What Does it Mean to be Uprooted?

As early as 2000, Oakland has been threatened with the reality of the Athletics leaving for greener pastures in another city.

Fans teetering in this precarious position—elated, then devastated by news of the franchise’s intentions of finding a new home away from Oakland—have been lulled into a sense of disgruntled compliance.

Goodbye to new optimism. Goodbye to budding franchise stars. Goodbye to the hope that this time things will be different.

Being Uprooted from the town that the A’s have firmly supplanted their roots since 1968 is a constant threat to the fans that continue to come back, hearts drumming, voices echoing along the concrete passageways of a decrepit cathedral that has already been abandoned before.

Oakland has accepted their team crossing the frigid Bay waters for a market perceived as more profitable. It has seen their team sprint across a desert to find a billion-dollar oasis close enough to the strip.

But will Oakland, one day soon, feel what it’s like to be without a team at all?

The answer seems to sway longer toward yes than it does no. For every advancement, a snag has the most recent Howard Terminal project staggering back.

Most recently, Oakland’s elected officials have floated the idea of pawning off their own responsibilities in the form of a million-dollar ballot measure. The A’s ownership group, in turn, has placed yet another bid for a property in the Las Vegas area.

This disappointment is nothing new.

For many fans, the only way to process these constant threats of rapid, violent change is to embrace denial. Deny the possibility that the A’s could exist anywhere else. Deny that today’s faces of the franchise could still be tomorrow’s because some kind of stability is just on the horizon.

On the field, as the A’s began to sputter into the last few days before the 2021 trade deadline, the fanbase reassured itself that some of the late-season magic would push the A’s into a Wild Card Game that would at least titillate a sense of hope.

But no matter the moves made at the deadline, no matter what the last few magical summers had told us about the A’s, the magic was not there.

The team would seemingly lose every remaining game to the Seattle Mariners. They would lose out on an opportunity for the Wild Card.

But most dauntingly, a looming sense of what would be coming in the offseason became more real.

No matter how many times the Oakland A’s have ripped the hearts out of their fans, there always seems to be a hope that something could be different this time around.

Maybe Sonny Gray will spend the majority of his career with the green and gold? Traded. Maybe Josh Donaldson will survive the winter? Traded. Maybe the local boy and heart of the team Marcus Semien will stay? Forced out the door.

A’s fans have seen a long and expanding list of familiar faces “narrowly” miss a window that has not come to fruition. A three-month lockout only paused the impending teardown of the latest iteration of a possible core.

Just days after the news that the 2022 season would be played in its entirety, Matt Olson would be dealt to Atlanta. Matt Chapman would be moved to Toronto. Chris Bassitt would be sent to the Mets.

This disappointment is nothing new.

Two off-seasons ago, longtime beat-writer Susan Slusser flipped to the other side of the bay. Longtime manager Bob Melvin would relocate to San Diego, where team motives aligned more closely with his remaining years in baseball. Beloved color commentator and former A, Ray Fosse, would step away from the broadcasting booth after announcing that he had been silently battling cancer for years.

Fosse passed away just two months later. Heartbreak has followed closely behind this organization.

These changes are not all the same. They are not all the same kind of heartbreak. But they are heartbreak and they are change. Each has been woven into a story that will one day be looked back upon when the A’s finally commit to Oakland or commit to becoming uprooted.

We will look back and think about what Matt Olson, Matt Chapman, and so many others would look like playing at the new stadium at Howard Terminal. We will wish that the new stadium would have become a reality while Ray Fosse was still around to see it.

But that will only be the case if Oakland can stop the one constant that has plagued the Oakland A’s—violent, unnerving, heartbreaking change.

In just a week, the organization will embark on a journey both anxiously new and disconcertingly old. There will be some familiar faces, of course. There will be names we still recognize. But the A’s will dive into the unknown of the season just as they dive into the unknown of what lies beyond the season.

And we will dive with them.

If you are here reading this, there is—presumably—some semblance of you that cares about this team, where they stand and where they’re headed.

If you’re anything like myself, you’ve toiled with the difficult question of what will happen if the unthinkable becomes the reality—if the disappointment ends up amounting to nothing more than wasted effort, if the Athletics’ roots are yanked from the cracked concrete covered earth of Oakland and planted into scorched desert sand.

If the A’s leave, will I follow?

Picturing another city’s name preceding “Athletics” triggers a visceral reaction, even if two city names have been there before. Imagining a new color scheme or script isn’t much easier. Envisioning all that Oakland’s wanted coming to fruition somewhere else is excruciating to accept.

Feeling disgruntled at this point seems par for the course. The Athletics organization has hurt its fans countless times.

So has the City of Oakland, itself.

But one day, perhaps even unbeknownst to any of us, we will be going to our last game at the Oakland Coliseum, our last time crossing the barbed-wire-crowned BART bridge while being courted by knockoff merchandisers and the smells of greasy hot dogs on pushcarts, our last time walking down those concrete corridors to see closed down vendors, our last time walking past rows of near-empty green seats as our team sprints onto the field, our last time listening to the mix of bat-cracking with cow-belling and barrel-drumming, our last time feeling Celebration reverberate over aging speakers and sun-bleached green tarps.

Our last time is coming, whether we’ve come to accept it or not.

Whether we’ve come to accept it or not, the Oakland Athletics have already become Uprooted by the nature of their situation.

The Baseball Gods—or the greedy billionaire owner, or the apathetic politicians, or a combination thereof—have their white-knuckled fists clenched tightly around the fate of the Oakland Athletics, whose roots dangle precariously above the earth, waiting to be supplanted again.

This is the reality of the Oakland Athletics. This is the reality of being Uprooted.

The day will come when the Athletics will settle in their new space—and only then will we see if the A’s are able to flourish into something beautiful or are bound to shrivel and wilt away everything they once were.

We do our best to follow along this grueling process. We hold our breath.

We wait to collectively exhale when the organization, the bureaucrats, the Baseball Gods work in motion together to finally plant this franchise in a soil familiar to us.

But all we can do for now is wait.

Two years ago, I was standing in a hospital room in Washington, holding my newborn son and coming to terms with new fatherhood—contemplating what experiences we would share, what passions I could instill in him.

There was no guarantee that baseball would be played in 2020. A lockout two years later felt like a legitimate threat. And the daunting possibility of the Oakland A’s having a foot already out the door was becoming more and more imminent.

All we could do was wait.

It crossed my mind more than once on those sleepless nights rocking him, that our days spent together at the Oakland Coliseum would be finite, that seeing the A’s play in Oakland could one day be only some distant, hazy memory for him.

He may be too young to know any of this uncertainty.

He may be too young to remember.

As he stirred in his sleep, I’d hush him in the dim-lit hospital room, quietly singing the same song, in the same way, that my own father had sung to me when he tried to get me to ease back into sleep:

…Let me root, root, root for the A’s,

If they don’t win, it’s a shame.

For it’s one, two, three strikes, you’re out…

At the old ball game.