Everyone loses as the Athletics leave Oakland Coliseum for good with a win

A‘s fans lingered long after the finale of their 3-2 win over the Texas Rangers, savoring every last minute one last time in the massive concrete Oakland Coliseum. Now the club, one of Major League Baseball’s most storied franchises — founded in Philadelphia before a stint in Kansas City — is about to leave the city of Oakland and its colorful fan base after 56 seasons. The Athletics are not leaving for greener pastures, but potentially – and we’re still not entirely sure – to a desert area where they weren’t asked to be. Oakland native Dave Stewart, an All-Star pitcher for the city’s last World Series champion in 1989, asked the question of the day during the A’s pre-game broadcast.

“What happened?” said Stewart. “There’s no real explanation for it. And whatever explanation you give, it doesn’t cover the impact, and it doesn’t cover all the details of what actually took place, of the Oakland A’s leaving this city and playing [in at] minor league baseball [stadium] three years in Sacramento, eventually ending up in Las Vegas.”

Influence is the word that stands out, especially when you consider the emotional investments fans make in ball clubs and what it means to lose a franchise to another city. Kristin Young was not one of the more than 46,000 prize-driven supporters who attended cliché-drenched, insincere pre-game “tributes,” imploring fans not to “be sad it’s over,” but to “be glad it happened ‘, and to ‘be glad it happened’. “celebrate and have fun”. She had already made the decision to stay away for the final game and the season leading up to it.

“Everyone says, ‘Kristin, you’re going to do it, right? For example, don’t regret it.’ I literally went back and forth until last week. And even [my friend] Tara said, “I let my husband set up a TV outside. So you don’t have to enter the stadium. Just at our tailgate.” I thought: no, it’s going to get worse for me…. I have moved beyond the anger. So now I’m just sad.”

Like many baseball fans in the East Bay, the club has been part of its makeup since the beginning. Her grandmother, Eva Young, bought season tickets in 1988 and took her grandchildren to games as soon as they could walk. Memories were built over decades, including learning to read by sounding out players’ names on the backs of uniforms. Section 216 was the second home for a busy family who always found time to bond over baseball.

After Eva passed away in 2018, the family gathered annually to honor her on Family Suite Day at one of the few MLB parks with affordable luxury boxes. On Thursday, the foggy-looking A’s fan, wearing a green Mark McGwire T-shirt, lamented the end of traditions and the latest void in professional sports on the “sunshine side of the bay.”

“You get used to seeing the same people with concessions, the same ticket buyers,” Kristin Young said. ‘I’ll miss the short walks, the weird B [parking] The entrance to the lot looks like a terrifying war zone… and I won’t have the same experience as when I take my kids or even my nieces and nephews to the games. I know you can tell all the stories later, but I will miss telling those stories like in the stadium. I will miss being able to share those experiences with other people in the places where they happened.”

There’s only one reason why Oakland is leaving and that’s because owner John Fisher, who inherited his family’s Gap fortune, decided to make a logic-defying leap east in what would be a lose-lose deal for almost all parties involved. seems: the owner, The fans of Oakland, the future fans of Vegas A, the city of Oakland, the city of Las Vegas, Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association.

It’s no wonder that former owner Walter Haas Jr., under whom the Athletics enjoyed their greatest success in the Bay, winning a World Series title while setting a franchise record, calls the move “downright inexcusable.”

The A’s much-discussed, painful search for a new ballpark to replace the aging and infamous Coliseum, baseball’s “last dive bar,” is a long-running, complex saga that includes multiple owners, mayors and even the Cross-Bay Giants. However, that search finally seemed to be nearing a resolution and the team received $774.5 million in tax-subsidized infrastructure improvements and other subsidies to move to a Former 55 hectare shipyard site known as Howard Terminal. The project, seen as the latest mixed-use development to gain popularity among North American sports team owners, offered impressive views of San Francisco’s waterfront, the Golden Gate bridge and the Oakland Bay bridge. And was close to the center. It made sense for a city still reeling from the loss of the NFL’s Raiders and the NBA’s Warriors, and for Fisher, who had the opportunity to build something unique in the East Bay.

“And then John Fisher abruptly switched gears and said, ‘No, we’re considering buying land in Las Vegas,’” Neil deMause, a journalist who co-authored the book Field of Schemes, told The Guardian. “And no one is really sure if that was because he felt like Oakland wasn’t showing him enough love, or because he thought he could use it as leverage to try to get something else from Oakland.”

The city of Oakland didn’t fall for it and the A’s, who threatened a move to Las Vegas to pressure city officials to get the best possible deal, went ahead and moved on from Sin City.

“And now he’s a dog who took the car and has to figure out what to do with it,” deMause said.

So Fisher, who for years traded away the best of the A’s talent pool, achieved some of the lowest payroll costs in the sport, raised season ticket prices and alienated every baseball fan in the area, is moving to Las Vegas with government funding for stadiums worth up to $300 million less than what Oakland tried to offer. They will move into the smallest stadium in the MLB, in the smallest television market in the MLB, on a site of just nine acres of land that has absolutely no development rights and may not be large enough to occupy the dome they want.

Despite all these factors, MLB’s owners, who would never punish any of their own for unsound business decisions (for fear that they might one day want to make some of their own bad business moves), voted 30-0 to allow it. of moving. Currently, no funding has been announced for the remaining part of the stadium and so there is a good chance that the situation could get worse. The A’s players will now have the pleasure of playing at a minor league park in Sacramento while their new stadium is built. as it’s built. And if the team ends up in Las Vegas, chances are the low-budget A’s will still be a revenue-sharing team and struggle to attract free-agent players, something that will surely have their new fans on fire and will set fire.

In theory, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred could have reversed the owners’ vote under the “best interests in baseball” clause, allowing a sale to an investor like Warriors owner Joe Lacob, who was willing to keep the A’s in Oakland , could have been enforced. But it was clear that baseball’s interests were not enough.

And so the A’s saga will continue for a while, as Oakland fans must once again ponder the question of the day and their lives: What happened?