-
Tim Keown, ESPN Senior Writer
OAKLAND, California – Everybody said goodbye to Oakland Athletics baseball in their own way on Saturday afternoon.
After 57 seasons at the Coliseum – and decades of indecision and vitriol swirling around the team’s season — A played its last game in Oakland in front of a massive crowd on a bright and beautiful Bay Area afternoon.
The crowd was buzzing, the atmosphere was festive and the fans were into it from the start. The evening started early. The parking lot, which was scheduled to open at 8 a.m. — more than 4½ hours before first pitch — instead opened at 7 a.m. after lines of cars waiting to enter the stadium backed up traffic on I-880.
Fans gathered on the balcony to cook breakfast, drink beer and alternate chants of “Sell The Team” and “Let’s Go Oakland.” A person who has made a side hustle impersonating A’s president Dave Kaval roamed the parking lot in a suit and tie, never breaking character. Fans, if they choose, can buy margaritas or psychedelic mushrooms from small business popups on the pedestrian bridge that connects BART to the Coliseum.
“People who have never been here will see this scene and be amazed,” said longtime A’s fan Jorge Leon, president of the Oakland 68s, a community-based fan group. “For those of us who have been coming here since we were kids, this is the only thing we always do before everyone gets tired of being lied to.”
The A’s announced a deal to move to Las Vegas in April 2023, and last April they announced a three to four-year stay at the minor league stadium – Sutter Health Park – in West Sacramento, starting next year when it’s new. the stadium has been built. The team’s lease at the Coliseum ended after the finals came out, and negotiations between the city and the A’s on the extension fell apart almost before they started.
“It doesn’t have to be that way,” Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao, watching the game from a suite down the third-base line, told ESPN. “The people of Oakland deserve better.”
If an arrangement in Sacramento doesn’t work out, Thao said, the city will reconsider bringing the team back.
The team’s suspension was not sentimental. The owner of John Fisher’s letter to the fans before the final series, in which he said that he wanted to be able to individually tell each fan despite the years of gutting the team and ignoring the fan base, seen by the fans as mainly tone deaf. But on the final day, the team hit a few true notes: former A’s pitcher Barry Zito sang the national anthem, and Dave Stewart and Rickey Henderson, both Oakland natives and A’s legends, threw out the first pitches.
The A’s took some impromptu team photos in front of the dugout before the game, and the nine starters were greeted with a standing ovation as they took the field. Members of the A’s field crew scooped up dirt for fans down the left-field line, and many A’s players did the same.
An hour before the first pitch, Stewart stood next to the “Rickey Henderson Field” logo behind home plate, his sunglasses shielding the world from the tears in his eyes.
“It was a tough morning,” Stewart said. “I can’t imagine how we are in this position.”
Security was heightened, with 140 Oakland police officers on site, similar to a Raiders playoff game. But the only real ruckus came in the bottom of the ninth, when two fans ran onto the field before being quickly escorted over the stairs in left field.
After they left, several objects were thrown onto the field, including several kelly green smoke bombs that landed on the warning track to the right. The game was halted repeatedly during the last half of the innings.
In all, a sellout crowd of 46,889 spoke with chants and signs. “Let’s Go Oakland” could easily be changed to “Sell The Team,” but even that seems half-hearted. The bleacher railings contain the usual signs — “Goodbye MLB” and “Las Vegas Beware” — with a new addition beyond the wall in left-center — “It’s Not Us, It’s You.”
“There’s no better city than Oakland to play baseball in,” Stewart said. “I’ve witnessed it. I was there on a great day, and this is a great baseball town. Nobody can say this isn’t a great baseball town. The time of the Coliseum has passed, but this is a great baseball town.”
A’s manager Mark Kotsay has a habit of writing lineup cards in his office before sending them to assistant coaches to fill out the official cards that hang in the dugout. After that, Kotsay tore the original card in two, lengthwise, and put it on the table.
After Tuesday’s game, a 3-2 victory over the Texas Rangers, the thought: What if this is the last time the A’s win in Oakland?
The solution: If there is, they will frame it, in two pieces.
After the victory, which ended with All-Star closer Mason Miller asking the Rangers’ Travis Jankowski to ground out to end the game, it was no longer a concern.
Kotsay then addressed the fans, surrounded by his team, as the crowd remained silent as the manager talked about walking back onto the field after Wednesday night’s game and letting the moment sink in.
Emotion thick in his voice, he thanked the stadium workers – “especially the ones who didn’t come with us” – and ended with a heartfelt tribute to the fans and, as he called it, “this amazing stadium.”
“I have one last request, that you give me the biggest cheer in baseball,” he said.
With that, Kotsay raised his hands as “Come on Oakland” rained down on him.
