I wish that I could say that my earliest memories at the Oakland Coliseum were of what was happening on the field, but they weren’t. I remember walking into the Coliseum, bundled in my jacket, hand-me-down A’s hat pulled over my head, holding my dad’s hand as we walked through Gate C. I remember the rumbling of crowd murmurs along the concrete concourse, the old-timey “PROGRAM!” calls that boomed out into the parking lot that hosted tailgate after tailgate in backs of beat up pickup trucks. I remember all of the green and gold, the smiles shot at me and my dad as if to welcome us to a home that I was just getting to know.
It was never about what was going on at the field–though I came to love that part of the game too. It was about the memories that were being made each and every time I walked into that concrete cathedral.
As I grew older, I would move away from slinging heaters against a dusty tarp at the speed pitch in the Stomper Fun Zone while my dad watched the game on a tiny monitor. We’d sit in layers of A’s gear during those cold Oakland nights, after school in the middle of the week where the crowds would be slim and the parking would be free. We’d watch the corny, Lite Brite style animations on the scoreboard that was decades out of style. We’d sneak away for day games and try our best to move further under the overhangs to hide from the crawling sun.
When I became a young adult, it got harder to consistently go to games, but my dad and I would wind up back in the lower bowl of the Coliseum, talking about the team, talking about the future, subconsciously reliving those memories we had together.
Though my two sons were born into a covid-stricken world, I held onto all of these memories in the hope that I’d be able to recreate them with my boys once baseball returned.
Last season, my dad was able to throw out the ceremonial first pitch. I proudly watched from the top step of the dugout. He held my oldest while he did it. It was my oldest’s first baseball game.
We went to playoff games. We went to games that didn’t matter one bit. We were there when Frank Francisco of the Rangers threw a chair into the crowd. We were there when the Oakland A’s came home and finished off a sweep of the Minnesota Twins during a cold October day. I’ll never lose those memories.
But they’ll fade with time. And the truth is that my kids likely won’t remember the Coliseum like I do.
They’ll have pictures of them there, and they’ll be told stories of how they ran around the concourse like I did, or how they made funny faces at Stomper, or how they threw tantrums because a late afternoon A’s rally just so happened to coincide with nap time.
But in the blink of an eye, while those two boys were fast asleep, a continued tradition of Oakland A’s baseball died.
Selfishly, I always figured that, if this day were to come, that it would synchronize with the reality that I would have to relocate too. The Bay Area is increasingly impossible to afford; a long distance relationship with the A’s might have been our reality regardless of Howard Terminal or a stadium a couple blocks north of Allegiant.
I strategically numbed myself to the idea, cast off the ongoing threats of relocation as threats for the sake of positioning, ignored the radio silence by Dave Kaval, who was hired for the purpose of being John Fisher’s talking head.
When the news of the Athletics’ deal with Red Rocks Resorts surfaced, everything stopped.
The Oakland A’s finalized a binding agreement on a 49-acre lot at Dean Martin Drive and Tropicana Avenue in Las Vegas, just north of the Raiders’ Allegiant Stadium. A’s President Dave Kaval broke his apparent vow of silence to call for the end of the supposed “parallel paths:” “For a while we were on parallel paths (with Oakland), but we have turned our attention to Las Vegas to get a deal here for the A’s and find a long-term home.”
Moments later, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred endorsed the decision: “We support the A’s turning their focus on Las Vegas and look forward to them bringing finality to this process by the end of the year.”
Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao responded by immediately ceasing negotiations and referencing “alternatives for the redevelopment of Howard Terminal.” The A’s put out their statement. The calls for there to be some entity out there to raise their hand and tell the collective Oakland A’s fan base to hold on before embracing doomsday went unanswered.
Tentatively, the A’s have all the momentum going toward a $1.5 billion, 35,000-seat stadium with a partially-retractable roof. They’ll be motivated to get things done before the end of the year so that they don’t have to deal with punishments by the league.
And while this may not truly be over until shovels hit the sand in the desert, it pragmatically is.
Oakland fans absolutely do not deserve this. They don’t deserve to be jockeyed around or blamed for poor attendance or painted as apathetic spenders or beaten over and over again as the punchline to jokes authored by reporters on the east coast. They don’t deserve to see their teams torn down every third year or a front office that collectively shrugs its shoulders while the owner cries poor or to have to bear the doubling of ticket prices to swap out RC Cola with Coke products.
Above everything else, they don’t deserve to have the happy ending of this story ripped out of their hands.
The punishment that Oakland A’s fans endured over the year was always taken with the hope that better days would come–that Howard Terminal or the Peralta site or frankly any other local idea would come to fruition. We shared safeguarded dreams that “New Oakland” was on the horizon, that investors would come in to save the day and keep the Bay Area dream alive, that the four championships in Oakland would be met with a fifth someday soon and that all of the abuse would amount to something.
Instead, it’ll be met with an uprooting of that history.
More likely than not, this will be the final season that the Oakland A’s are the Oakland A’s. With the relatively easy mechanics of Nevada law, the A’s will be fast-tracked to the desert. They’ll pack up, spend a season or two at Aviator Stadium, and then close the roof on their new site to play along the strip.
Meanwhile, the Coliseum will be mostly vacant. We’ll deal with the “I told you so’s” of half-tapped-in baseball fans, jokes about the opossums taking over, and so on.
But what hurts the most is knowing that the home that houses so many of my memories–as well as so many memories I was supposed to share with my boys–will be empty.
And, some day, it’ll be gone forever.
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