I had never been to Oakland, nor could I name a single player on the Oakland A’s. But on September 26, 2024, when the team left town, I wept like a small child.
You see, when people visit California, they don’t visit Oakland. That, of course, can mean only one thing—it’s my type of city. The Bay Area is the sophistication of San Francisco. It is the wealth of Silicon Valley. It is the intellect of Berkeley. The rest, it could be said, ends up in Oakland.
The city of 440,646 is one of the most ethnically diverse in the US, home to perhaps the greatest per-capita concentration of artists in the country. While the western side of the Bay has attracted the Mark Zuckerberg types, Oakland has produced Tom Hanks, MC Hammer, and the lead singer of Green Day, Billie Joe Armstrong.
Sure, crime is a problem, but that’s an American problem. Must we point fingers selectively?
It was a different era that allowed a gritty city like this one to have three professional sports teams. In more bling-obsessed times, one by one, those teams have found new homes.
First, it was the NBA’s Golden State Warriors. They, mercifully, stayed in the area, ditching Oaktown for their prior home in the more polished San Francisco.
Then it was the NFL’s Oakland Raiders. That one hurt, but the Raiders had skipped town before, setting up shop in Los Angeles before coming back, only to bolt for the glitz of Las Vegas.
The pain was real, but still left were the Oakland A’s. As a spectator, I do all sports, but baseball lore has a special place in my All-American heart. And with Major League Baseball (MLB) being fiercely protective of that lore, there was no way the league would ever let a storied franchise like this one leave.
The memories were just too strong.
It started with the move to Oakland in 1968.
Next came the three consecutive World Series victories in the 1970s. (Yes, I wasn’t quite born yet, but fanatics of baseball mythology will tell you that birth year matters little.)
Fast forward to the late 1980s—I had been around for over a decade—and the A’s began another stretch of three consecutive World Series appearances. This one was not as successful, but it was just as memorable.
Who can forget being on the wrong end of one of the most iconic home runs in Fall Classic history?
Or being part of one of the most tragic moments in baseball history?
After that second World Series run, the A’s became elite in another way—finding big success with small money. Thanks to the book and subsequent movie Moneyball, you may know the architect of those teams as Brad Pitt. His real name is Billy Beane.
With Beane’s help, despite playing in the Coliseum—aka Baseball’s Last Dive Bar—the A’s stayed relevant.
The team with the green and gold continued to show up in October, and the stadium became part of the aforementioned lore. In times when most markets had made a move to gimmicky, shopping-mall-like structures to cater to the well-heeled, the Coliseum continued to look—and perhaps smell—like a toilet bowl. While it didn’t exactly have the charm of Wrigley or Fenway, it certainly didn’t lack personality.
One might have even thought that the old stomping ground of Catfish Hunter, Reggie Jackson, Rickey Henderson, and countless others was still going strong, simply waiting for a new generation of stars to recreate the electricity of the ’70s and ’80s.
But the 21st century has little patience for such character, unless it is contrived.
A’s owner, John Fisher, who inherited his fortune from his parents’ Gap clothing empire, would agree. Degrees from Princeton and Stanford don’t necessarily make for a great owner, nor can they make someone care about the city of the team they own.
Even the most sentimental of the lot knew the Dive Bar had to eventually go, but they could never have imagined how far. When the city of Oakland, known for its mazelike bureaucracy, offered to chip in a few dollars—as in several hundred million dollars—for a new stadium, Fisher and his fellow MLB owners opted for the more-monetizable Las Vegas instead.
Suddenly, the grungy part of the Bay Area was teamless, devoid of the ability to make new memories.
The feisty city that could was the floundering city that couldn’t.
It had been put in its place, one that no longer has room for mere feel-good stories.
After all, what value does middle-class nostalgia have relative to luxury boxes?
So on September 26, 2024, when the Oakland A’s played their last game in The Town, I shed some tears.
Yes, I know money rules.
And surely I know that everything is fleeting.
Heck, I even know that meaning is fabricated.
But what I don’t know is this: Do we always have to make it so obvious?
