Elegy for the Oakland Athletics

Three more games.

There will be three more games at the Oakland Coliseum on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Then the team known currently as the Oakland Athletics will finish out the baseball season with three more games in Seattle, and that will be it. The Oakland A’s will be no more. Born 1968, died 2024. Kaput.

What’s next for one of baseball’s most celebrated teams, or formerly most celebrated teams, is more than a little unclear. They’re slated to move to Las Vegas, but there is no major league stadium there, and the one that the A’s are planning to build won’t be ready until 2028. The team is slated to play the next three seasons in a minor-league ballpark in Sacramento. Given the uncertainty of all these arrangements, and of society in general, anything could happen. The only sure thing is that the Oakland era is over.

There is plenty of blame to go around for this outcome. The team owner, John Fisher, is a billionaire but nevertheless refused for years to pay the salaries necessary to keep the A’s competitive as if he deliberately wanted the team to be bad to ensure that attendance would be low. He also ignored aggrieved entreaties to sell the team, and numerous offers to buy it, from people who wanted to keep it in Oakland.

The city of Oakland, meanwhile, found time amid its efforts to lose the NFL Raiders and the NBA Golden State Warriors to lose the Athletics as well. Like so many major cities today, Marxists who have contempt for sports and for the people who watch sports staff the city administration in Oakland. They stalled or blocked outright all of the team’s attempts to build a new stadium that would be more pleasant than the Coliseum, and in a safer area of town, so they share the blame with Fisher for the team’s absconding. 

No one considered continuing to play at the Oakland Coliseum an attractive option. Indeed, the Coliseum has never been loved, except by my younger self. Way back in the early 1970s, when the Oakland A’s were busy winning three world championships in a row, the captain of the team, third baseman Sal Bando, dubbed the place “the Mausoleum,” in view of its gray concrete exterior and sparse attendance even then. But that doesn’t mean that the A’s had no fans. The second great championship team in Oakland was second in the American League in attendance in 1989 and 1990. Field a decent team, and they will come — and so Fisher determined not to field a decent team.

The A’s attendance was healthy before the Raiders blocked the Coliseum’s lovely view of the Oakland hills to build luxury boxes that were dubbed “Mount Davis,” after the football team’s notorious owner, Al Davis. Mount Davis made the Coliseum a truly ugly place, yet even when the Raiders finally absconded after the 2019 season, the A’s didn’t tear down Mount Davis and restore the previously pleasant atmosphere. As it turns out, they had their eyes on the exit door as well.

And so what is known in baseball parlance as a “storied franchise” will soon tell its last story. In 2016, I attended a reunion of the 1972-74 championship team, the towering heroes of my youth, and it’s a good thing I did, as there will soon be no home for such gatherings. Also, many of the principals have died since then, including such green-and-gold luminaries as Bando and the wily pitcher Ken Holtzman, as well as Holtzman’s formidable counterpart Vida Blue and his batterymate Ray Fosse, both of whom were kindly and affable, as well as extremely generous with their time and memories.

I met outfielder Joe Rudi there as well, and said to him, “Nice catch.” Both he and I knew that I was referring to his tremendous catch in the second game of the 1972 World Series, when he leaped halfway up the left field wall to rob the Cincinnati Reds’ Denis Menke of an extra-base hit and possibly of the World Series championship. Rudi grinned and replied with surpassing modesty: “Oh, I was just in the right place at the right time.” So were the Oakland A’s as a whole back then. 

The Oakland Athletics existed from 1968 to 2024, and so will live on in the memory of those of us who loved them as corresponding to a time when America itself was stronger, brighter, saner, and more confident. They will pass into history during what has come to be known as the 2024 “election season,” a particularly fateful time that could make the days when we could spare any time for baseball at all seem like an impossible luxury.

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Yet the memories will remain. Hunter, Holtzman, and Blue, the unbeatable starting trio. Rollie Fingers and his handlebar mustache, taking a break from tying maidens to the railroad tracks to come in to save what they started. Reggie Jackson, who would be the first to tell you that he was the best in baseball, and he would be right. Rickey Henderson, who could be split in half and be two Hall of Famers. Dave Stewart and his death glower for batters. Eck. Hudson, Zito, and Mulder. Yoenis Cespedes, aka La Potencia, and the A’s teams from just a few years ago, which Fisher and his henchman Dave Kaval cravenly dismantled (as they had done to other teams before) when they were on the verge of greatness.

Ultimately, all things come to an end, and all we have are our memories. One day, even the New York Yankees will play their last game. Still, the cavalier manner in which all the major sports leagues create and then discard fan bases should cause all sports fans, even fans of the winners of the Bay Area, the San Francisco Giants, and the rival Los Angeles Angels to pause for a moment to bid the A’s a fond adieu. No fan of any team can safely say, “It won’t happen to us.” It’s just a business, after all. It’s just too bad that it’s one that can so easily capture our imaginations and our hearts.