The familiar smells of street food, swamp water, and urine permeate the air as I cross the bridge that leads from the Coliseum BART station to the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum a few minutes before the first pitch of a July 19 matchup between the Oakland A’s and the Los Angeles Angels.
For the past three decades, I’ve taken this hallowed path to countless shows, sporting events, and smoked-out concerts. As a kid, I’d take the BART to see the Raiders and A’s on Sunday afternoons and long summer days. As an adolescent, I’d pull up to KMEL Summer Jam across the concourse at Oracle Arena to see Kendrick Lamar or E-40. As an adult, I spent many more nights here covering the Warriors during their dynastic run. But tonight’s walk is particularly nostalgic. I’m here, for the last time, to see my beloved Athletics in person before they play out the rest of the 2024 season and then leave Oakland for good.
Since moving west in 1968, the Athletics have inspired every possible emotion in Oakland fans. They won three consecutive World Series in the 1970s, led by eclectic stars such as Rollie Fingers, Reggie Jackson, and Catfish Hunter. In 1989, a team featuring Rickey Henderson, Dave Stewart, and Bash Brothers Mark McGwire and José Canseco won the World Series over the San Francisco Giants. In 1995, real estate developers purchased the team and immediately slashed payroll, leading to the team’s Moneyball era, in which general manager Billy Beane built a perennial contender with only limited financial resources. That team won 102 games in 2001 despite having the second-lowest payroll in MLB.
Every iteration of the Athletics—from the “Swingin’ A’s” of the ’70s to the lovable underdogs of the early aughts—captured something essential about the spirit of Oakland. For all its existence, The Town has lived in the shadow of neighboring San Francisco. Professional sports was a temporary antidote for that, a chance for the region to be seen by the world in the way it saw itself. We didn’t need to be New York, Los Angeles, or San Francisco, because we were busy beating them.
Now, the relationship between the A’s and Oakland has entered its final frame. Team owner John Fisher, who bought the franchise with Lewis Wolff in 2005 and bought out his partner in 2016, is relocating the team to Las Vegas. (Starting next season, the A’s will play in a Triple-A park in Sacramento until their new stadium in Vegas is complete, which is slated for 2028.) And the A’s are just the latest professional sports franchise to leave the East Bay, following the Warriors’ move to San Francisco in 2019 and the Raiders’ departure to Vegas in 2020.
My fandom was born out of the childhood stories of my father, who adopted both the A’s and Raiders while growing up in the Central Valley. With profanity-laced enthusiasm, he would tell me about the teams of the ’70s. “None of these pitchers today could fuck with Vida Blue, son!” he’d boast. “I ain’t lyin’,” he’d add, while Googling Vida’s stats to verify his claim. When my pops arrived in the Bay Area in the late ’80s, he was captivated by the Bash Brothers, keeping a framed selfie with Canseco near his bed well into my teenage years.
My father worked at a fire sprinkler business called George M. Robinson & Co., which had a factory on 85th Avenue in the shadow of the Coliseum. The company owned A’s season tickets behind home plate that it occasionally gave to its employees. When we’d get them, we’d head to the Lake Merritt BART Station, not far from our place on Seventh and Oak, board the Fremont train, take the 10-minute ride to the ballpark, and experience the joys of a ball game.
Most times, we’d get to the park early so that my dad could pick up a program, go over the lineups, and insult the opposing pitcher. “This muhfucka is weak,” he’d say. “We’ll be home by the seventh.” He also had a knack for making special moments with his boy, like in the 2002 playoffs, when he got us tickets to a matchup against the Minnesota Twins for Game 2 of the ALDS. We sneaked behind the A’s dugout in the final innings of the 9-1 win and flagged down outfielder David Justice, who rolled a game ball over the dugout roof for the little kid in the A’s hat and puff coat.
“You know he’s the one that fucked it up with Halle Berry, right?” he informed me shortly after. “But that was hella cool of him.”
Baseball didn’t only provide whimsical moments for my father. He pledged to boycott MLB during the strike in 1994, which canceled that season after 114 games and broke his heart in the process. “They ruined the game, man,” he’d say. “And for what? A couple of dollars?” But he found his way back in the late ’90s, making a compromise to only listen to legendary broadcaster Bill King call the games, which played on the Kenwood stereo system that sat right next to our dining room table. By the early 2000s, he had fallen back in love, as the A’s built one of the best teams in franchise history, boasting a lineup with Miguel Tejada, Jermaine Dye, Eric Chavez, and Jason (and Jeremy) Giambi, plus an ace pitching staff headlined by Barry Zito, Mark Mulder, and Tim Hudson. Oakland made the playoffs four times in a row, including a heartbreaking 2001 matchup against the Yankees that was defined by Derek Jeter’s iconic flip. When we lost our cable in the mid-2000s, he watched every game on an internet stream that may or not have been legal, yelling at every high and low, bursting with pride whenever his underfunded team took down the league’s titans.
Watching today’s team, that feels like ancient history. The A’s still operate on a shoestring budget, but they are on pace to finish last in the AL West for the third season in a row. In the franchise’s final years in Oakland, Fisher has hollowed out the on-field product while raising ticket prices and letting the Coliseum fall into disrepair—a cynical ploy to reverse-engineer the conditions that would justify relocation. Fans have mounted a spirited opposition to the move, but at this point, it’s out of their hands.
Now, as I watch the A’s take on the Angels, there are more empty seats than occupied ones. I get the urge to go back in time, so I get out of my seat, walk up the steps toward the concourse, bust a right, and take a lap around the concrete palace.
Near Section 242, the concessions stands that occupy my childhood memories are empty. It looks nothing like the packed corridor that I remember from decades ago, when Pops took us to see Giambi return to the Bay as a New York Yankee; we booed him mercilessly, only to watch him go 2-for-4 with a seventh-inning double that set up the game-winning run. Today, old banners are strewn about the ground, and the only open room features a gurney, an IV rack, and some EMTs. A few minutes later, I pass Section 106, which housed the legendary “Black Hole,” where only the most G’d up Raiders fans could sit. I remember a rain-drenched 2010 matchup against the Chiefs when me and my best friend Dez watched from the 10th row as the Raiders beat Kansas City 23-20 in overtime.
Toward the end of my loop, I see the third deck, high above the outfield wall. The structure, colloquially known as “Mount Davis,” was built in 1995 to lure the Raiders back from Los Angeles, at a cost of over $200 million to taxpayers. While the Raiders’ return delighted local sports fans, it came at a time when other parts of the city were sorely underfunded. Over the next 25 years, the Oakland Unified School District declined to the point that my parents spent what little they could to send me to private school, pushing us further into poverty. Meanwhile, the city is still paying off debts related to the Mount Davis renovations.
The fate of the A’s has always been inextricable from that of Oakland. Fisher sought hundreds of millions in taxpayer money for a new stadium before ultimately turning to Vegas (which has committed $380 million in public funding). Now, the team will ship out as Oakland struggles to bounce back after the pandemic and pivot in the wake of the tech boom of the 2010s, which failed to deliver on its promises to transform the city.
In recent years, people have left Oakland in droves, devastating its downtown business sector and undoing the city’s decades-long gentrification efforts, which had already pushed a number of my childhood friends out of town. In late June, 14 people were shot at a sideshow following a Juneteenth celebration near Lake Merritt. The next day, the house of Mayor Sheng Thao, who was already facing a recall, was raided by federal agents, putting the local government in peril and eroding the trust between the city and its citizens. The city faces an affordability crisis, with unhoused people sleeping under high-rise apartments that have “Many Vacancies” signs. I want to believe that ridding Oakland of John Fisher will allow the city to direct support to people who need it, but it’s hard to be optimistic.
As I ponder all of this, A’s first baseman Seth Brown makes an impressive over-the-shoulder catch near the Angels’ bullpen, snapping me back into the game, which is beginning to heat up. In the bottom of the sixth inning, the A’s reel off seven runs, putting them up 13-3, and suddenly I’m on my feet, cheering for the team I’ve tried to hate over the past few years.
For the seventh inning, I pop a squat a few rows behind home plate. I can still see everything that made A’s games so much fun during my youth. To my left, an OG is keeping score in his notebook. To my right, an inebriated fellow in an A’s jacket is getting the crowd going during the seventh-inning stretch, as we all sing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”
But what really hits me to the core is the abundance of parents and kids watching on. In a few weeks, I’ll have a son of my own, and the notion that all the teams I grew up rooting for will be gone by the time he’s here makes me wonder whether we’ll ever share the connection to local sports that I had with my father.
I wonder whether the li’l homie will have any relationship to Oakland sports. In late 2023, a local group founded an independent baseball team called the Oakland Ballers, and two United Soccer League teams, the Oakland Roots and Soul, are slated to play in the Coliseum starting in the fall of 2025. Fans of the Giants, Warriors, and 49ers have opened the bandwagon for newly nomadic fans like myself, but Li’l Logan from the Lake could never let me fully complete an act of betrayal like that.
Before you know it, the game is over. The A’s win 13-3. Angels and A’s fans hug in the bleachers and Stomper the Elephant waves a team flag near the mound. There’s a drone show planned afterward that the security guards insist I stay for, but I can’t summon the energy. So out of the Coliseum I go, as 3X Krazy’s “Stackin Chips” soundtracks my journey back across the bridge to the BART station.
Being an A’s fan sucks, but I’ll miss it so much.
