A farewell to the Oakland Athletics

For six years in the 1990s, I lived about two and a half miles from the Oakland Coliseum. From the front lawn of our home in Alameda, I could occasionally hear cheers from an Oakland A’s game, if the wind was just right.

I followed the A’s regularly back then, listening to their games on the radio with Bill King or Ken Korach doing the play-by-play and Ray Fosse handling the color commentary.

This weekend is the A’s final home series at the Coliseum. As the franchise closes out 57 years of playing in San Francisco’s East Bay, I have to have my say.

It’s a travesty that the team is leaving Oakland, where several major league stars had roots, such as Curt Flood, Rickey Henderson and Vada Pinson.

For a few glorious years in the early 1970s, the A’s dominated baseball. But over the past several decades, the team withered, weaker sister to the increasingly successful San Francisco Giants playing just a few miles to the west.

Symbolically, I believe that “Mount Davis” was what triggered the A’s decline, as the Raiders’ owner Al Davis in bringing his NFL team back to town built new seats that blocked most fans’ views of the Oakland hills behind the Coliseum.

While the Giants got a new stadium, the A’s (or Athletics, depending on your mood) suffered the humiliation of raw sewage flowing in their ballpark just off the Nimitz freeway.

The sewage seepage happened long after I left Area Code 510, and that can’t pollute my memories of Coliseum games.

There was the “helmet night” when I went with a college friend to see the A’s play the Yankees. Friend and colleague Steve Elliott and I grilled bratwurst in the parking lot before what probably was a game against the Milwaukee Brewers.

There was an afternoon game in my Modesto years when fellow Clevelander Joe Kieta got us foul line seats to see Cliff Lee and the Indians play the A’s. And I always remember fondly the Indians-A’s game when fellow Tribe fan Tim Graham and I met at the Coliseum BART station, he in Indians cap and A’s jacket and I with the reverse, Oakland cap and Indians jacket.

I’ve never been in it but I’ve seen the Sacramento ballpark where the A’s will be relegated the next season or more. I hope the team finds a way back to Oakland, but in my heart of hearts I know that’s not going to happen.

Damn. 🧢