Ark of the Lost Angels

“Oakland Athletics” _{(Credit: Carlos Lopez)}

I was raised a Baltimore Orioles fan since birth. Camden Yards has been another home for as long as I can remember. Yet the only other baseball stadium where I’ve caught a game was Oakland.

Yesterday afternoon, on September 26^th, 2024, the Oakland Athletics played their final home game at the Oakland Coliseum after 57 years in Oakland. Their last home game was a 3-2 win over the Texas Rangers.

The A’s have one final series against the Seattle Mariners before they will be the Oakland Athletics no more. With several years stopover in Sacramento at a Triple-A stadium while their new home in Las Vegas is being built, the A’s have played their last game in Oakland, at the only home they’ve known while they’ve been there, the Oakland Coliseum.

Not that the new Vegas stadium has any money secured to build a new facility. Not that anyone outside of A’s owner, John Fisher, wants the team to move to Las Vegas. Not that this is in any way respectful of the longtime fans of Oakland.

Not that John Fisher is anything more than a liar, a coward, and a cheat who happens to own a baseball team.

I won’t claim to be a diehard Oakland fan, or that I ever followed the team much. But as a baseball fan who suffered under Peter Angelos’ ownership taking everything he could from the team while giving nothing back, I can sympathize with the longtime A’s fans who are devastated by the Athletics’ 57 year tenure in Oakland coming to its end after multiple seasons where the team was never even given a chance at performing well. Anyone who knows anything about Baltimore sports, or teams relocating will no doubt know of the infamous incident in 1984 when the Baltimore Colts left for Indianapolis in the middle of the night. Many of us in Charm City know the pain of losing our team. It’s one of the reasons why we insisted the Cleveland Browns’ history and identity remained in Cleveland when the team moved to Baltimore in 1996 to become the Ravens.

So, I know that it means to have the Oakland Athletics leaving Oakland. It’s a soul rending pain, that no amount of love for the game or loyalty to a team that struggled on its best days could have kept them in Oakland. It’s a slap in the face to those who rooted for the Athletics year in and year out, even while Fisher put no money into the team. Of course, cowardly tanking a team’s performance to then excuse a move because “the fans aren’t supporting the team” is not uncommon in the sports ownership world. I know that many in Oakland have voiced their displeasure. Bay Area local channel ABC 7 sports director Larry Beil being one of them. I can’t say I blame them at all.

At the very least, I believe that all sports teams relocations from here on out should work the way the Browns’ move to Baltimore worked: the identity of the team stays in the home city, and the city receiving the team gets to create their own identity. The Athletics should, from here on out, always be in Oakland. Even if the name and colors are unused for a few years. Even if the organization isn’t the same. At a certain point, a sports team becomes a Ship of Theseus situation, where enough players, executives, managers, and front office staff have changed over that from era to era, the same team may essentially be a different team. The only thing maintaining that continuity is the name and colors and the records attached to those things. While I think the A’s should never leave Oakland, the organization currently taking care of the name can, and move to Las Vegas as something new.

The thing about being the owner of a sports team is that you don’t just have a fiduciary responsibility, but a duty towards the fans of your team to put everything you have into winning and playing the best of the game. You are a steward of a cultural tradition that, in many places, has lasted decades. It becomes interwoven with the fabric of so many places. A sports stadium is still one of the last places where people can routinely come together beyond everything else, and for just a few hours, become part of just one thing as the only thing that matters. Nobody cares what you do or who you vote for when you walk into the stadium, buy an overpriced beer and a hot dog, and plant yourself in one of those hard seats for a few hours. You’re all there for one reason and one reason only: to watch your team pummel the other team. Sports have a way of bringing people together because it gives them something common to root for. So many of these sports owners fail in that capacity, which makes them miss the crucial fact that if you put a product on the field that is worth watching, people will show up to support the team, and you’ll make your money. “If you build it, they will come.”

John Fisher will go down in history with the worst team owners across every sport. Everything he has done has been to spite the people of Oakland, who cherished the Athletics for 57 years. The man wants to move the team to Vegas, and he seems to be the only one. He lied about securing funding, and there is no place to play in Las Vegas, but because he refused to sign a new lease at the Oakland Coliseum, the Athletics are leaving for a Triple-A facility in Sacramento for potentially the next four years. He refuses to talk to the press or explain himself in any way. He hides away because he knows that the people of Oakland would see through his hollow excuses. There is no stadium funding plan, there is no contingency for the Athletics move. Just a hasty exit so he can make his money in Las Vegas as soon as possible. The Warriors of the NBA and the Raiders of the NFL left town for supposedly greener pastures since 2019. In the span of just a few years, Oakland lost all of their teams, but none of them have been quite as pathetic as the A’s catching the last bus out of town.

The Oakland Athletics have enjoyed a decent amount of success during their tenure in Oakland, especially in the 2000s and the 2010s. Every club has its ups and downs, but this was a team still beloved by its city, even if it was considered a “small market team.” The San Francisco Giants across the Bay gave the A’s a heated local rivalry which always brought out the best in both towns. This was the team who fought their way into the playoffs with the cheapest roster possible during the Moneyball years and still performed admirably. The same A’s who have been a consistent fighter in the American League the whole time.

The final Oakland A’s game has me emotional in many ways. I knew I went to a game, but the sadness that I feel in sympathy with the A’s fans has unlocked my memories of sitting in the upper deck at the Coliseum, watching a game which I didn’t quite understand yet. The buzzing of the crowd, the smell of the overpriced food, the feel of well-trod concrete under my little feet, the crack of bat hitting ball that sent a cheer through the entire stadium. A little research and conversation with my parents led me to believe that I was there on June 12^th, 2002, at a day game against the Milwaukee Brewers which the A’s took 8-0 in the middle of the Moneyball season. That is a story I’ll want to tell my kids about one day. That is a memory I’ll cherish until I’m old and grey.

With all of this happening, my heart goes out to the fans. I remember the way terrible ownership made me feel, and never in a million years would the Orioles have left Baltimore. Even from the other coast, I knew how much the Athletics meant to Oakland all these years later. Yesterday, it wasn’t hard to see I was right.

Baseball may not be as popular as it used to be in America, but it’s still woven into the fabric of this country. In many ways, baseball is a place for everyone to come together. And sure, there is a conversation to be had about overpriced tickets, owners who don’t put money in resulting in bad products on the field, questionable or downright terrible umpires, cheaply made overpriced merchandise, and a host of other issues facing baseball. But there are so few things still so popular today which has the same rich tradition as baseball. My family used to have season tickets for the Orioles when I was a kid, and year after year of bad performance and terrible ownership decisions pushed us away from the team, there was a part of me that believed in that Orioles Magic, and I feel rewarded after so long to have a team to come back to. I know I would have been devastated had the team left town during that time. I feel for Oakland. I feel for the fans who were more diehard and loyal than I was, that stayed coming to Athletics games these last few years even when it was obvious that Fisher had no interest in putting a team on the field to compete. My heart breaks for Oakland. This is a situation I think every baseball fan disagrees with. Fisher will be reviled in history, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt in this moment. The people of Oakland were failed.

Yet, that hope which springs eternal in the human breast says the sun will shine once more in Oakland. Perhaps the gods of baseball will intervene and send the Athletics back to Oakland with new ownership amidst the catastrophe of their layover in Sacramento. Perhaps enough voices will convince John Fisher to leave the history of the Athletics in Oakland for someone new to pick up with as an expansion team, and the existing organization forges a new identity in Las Vegas. Or perhaps a new team will come to town, and the city of Oakland will embrace them as wholeheartedly as they embraced the Athletics when they arrived in 1967. Whatever will happen, baseball is something which brings hope. 162 games a season, and a miracle can happen at any one of them. That’s the kind of optimism that can buoy someone through harsh seasons on the diamond and wipe away their troubles outside the grandstands.

Billy Beane said it best, “It’s hard not to be romantic about baseball.”