The Oakland A’s played their final game on September 26, 2024, defeating the Texas Rangers 3-2 in front of over 46,000 fans who had gathered to say goodbye to the team that had held a place in their heart since 1968.
I turned nine the year the A’s came to Oakland. From the beginning, this team and its at-the-time-considered garish green and gold uniforms atop white shoes, colors deemed sacrilegious by the staid, tradition-bound baseball world, enraptured me. I don’t remember if I read at the time the words uttered by Senator Stuart Symington (D-MO), who, upon the A’s leaving Kansas City for Oakland, commented, “Oakland is the luckiest city since Hiroshima.” Symington, who unlike California’s present-day feckless national politicians cared far more about his constituency than lining his pockets courtesy of insider information while jockeying for national prominence, threatened baseball with legislation to both revoke its antitrust status and the reserve clause, which at the time precluded free agency from existing. Baseball blinked, and the Kansas City Royals were born in 1969. Where has Gavin Newsom been in all this … never mind, forget I asked.
How was I to know of such things as the mechanisms and financial chicanery of moving teams from one city to another or the (to put it mildly) eccentric ways of A’s owner, Charlie O. Finley? I was nine years old, and 1968 was a year of tumult far exceeding any possibility of noting or caring what people in Kansas City thought. Nationally, there was the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the election of Richard Nixon as President, and Apollo 8 circling the moon. Topping even these was the Vietnam War, which was personal for me as my oldest brother was there fighting for the country he loved even as it despised him for doing so. Even at that young age, I needed relief. And here it was.
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The A’s were my team now, my new youthful passion. I saved newspaper clippings from the Oakland Tribune and poured over every word they printed. I listened to or watched every game I could, the old sneaking a transistor radio under the pillow so my parents wouldn’t catch me staying up past my bedtime routine regularly being employed so I could listen. I watched as Finley assembled a juggernaut that won three straight World Series in the 1970s, then destroyed as he had no interest in paying his players what they were worth.
I stayed with the team through all its ups and downs, riding the waves of championships, cellar dwellers, and every place in between. For years, my wife and I had season tickets back when doing so was the only way to guarantee a decent seat at the Oakland Coliseum. Win or lose, I was there. Always. No matter what.
Ah, the Coliseum. It was what it was: a giant concrete circle perfectly unsuitable for baseball and football. Yet, in its pre-Mount Davis days, it was a terrific place to watch a game. The sightlines were excellent, and the oak-dotted hills beyond the bleachers gave the place a pastoral aura. Other parks were better, but in its own way, the Coliseum was warm and inviting. It was home.
Rather than focus on the bad memories — I saw the A’s lose the 1988 and 1990 World Series in person — I choose to focus on the positives. Two come to mind. The first one was during the top of the first inning of Game One of the 1989 World Series between Oakland and the San Francisco Giants. Living in the San Francisco Bay Area, as I have most of my life, you can imagine how over the top the local hype was for this series. It was at such overkill that I was beginning to regret the hitherto thought dream matchup taking place. Nevertheless, there I was at the Coliseum, with the Giants having two runners on and two out. The stadium was alive; the tension was crackling. Then, and only then, did it occur to me that I was witnessing the events before me. It was the A’s and the Giants in the World Series for all the bragging rights that came with it. Despite how the Series unfolded, with the Loma Prieta earthquake shattering the Bay Area and postponing the Series until late October when the A’s completed a sweep, the memory remains.
The second memory comes from the mid-1990s. My parents, who had retired and moved back home again to Indiana, came to California for what turned out to be their final visit before my father’s passing in 1999. I went with my Dad to the A’s game that Saturday afternoon. My fervent hope was that my Dad would see Mark McGwire hit one of his massive home runs. He acquiesced, and the A’s won. How clearly I remember sitting there trying not to become morose at the thought this would most likely be the last baseball game he and I would watch together, instead focusing on the joy that moment gave. A father and son, watching a ballgame together.
And now the A’s are gone from Oakland, thanks to a spoiled, sulky, overaged brat owner unwilling to reach into his own billions and build a new ballpark while attempting to place the blame on local politicos, who, to be fair, never helped matters. The A’s will be strictly minor league for years, playing at a minor league park in Sacramento’s miserable summer heat for at least the next three seasons, if not longer, while waiting for the construction of a new stadium in Las Vegas that no one who lives there wants. But the local and state governments flashed the cash, and baseball’s powers that be couldn’t resist the lure of an excuse to write off traveling to see Wanda LaLustee at the KitKat Klub as a business expense.
I have my priorities in place. I’ve buried both my parents and two of my three brothers, including my oldest, who survived two tours of duty in Vietnam but was not so fortunate in his dealings with the Veterans Administration’s healthcare system. I’ll go back to rooting for the Giants as I did before the A’s came to town, although it won’t be the same. As to Oakland, it still has the Roots minor league soccer team, which, courtesy of local group ownership in the same fashion as the Green Bay Packers, isn’t going anywhere. But … yeah.
First, it was the Seals leaving town for Cleveland and then disappearing altogether back when I was in high school. Then it was the Raiders … twice. And now, the A’s. There will be no new memories. No, all that is left are the old memories, now tainted by bitterness over what should have been — a shiny new ballpark in Oakland, with new memories attached — but will most likely now never be thanks to the rich and powerful seemingly unaware there will not be a U-Haul trailer carrying a safe towed by their hearse.
