Last Out in Oakland

The Oakland Coliseum, where the Athletics played baseball for 57 years until last Thursday, is beautiful to me, in the subjective way that anything you have loved for a long time is beautiful. But the stadium is not, factually speaking, nice to look at. It is mostly concrete, with exposed rebar tracing the ceilings and water stains mottling the floor, and so dark in places that I’ve had to use a flashlight to see the ground in front of me. Because it was dug out from nearly 30 feet beneath the surrounding dirt, much of it sits damply below sea level, and because it was built to be shared with a football team, the Raiders, its field is rounder and has more foul territory than any other stadium in Major League Baseball.

The Coliseum’s best feature—a wide, almost decadent view of the golden Oakland hills—was intentionally blocked in the 1990s after the Raiders’ owner, Al Davis, demanded that the city build more seats in exchange for the team’s moving back from Los Angeles. (The government did, for half a billion dollars. In 2020, the Raiders moved to Las Vegas, shortly after the Golden State Warriors basketball team’s move from Oakland to San Francisco. Mount Davis—the monstrous slab of seats named, unofficially, after Al—remains.) The Coliseum regularly lands at the bottom of ballpark rankings and is often compared to a toilet bowl, even by people who like it. I have been watching the A’s play there my whole life, and it is one of my favorite places on Earth.

Being an A’s fan has always been painful in the ordinary way that being a baseball fan is painful. But in 2005, it started to become agonizing. John Fisher, a Giants fan whose parents founded the Gap, bought the team with Lewis Wolff as minority partner, and they quickly began trying to get out of the Coliseum. Like many MLB owners, they wanted the public to help pay for a change, via a new taxpayer-funded ballpark in a new location. But the city of Oakland, in a prolonged budget crisis partly stemming from the Mount Davis project, could not give Fisher (who is worth $3 billion) and Wolff everything they wanted.

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Over the next several years, especially after Fisher became sole owner of the team in 2016, the product he was offering began to deteriorate. Oakland had never been a big-money team, but its management started spending even less on players and player development. Ticket prices rose precipitously. The Coliseum fell further into disrepair. A’s leadership announced that the team would explore other markets. It seemed obvious what was happening, and not just because it was basically the plot of the movie Major League: Fisher was cynically and systematically working to make Oakland baseball harder to love and then blaming the fans for not loving it enough. He miscalculated: We loved Oakland baseball anyway—unconditionally. We just didn’t like him. Last year, the A’s had the lowest payroll in baseball. They also had a possum living in a broadcast booth and the lowest attendance of any team in the league. But on nights when the fans arranged it, the park was packed in reverse boycott, 27,000 people and hardly any official A’s gear in sight, just an ocean of kelly-green shirts with a message for Fisher: SELL.

Like all activism, this was love. Like all activism, this was wild optimism—a belief that enough people, working together, could make things different. “All baseball fans believe in miracles,” John Updike once wrote. “The question is, how many do you believe in?” Last spring, Fisher abruptly walked away from negotiations to keep the team in Oakland. (The mayor called it “a blindside” and accused Fisher of using the city as “leverage.”) No miracle had come. The A’s were leaving. They will now spend the next three years in Sacramento, sharing a stadium with the Giants’ Triple-A affiliate, before, in theory, moving into a $1.5 billion ballpark on the Las Vegas Strip that will be financed in large part by taxpayers and seems oriented toward casual, visiting fans who are looking for a vacation activity and don’t mind paying high ticket prices. (Ground has not been broken, but according to renderings, the park will be very shiny and have a view of the simulacral Statue of Liberty that fronts the New York–New York casino across the street.) Every MLB owner approved the move. It is the first time in two decades that one of their teams has relocated, and the first time in history that one has done so after such a fight with fans.

Those fans are mostly done with Major League Baseball. They’re airlifting their devotion to the local Pioneer League baseball team or to the independent soccer team that will play at the Coliseum next year. Oakland, a great sports city with a population roughly the size of Miami’s, has no more major professional sports.

Fisher almost never speaks to the press, but last week, he emailed a letter to fans attempting to explain himself. He wrote that he had always wanted “to win world championships and build a new ballpark in Oakland,” and that he and his colleagues “did our very best to make that happen.” I received this message while I was on the phone with Steven Leighton, a fan who had dedicated the past few years to persuading Fisher to sell, perhaps to one of the many people who had reportedly come out of the woodwork to express interest in buying the team and keeping it in Oakland. (Leighton was telling me about the time his dad took him out of school to watch the final game of the 2012 season, as a surprise.) That night, Larry Beil, a local news anchor, called the letter a “great work of fiction” and ripped it up on the air.

A stadium is a funny thing for anyone to own. It’s real estate, sure. But I can’t think of any other building that holds so many memories. The Oakland Coliseum hosted 4,493 regular-season games, 61 playoff games, and one All-Star Game. It is where a batboy got the nickname MC Hammer, where a platinum-blond cheerleader called Krazy George invented the Wave, and where Rickey Henderson set a league record for stolen bases that still stands. It is where, on Mother’s Day 2010, Dallas Braden pitched the 19th perfect game in baseball history, in front of 12,000 people, every last one of them holding their breath; afterward, he scooped his grandmother, who had raised him after his mom died, into a weepy bear hug on national TV. (I was watching, away at college, holding my breath too.)

Some memories are collective; others are personal. The Coliseum is where Esperanza Uruena went into labor and begged her husband not to make her leave, even as her insides twisted and cramped—Dave Stewart was pitching. It’s where my friend Rachael once threw out the first pitch with her daughter, Ynez, strapped to her chest; this past week, Ynez, suddenly 5, was in the parking lot wearing a traffic pylon like a witch’s hat and waving a SELL flag. When I was a kid, my family and I would lay pilled blankets on the field after games and watch fireworks explode above us. I wrote in my diary after one of these nights that it was the happiest I had ever been. In our 20s, friends and I would sit 10 or 15 wide at weekend day games, cheap beers in our hands and feet up on the bleachers.

Ten years ago, the A’s played the Royals in a single-elimination wild-card game. It was in Kansas City, but I watched in Oakland, in a dive bar so crowded, I could barely move my arms, with a friend I’d been to a couple of games with. It was our first date. The A’s lost 9–8 in 12 innings. The next season, that man and I bought quarter-season tickets, and the season after that, and the season after that, touching knees in the right-field bleachers, April to October. The bleacher-dwellers have their rituals, and we were happy to submit: We clapped along with the drums and the cowbells, headbanged for Sean Doolittle, believed in Stephen Vogt. We watched as our favorite players left, traded away or given up to free agency. In 2015, the team entered a painful, protracted slide, and then—still among the worst-paid teams in baseball—they rallied to reach the playoffs for three seasons straight.

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During the last of those seasons, one shortened by plague and played in empty stadiums, we moved across the country. When baseball came back, we were somewhere else: We watched different teams, in different ballparks. We read the bad news coming out of Oakland. We had a baby, Bobby, in the middle of the postseason, and I listened to the World Series on the radio while I nursed in the dark. We loved our son without condition or limit, and then, just when we thought it was the happiest we’d ever been, we got even luckier: He became a baseball fan, running coffee-table bases on fat, unsteady toddler legs and begging to watch the highlights over breakfast. (He’s a New Yorker, so he roots for the Mets.)

This summer, we took Bobby to the Coliseum. We wanted him to see the place where his parents fell in love, and we wanted to chant “Let’s go, Oak-land!” one last time together. We sat in our usual spot: Section 149, among the drummers and the diehards, the people who reverse-boycotted and fought and still scream “Fuck you, Fisher” when their team scores a run. Since the deal had become final, their ranks had thinned considerably. “I had to be here as much as I could, but everyone grieves in different ways,” Esperanza Uruena told me that afternoon. But we got to see some old friends, and our son got a certificate that said MY FIRST A’S GAME, which we joked we should take a Sharpie to—add and last. Bobby, one and a half, did not understand the significance of anything, but he had a great time watching the game. His dad and I both cried.

In the face of the ineffable, A’s fans have been grasping for metaphor. Thursday was a funeral; no, a funeral for someone whose death was preventable; no, a funeral for someone who’d been murdered, and the killer was charging admission at the door. The Coliseum, meanwhile, is Baseball’s Last Dive Bar. It’s home. It’s a concrete cathedral—which is maybe a little grandiose for a place with so many sewage problems and such stubborn possums, but I like it. Mircea Eliade, the great religious scholar and historian, spent years trying to understand precisely what makes something holy, why people chose to pour their faith into certain containers and not others. His conclusion, ultimately, was that sacredness is defined subjectively and circularly: The sacred is that which is not profane, and the profane is that which is not sacred. The believer gets to decide, in other words, where and when and how she finds what Eliade called hierophany: the manifestation of the divine, the moment when an ordinary object ceases to be ordinary.

I had learned about Eliade and hierophany from the book Baseball as a Road to God, co-authored by the former New York University president John Sexton. Last week, I spoke with Sexton by phone. He is incredibly smart and kind, even though he’s a Yankees fan, and he could probably tell that I was a wreck. He told me a story about a trip he’d taken some years ago, to Australia. With a guide, he and his family went to Uluru, the giant sandstone monolith that rises out of the flatness of the outback like a breaching whale and is a religious site for the Aboriginal Pitjantjatjara people. “To our native Australian guide,” he told me, the rock “was the most sacred place in the world.” To Sexton and his family, “it was a beautiful, overwhelming natural wonder, but it wasn’t ‘sacred.’” These places are not intrinsically sacred—they’re sacred if, and only as long as, living people see them as such, find miracles in their presence. I think Sexton had intended to make me feel better, to help me understand that the Coliseum could be divine as long as I wanted it to be. Instead, I thought about Bobby, who will never remember the mighty Oakland A’s, oblivious and happy as his parents wept at the ballpark, and about all the people who had consecrated the Coliseum, only to see it abandoned and emptied out.

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A regular football season is 17 games. Regular basketball and hockey seasons are each 82 games. A regular professional baseball season is 162 games, 81 of which are played at home. Esperanza Uruena missed only nine this season. Baseball—like falling in love, or raising a child—is mostly about the choice to keep showing up. It makes the mundane holy, through repetition and commitment, attention that becomes devotion, one day at a time, just like Mary Oliver said. It is ritualized submission to forces beyond your control, and as such, it is about the most radical, sacred, bighearted thing a person can do: Loving a team, like loving anything unconditionally, is the decision to make your world larger, even though it will hurt. Streaks end. Leads are blown while you get up for a beer. Your favorite guy gets traded, or injured, or sent down. A thing you organized your life around for years is taken away. The Oakland A’s were so much to so many of us, for so long, and now they are nothing at all.

But on Thursday, we were at the Coliseum, 46,899 of us—there to show that the A’s meant something to us, even if we didn’t mean anything to the A’s. Krazy George was there, signing autographs and banging a drum. So were Rickey Henderson and Dave Stewart, throwing out the first pitch, and Dallas Braden, now a color commentator, choking up in the booth. Rachael and her husband, Matt, were up in the 300s with their kids, and Esperanza was down near me in the bleachers, her fingernails painted green and gold. Women carried sleeping, floppy-limbed newborns—so their babies could see the place, just once, even with their eyes closed—and ushers carried bouquets of red roses given to them by fans. We chanted “Let’s go, Oak-land!” and “Sell! The! Team!,” our voices made louder bouncing off all that concrete. At some point, a beach ball appeared, and at some point afterward, once it had traveled hundreds of feet and fallen onto the field twice, it was euthanized with a pocketknife.

Oakland took the lead in the third and widened it in the fifth. By then, it was mayhem: Security guards had abandoned their posts to watch the game, and the aisles were clogged with bodies leaking sweat and tears. Smoke bombs, toilet paper, and two people escaped the stands and made their way onto the field. Someone in the bleachers unfurled a white banner so wide that five people had to hold it; in spiky, handwritten capital letters, it said UNFORGIVABLE. During the eighth inning, Kara Tsuboi—who has been an in-game announcer since 2009 and will not be going to Sacramento—thanked fans and staff. “This place is special,” she said. We got on our feet and didn’t sit back down.

Then, the ninth. The Rangers had scored, so we were ahead, but barely. Mason Miller struck out two back-to-back, then Travis Jankowski grounded to Max Schuemann at third base for an easy out. It was over, two hours and 29 minutes and 57 years after it had started. As the crowd cheered and the players shook hands, I ducked into a corridor to call Bobby. I told him I missed him, which was technically, though inadequately, true. He was in his hometown, playing with magnets, and I was in mine, pondering devotion, and I wanted so badly to be closer to him, I thought I might swallow my iPhone right there.

When I returned to the bleachers, almost everyone remained, chatting and hugging and taking selfies and looking out at the Coliseum, still the same and so, so beautiful. People pitched their torsos over the fence to pass the groundskeepers souvenir cups, empty water bottles, and Ziploc baggies to fill with dirt from the field. For anyone who wanted a different memento, a wide-necked guy in a Henderson jersey was demonstrating how to yank a cupholder off the seat. A final “Let’s go, Oak-land!” rose and fell: There weren’t enough people there anymore to make it last. A drummer in a bucket hat passed tissues to a crying security guard. At some point, the stadium music died. And then, about an hour after the game had ended, we had to go. We filed out of our seats and into those dark tunnels, holding our cups of dirt, the concrete under our feet scattered with toilet paper and rose petals.

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