Farewell to Oakland, where A's fans lost a 56-year battle

OAKLAND, Calif. – Just moments after an era-defining playoff game for the A's here, manager Mark Kotsay grabbed a microphone and sang a closing “Let's go to Oakland” to the more than 30,000 people who stayed long after a 3-2 win Texas Rangers on Thursday afternoon.

Thirty minutes later, people were still lining up in the lower bowl to fill plastic cups with coliseum soil to create a lasting memory.

Next year, the A's will play in Sacramento at Sutter Health Park, the current home of the Triple-A River Cats. Eventually they will move to Las Vegas.

Many Oakland supporters will refuse to maintain their support following the move, put off by the club's lost decades-long battle to remain in the Bay Area.

They said goodbye on Thursday. The mood was predominantly positive, like the evening before. As the players entered the field, they received a standing ovation. When starting pitcher JT Ginn left in the top of the sixth, he received thunderous applause. The right-hander clapped his glove to acknowledge the warm welcome.

Fans remained on their feet for most of the final three innings. They reacted positively to Kotsay's speech on the field.

However, there were a few interruptions. People threw at least three green flares onto the field, disrupting the game, and two fans invaded the diamond in the ninth inning before security guards tackled them. Signs reading “Sell the Team” could be seen throughout the venue.

This aspect of Thursday's farewell game reflects the entire history of the Colosseum. In Oakland baseball, tensions almost always arose between fans and owners — but not between players.

Just five years after the A's arrived from Kansas City, the first wave of emotion poured out on national television. During Game Six of the 1973 World Series against the New York Mets, fans took aim at then-owner Charlie Finley, whose reign was marred by avarice and a persistent urge to take the organization elsewhere.

According to a newspaper report on the scene dated October 21, 1973 The Telegraph HeraldA's supporters hung anti-Finley banners at the Coliseum, one of which read: “A's Fans for Oakland Ownership. A million fans can't be wrong.” Some people chanted for Finley's ouster in the seventh inning.

Relocation threats and poor attendance under Finley culminated in a near move to Denver, which did not yet have the Rockies. But fans came back when the Haas family bought the club in 1980 in a last-minute takeover born of community desperation.

In 1979, the A's played a home game with 653 spectators, one of the lowest attendances in MLB history. Exactly two years later, after Finley sold the team and doubled the payroll, a then-record 50,000 people turned out for opening day at the Coliseum Investigate San Franciscor article from 1981. Within two seasons, the number of A's season ticket holders increased from 75 to 3,500.

In 1990, Oakland had one of the highest payrolls in the MLB and welcomed the third-most fans per game at about 35,000. The A's made it to the World Series three straight seasons during those glory years.

However, the following decade the popular Haas family sold the club. Worse, the local government green-lighted the Coliseum's costly Mount Davis expansion—a sad plastic surgery that obscured Oakland's rolling hills behind the outfield wall—to bring back the NFL's Raiders. Because of these changes, the A's did not make the playoffs from 1993 to 1999.

Relocation threats arose again, initially against the nearby Bay Area cities of Fremont and San Jose. The talented A's roster bled key players like Jason Giambi, Miguel Tejada, Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder and Barry Zito.

“I didn’t want to leave,” Tejada told reporters before his first game at the Coliseum after signing with the Orioles as a free agent in 2004. “They forced me to leave. I would have taken less money to stay in Oakland.”

Before the mass exodus of its top young homegrown players, Oakland finished a respectable 19th in 2001, 18th in 2002, 17th in 2003 and 19th in 2004. But soon after, viewership fell to the bottom of the MLB.

It didn't help that the nearby San Francisco Giants managed three World Series parades in five years (2010, 2012 and 2014), or that the crumbling Coliseum became the joke of the baseball world.

Since 2020, Oakland has ranked 29th or worse in attendance for four straight seasons. But the painful 25-year decline in attendance, which accelerated after the pandemic, should not overshadow the electrifying moments that fans defiantly produced.

Oakland's epic 2012 chase against the Texas Rangers to win the AL West on the final day of the season inspired fans to come out in droves and create their own soundtrack. Songs, dances, drum lines and chants formed in the stands. The Balfour Fury. The Bernie Lean. A recurring sing-along by Carly Rae Jepsen.

It was a team with the second-lowest payroll in MLB that was picked last, trailing the Rangers by twelve games as of July 1, 2012.

After winning the division at home in front of 36,000 spectators on October 3, 2012, the players returned the fans' love by taking a lap around the field and allowing spectators who had refused to leave the field after the final pitch , gave a high-five.

A week later, people in the Coliseum wept with joy as Coco Crisp blasted a walk-off single into right field in Game 4 of the 2012 ALDS, extending a miracle season with a furious ninth-inning comeback. Strangers hugged each other in the stands. When Seth Smith stormed home to score the winning run, the late Ray Fosse, then the radio color commentator, let out a scream from the depths of his soul.

The Detroit Tigers, the counterpart to the A's after the 2012 and 2013 seasons, equally valued the Coliseum environment.

“I like bars with music, but this is a little loud,” quipped legendary manager Jim Leyland of October in Oakland. “So it gets into the eardrum. Thank God I can’t hear that well.”

“This ballpark is unique because you have to walk past the fans to get on the field, so I walk past the fans and they yell at me as much as they can,” said Justin Verlander, the A's' longtime bogeyman in 2013. “It’s very hostile and really fun to be on the mound. Everyone in the stadium [they] defend themselves against me and scream as loud as they can.”

“Something I’ll never forget,” said another future Hall of Fame pitcher, Max Scherzer.

Recently, Rays manager Kevin Cash said that the crowd at Oakland's 2019 wild-card game at the Coliseum — the last postseason home contest outside of the pandemic season to prevent crowds — was “perhaps the loudest I've ever seen in one.” “I heard baseball stadium.”

The fan demographic contributed to a stadium atmosphere that, as former A's infielder Jed Lowrie once put it, “always feels like there are more people there than there actually are.”

The Colosseum was one of the cheapest major US sports venues to visit. While many avid sports fans, the lifeblood of a sports industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars, were increasingly barred from live events across the country, including at Oracle Park across the bay, attending an A game remained in the Coliseum feasible sentence.

As a result, Oakland baseball's highlights gathered crowds that seemed to represent the community's average working citizen more than many other professional sports franchises.

After saying goodbye on Thursday, this atmosphere developed like that of the dodo bird, the woolly mammoth and the saber-toothed tiger. Beaten to an ugly death. You can expect a comparatively soulless entertainment scene in Las Vegas.

The Bay Area working class community lost an unbalanced battle. Oakland, already on the moving ropes again in the 1970s, held on as long as it could. This is how David vs. Goliath happens in the real world.

The fans here loved Nelly's both on Wednesday, at the final evening game at the Coliseum and at the finale on Thursday afternoon Ride with me booms over the PA system. “Oh, why do I have to feel this way?” they sang in unison. “Hey, it must be because of the money!”