Thank you for reading The Dope.
I’m not sure how much of my life I’ve spent at the Oakland Coliseum. It’s a lot. Months, certainly. When the A’s were in town for, say, a seven-game homestand, I’d show up as a columnist a few times — maybe two or three or four — to throw down a few random baseball judgments and opine at will.
Multiply those visits times the homestands, throw in some playoffs, add the Raiders games, then figure all of that per year for I don’t want to tell you how many years….Yeah. Should’ve brought a pillow.
And I was rewarded, no question. All of us were, during that era of sports journalism, the late 1980s through maybe the early 2000s, when newspapers were so flush that my bosses sometimes sent me out on road trips just before the end of the fiscal year to make sure we had burned through our full budget, so they could ask for more. It was a sweet deal until it wasn’t. (The newspaper industry didn’t take the internet seriously until it was too late, a fatal self-harm of a miscalculation.)
We all saw great games and great A’s teams — the Moneyball guys, yes, but a lot of stone-cold winners well before that, too, and Rickey Henderson and Dave Stewart, Canseco and McGwire, Eckersley, Tony La Russa’s teams and…I’ll stop. It was a good time.
The Coliseum isn’t a place that inspires a lot of nostalgia. It’s hard to love a building, anyway — you love what it stands for, or the memories you made inside it — but the Coliseum is particularly rough. Toward the end, after a decade-plus of the A’s idiot owners trashing the facility and essentially telling the world that it was uninhabitable, about the best you could say was, “Hey, plenty of parking and you can walk right in.”
So nostalgia is not what a lot of folks felt this week. More of a chill. We could go on for thousands of words about the demise of the A’s in Oakland, but there’s an overarching truth that’s a lot darker than even that botch job: Your team can go.
It can go anytime.
All it takes is the wrong combination of people and circumstance.
That’s not consoling, no. But every time a market gets its guts torn out, we have to at least take a moment and acknowledge that sports at this level is business and marketing and sales. Fandom is — it’s not nothing, but it’s not the thing when people start pushing money around the table.
The Coliseum failure is an A’s ownership failure, but then the A’s have almost always had terrible ownership. I’m not sure why. Except for the 15 years that the Haas family shepherded the franchise, 1980 to 1995, the franchise had been held by a succession of sometimes colorful but generally underfunded or outmanned people, from Charlie Finley on.
This last group, the John Fisher group, is the worst of the bunch. Fisher’s parents started the Gap clothing company. John has been a sporting tool, a cheapskate who constantly shorted the A’s on payroll and lifted no fingers to make the Coliseum experience better, while collecting “we are a poor market” money from the other MLB owners for years. He turned a profit.
Why those same MLB owners would approve a move for Fisher that involves the A’s going to a minor-league park for three, maybe four — do I hear five? — seasons is a great question with a terrible answer: They all want the right to get similar malodorous ideas approved if they ever want to. (You’ve been warned, local fan.) The owners vote for each other so that nobody has to worry too much about asking permission to do something awful.
I mean, it’s a cartel. They can do what they want. This A’s thing only reinforces what we already know about pro sports, but if you’re still not sure, ask the Seattle SuperSonics fans, or the San Diego Chargers fans, or the Raiders fans, or the Rams or Colts or Oilers or Browns or — I guess we could play this game all day.
Let’s not.
Here’s a better story. A couple of weeks ago, we were given the gift of seeing our son play for the Detroit Tigers against the A’s at the Coliseum. It was a night game and two day games. The crowds were, ahem, intimate. Didn’t matter.
Despite everything I’ve told you and my opinion about inanimate objects like ballparks, I had a moment, I won’t lie. It got misty. Maybe it was the sunscreen. But it was also a chance to revisit the old hulk of a building, shake down the ghosts. I could barely believe that a member of my family was out there on the field where I’d seen so many others — great players, Hall of Famers — do their thing.
(I know what you’re thinking. Colleen, my wife — it’s her family with the athletic talent in the bloodlines. This explains it. Carry on.)
We spoke with a few of the Coliseum workers, none of whom would be making the trek to Sacramento beginning next season. For them, the ride ended here. We drank a beer. All three days, after the games, we spilled onto the field with our big extended East Bay family, including some lifelong A’s fans, and saw Ryan and took photos.
It was a goodbye. It’s not perfect, because they never are, but sports are that way, not perfect. The building indeed held memories, not just concrete. We added one. It’ll have to do.
Watched the A’s dozens of times over the years, probably through every owner’s group starting with Charlie Finley. Fortunately, I never made it to the Fisher era. But Don Fisher? I’ve been cursing John Fisher!
Gorgeous. It's generous of you to share some perspectives that are unique to you.