestick during my youth.
During those years, the Coliseum was the place you went to see concerts. Bill Graham’s “Day on Green” were epic. Bands I saw at the Coliseum included the Stones, Santana, Boston, Foreigner, Van Halen, AC/DC, Pat Travers, Linda Ronstadt, Dolly Parton and even the Beach Boys.
They would pack kids like sardines into the Stadium for these acts — only protecting the pitcher’s mound.
But, not everyone digs the vibe in Oakland. Or the funky Oakland Coliseum. Visitors are often taken aback by its shabbiness. Southern California News Group Columnist David Allen has been to more than half of MLB stadiums and he wasn’t impressed by the Coliseum.
“I've been to 17 stadiums and Oakland was by far the ugliest. Nothing else was even close. It's like putting your right foot into your left shoe; the stadium just seemed like a poor fit for baseball. It wasn't even likably bad, it was just bad.”
I get it.
You could search Twitter all night and find a dozen reasons for the A’s adios to Oakland.
As David Allen points out, the stadium is definitely one of those reasons. Nonetheless, the fall of a historic place, which some have described as a cathedral, had to begin somewhere. My friend, J. Brian Charles, a Baltimore journalist, blames the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.
His theory is a good one.
On Oct. 17, 1989 at 5:03 p.m. as the A’s and Giants prepared to play in Game 3 of the World Series, the 6.9 Loma Prieta Earthquake rattled Candlestick Park and millions of residents of Northern California. The quake caused billions of dollars in damages, taking out two major freeways, causing 63 deaths and 3,757 injuries. Additionally, hundreds of homes were destroyed.
Overall, the Bay Area bounced back quickly. The World Series resumed 10 days after the quake and the A’s took the crown. It was their last hurrah.
As Charles sees it, following the quake, money flowed to San Francisco, but not so much to Oakland. After all the banks were there. In San Francisco they removed a collapsed freeway, opening up The Embarcadero and ultimately making it possible for the Giants to find a new home. In Oakland, the rebuilt the freeway, cutting off neighborhoods from one another and the town from would-be visitors on their way to somewhere else.
The dichotomy has all the makings of an epic book. Perhaps one day.
Oakland has seen its share of ups and downs. But for all of it, the A’s have been there. World Champions in ‘72, ‘73 and ‘74; back on top in ‘89 and despite a few good runs never back on top, but always top of mind to their die hard fans.
Needless to say, real Oakland A’s fans are pissed about their future. Over the past two years “Sell the team” has been a frequent chant at the stadium. Owner John Fisher has been pilloried and vilified on Twitter, on TV, in visiting stadiums and in reputable newspapers around the country. MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred bears some blame too. After all, he sat by while this team has decided to leave Oakland for the shabby end of declining Vegas Strip.
There’s way more to this story. Next up a trip to Oakland for the last game.