‘Today there is crying in baseball’

OAKLAND, Calif. — It was last call at the venerable Oakland Coliseum, but none of the regulars was ready to leave.

Thousands of green-and-gold-clad die-hards remained at their seats and soaked in the nostalgia on Thursday afternoon, long after the A’s notched a 3-2 win over the Texas Rangers in what was the franchise’s final game in Oakland.

A man in a Rickey Henderson jersey lit a joint in the right-field bleachers. A group of friends a few rows away stood with their backs to the field and snapped a selfie together. Someone else raised a middle finger while shouting expletives at A’s owner John Fisher.

A woman along the third-base line held aloft a homemade sign that read, “Today there is crying in baseball.” Proof that she was right was all around her, as a grown man in a World Series cap wiped tears from his eyes and a young girl with an A’s chain around her neck bawled uncontrollably.

While security vigilantly kept watch for people ripping Coliseum seats out, the worst vandalism was a couple of knuckleheads tearing out the cupholders. Caught red-handed, one of the men sheepishly forked over his cupholder and said with a guilty smile, “What, I can’t have a relic?”

Those melancholy, sentimental scenes marked Oakland’s farewell to big-time sports. A fiercely loyal, often underappreciated sports town had its heart ripped from its chest three times in the past five years at the hands of team owners who sought greener pastures.

It began in 2019, when the Golden State Warriors gambled their soul abandoning raucous, no-frills “Roaracle” to head across the bay to a $1 billion, state-of-the-art arena stocked with luxury suites. A year later, the Raiders traded the crumbling, antiquated Oakland Coliseum for a glitzier new venue on the edge of the Las Vegas strip, pledging to try to recreate the fanaticism of the Black Hole in a destination city.

But to many longtime fans, the A’s turning their back on Oakland stings most. Owner John Fisher cemented himself as Oakland’s most despised man even before last year’s announcement that he planned to move the A’s to Las Vegas. He alienated fans by slashing payroll, sabotaging the team’s competitive prospects and allowing the already crumbling Coliseum to fall further into disrepair, all while raising ticket prices and charging more for hot dogs than any other major-league team.

After more than a year of silence, the reclusive owner of the Oakland A’s at last addressed the team’s fans on Monday. Fisher penned a letter insisting that keeping the A’s in Oakland had been his “mission” and describing himself as “genuinely sorry” for failing to achieve it.

“When Lew Wolff and I bought the team in 2005, our dream was to win world championships and build a new ballpark in Oakland,” Fisher wrote. “Over the next 18 years, we did our very best to make that happen. We proposed and pursued five different locations in the Bay Area. And despite mutual and ongoing effort to get a deal done for the Howard Terminal project, we came up short.”

The response from many Oakland fans was a collective eye roll. For months, they bitterly protested the departure of the A’s at the whim of the billionaire son of the co-founders of the Gap clothing empire. Now they mourn the loss of a franchise that won four World Series championships in Oakland and has been part of the fabric of the city for 57 years.

“Imagine that a loved one was murdered, and you’re told you have to go to that funeral 81 times,” said Bryan Johansen, who has been going to A’s games at the Coliseum for 40 years. “That’s what this entire season has been like. And it has only gotten more intense as the days pass.”

The roaring ’70s

Hard as it might be to believe, there was a time when Oakland benefited from a baseball owner’s obsession with moving his floundering club to a new market.

In 1963, Kansas City A’s owner Charlie Finley tried to shake down the city for money, pledging fealty to K.C. only if it built him a new, publicly funded stadium with a generous lease. Kansas City politicians refused, leading Finley to openly court prospective major-league cities, from Dallas to Atlanta to Louisville to Oakland to goodness knows where else.

When major-league owners greenlit the A’s move to Oakland after the 1967 season, even their decision to award Kansas City an expansion team didn’t fully appease Missourians disgusted by Finley’s antics. Groused Missouri senator Stuart Symington as Finley left town, “Oakland is the luckiest city since Hiroshima.”

What Symington didn’t realize is that the collection of young unknowns that Finley had cobbled together was on the cusp of blossoming into a juggernaut. Reggie Jackson, Catfish Hunter, Vida Blue and Rollie Fingers overcame their meddlesome, miserly owner to lead the “Swingin A’s” to three World Series championships and five straight division titles from 1971 to 1975.

It was during the height of that dynastic run that a 10-year-old Adam Duritz arrived in Oakland in the backseat of his parents’ station wagon. The future charismatic Counting Crows frontman was already a passionate sports fan by then, but a nomadic childhood spent hopping among six different cities kept Duritz from latching on to any particular team.

When the Duritz family settled in Oakland, the brash, anti-establishment A’s became Adam’s first love. Duritz was drawn to their rebellious facial hair, garish green-and-gold uniforms and clubhouse drama as much as their winning ways and electrifying talent.

The year after the Duritz family moved to Oakland, the Golden State Warriors secured their lone pre-Steph Curry NBA title. Then the Raiders’ intimidating mix of castoffs and misfits piledrived Minnesota in the Super Bowl the following year. For a few fleeting years, Oakland was the envy of the sports world.

“Those teams were so good,” Durtiz told Yahoo Sports. “And they were all, like, ours. It really felt local. There was something so Oakland about each of them.”

While Duritz in adulthood became a Raiders season ticket holder and a close friend of Warriors coach Steve Kerr, he had the strongest connection with the A’s as a kid. He fondly remembers cutting school and hopping on a BART train to attend an afternoon game at the Coliseum. Duritz would pay $2.50 for bleacher tickets. Friends who couldn’t afford that would sneak in through holes in the Coliseum fences.

“You’d sit in the bleachers, you’d hang out and it was f–ing beautiful there,” Duritz said. “There was a huge lawn, the Oakland hills in the background. It was just a great place to be.”

Winning seasons and deep playoff runs became more sporadic for the A’s after the mid-1970s, but the franchise still managed to produce charismatic stars and memorable moments. First came the Bash Brothers, Rickey’s stolen base record and the Bay Bridge World Series sweep. Then Billy Beane and Moneyball, the Big Three and The Streak.

Crowds dwindled in recent years as the A’s went from frugal with their money, to notoriously cheap. Fans grew tired of the A’s consistently refusing to pay to retain crowd favorites and future Hall of Famers. The club has retired six players’ numbers in 56 years in Oakland. Not a single one finished their careers with the A’s.

The deteriorating state of the Coliseum also didn’t help the A’s attract casual fans. It was bad enough that the construction of Mount Davis in the mid-1990s stripped the Coliseum of its most charming asset: the picturesque view of the Oakland Hills beyond the centerfield wall. Then came the feral cat invasions and possum infestations … and the power outages and locker rooms flooded with raw sewage.

A’s diehards who kept showing up found beauty amidst the dysfunction. They often identified with the franchise’s blue-collar mentality, run-down facilities and perennial hustle to try to stretch 15 cents into $1.

“The A’s were a perfect fit for Oakland,” former A’s vice president of marketing Troy Smith told Yahoo Sports.

Not so long ago, it even looked like ownership was beginning to realize that.

Not so ‘Rooted in Oakland’

In March 2017, the A’s unveiled an audacious new advertising campaign. The same club that for years had enthusiastically explored moving elsewhere in the Bay Area suddenly trumpeted its rich history in Oakland and its commitment to building a ballpark in its home city.

“Rooted in Oakland” signage, billboards and banners went up at the Coliseum and at high-traffic locations across the city. Five TV commercials also hit the airwaves, each featuring different A’s luminaries and showcasing East Bay locations like Oakland’s City Hall, the Oakland Zoo, Lake Merritt and a BART station.

For the A’s, the decision to celebrate their longstanding ties to Oakland was a sudden strategic u-turn. Fisher and then co-owner Lew Wolff had previously claimed that there are not enough A’s fans in Oakland to justify keeping the team there. While trying to strike a deal to move the A’s to nearby San Jose or Santa Clara, Wolff nixed a two-minute ”This is Oakland” hype video, according to the former A’s employee who created it.

“Lew Wolff basically demanded that the video be removed and never shown at the Coliseum,” former A’s digital video producer Jeremy Wesler told Yahoo Sports. “He said it should not be played because it glorified Oakland.”

The timing of the new Oakland-centric campaign was no coincidence, Smith told Yahoo Sports. A’s ownership had struck out in its bid to gain permission to move the team to San Jose or Santa Clara. Major League Baseball had ruled that the South Bay was within the San Francisco Giants’ territorial rights and the courts system had refused to overturn that decision.

That appeared to leave Fisher and Wolff little choice but to consider proposals for a new ballpark in the East Bay. While the Warriors were already bound for San Francisco and the Raiders were pivoting to Las Vegas after a failed bid to move back to Los Angeles, Smith said that the A’s marketing department “received some signals from ownership” that the club intended to try to remain in Oakland.

“That’s when we started to brainstorm ideas for an Oakland-centric campaign,” Smith said. “We absolutely believed ownership wanted to keep the team in Oakland and that’s why we were reflecting it. Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know, but the whole marketing team certainly believed it.”

The “Rooted in Oakland” slogan was Smith’s brainchild. He drew inspiration, he said, from the city of Oakland’s iconic tree logo and from street artists at Oaklandish adding burrowing roots to the image.

At first, the “Rooted in Oakland” campaign unveiled by the A’s San Francisco-based advertising agency was an instant hit. Smith beamed with pride driving along Interstate 880 and seeing the massive “Rooted in Oakland since ‘68” sign on the Coliseum facade. Or walking downtown and seeing the slogan on A’s T-shirts.

The campaign began to feel more disingenuous, though, as time passed and questions arose about how sincere the A’s actually were about building in Oakland. Fisher, who in 2016 took over as A’s majority owner, didn’t want to build on the grounds of the Coliseum, a site that could accommodate construction cheaply and with few political headaches. He set his sights on what is known as the Howard Terminal site, a challenging 55-acre chunk of waterfront property owned and operated by the Port of Oakland.

Fisher didn’t just propose building a waterfront baseball stadium. He sought a $12 billion stadium-anchored village complete with apartments, parks, hotels, commercial space and gondolas to connect to the nearest BART station. And he wanted the city of Oakland’s help making it happen in the form of massive on-site safety and infrastructure investments.

As negotiations stalled while Oakland City Council members debated the extent they would be willing to give in to Fisher’s financial demands, the A’s revealed in 2021 that they intended to explore a move to Las Vegas. The A’s simultaneously traded away or let go of almost their entire 2021 starting lineup and, remarkably, raised ticket and parking prices, a naked attempt to keep fans away and accentuate the need for a new ballpark.

It was around that time that longtime A’s fan and season ticket holder Stu Clary says he began to feel like the victim of a “long con.” The team that insisted it was ready to spend to keep its cornerstone players had instead taken a sledgehammer to its payroll. The team that claimed to be “Rooted in Oakland” had executives touring potential stadium sites in Las Vegas.

“When you look back on it, you realize they’ve been lying to us for years,” Clary told Yahoo Sports. “They weren’t rooted in Oakland. They were still looking to get out.”

Every time he spotted a “Rooted in Oakland” banner the past few years, Clary would say under his breath, “F— you, Fisher!”

He wasn’t alone.

For several years, Smith cringed when he drove past the Coliseum and saw that the massive “Rooted in Oakland since ‘68” sign hadn’t been removed.

“It wasn’t true anymore,” the former A’s marketing executive said. “When it ceased to be true, it really needed to come down.”

A’s fans revolt

As the A’s began intimating more seriously that they intended to relocate, some of the team’s most passionate fans refused to let them go quietly. Among the most outspoken was an East Oakland-raised man with a booming voice and an activist streak.

Jorge Leon fell in love with the A’s as a kid the first time he smelled the Coliseum’s fresh-cut grass and concession-stand hot dogs in the early 1990s. Almost ever since, he has lived in fear of his hometown baseball team leaving Oakland.

When Leon was in high school in 1998, he wrote a paper arguing why the A’s should stay in Oakland. Years later, as an adult, Leon became so aggravated by ownership’s threats to move the A’s to San Jose that he began showing up to games with signs bearing hand-written slogans like “Don’t take our A’s away,” “Lew Wolff hates Oakland” or “Wolff lied. He never tried.”

Several times, security ordered him to remove his banner. In April 2010, he generated headlines nationwide when the A’s ejected him from a game over one of his signs. Undaunted, he kept coming back to the right-field bleachers, kept passing out anti-ownership fliers and kept hanging banners urging Wolff and Fisher to sell.

“There was never a season where I didn’t have in the back of my mind that the A’s could move,” Leon said. “My cousins would give me s— like, ‘Why can’t you just enjoy a playoff game?’ I’d always tell them, ‘Because none of this matters unless they stay.’”

In April 2023, as a laughably undermanned A’s team piled up loss after loss, the news that Leon dreaded finally hit his phone. Fisher had halted negotiations with Oakland and announced plans to purchase land for a stadium in Las Vegas.

Most A’s fans initially protested with their wallets and stopped showing up to the Coliseum. Leon and the Oakland 68s fan group he founded took the opposite approach, coming to games, hanging bed sheets spray-painted with anti-ownership slogans and shouting so loudly at Fisher that it echoed through the empty stadium and could be heard on TV broadcasts.

That approach from Leon inspired others to take the fight to Fisher.

In May 2023, the founder of the A’s supporters group, Last Dive Bar, conceived of a creative way for fans to display their anger. Bryan Johansen held a rotten tomato tailgate in the Coliseum parking lot a couple hours before the first pitch of an A’s game.

Johansen supplied a wooden board featuring photos of Fisher, A’s president Dave Kaval and MLB commissioner Rob Manfred. Hundreds of A’s fans, young and old, provided the tomatoes. Strewn at the base of the board by the end of the tailgate was an ankle-deep layer of tomatoes, bruised or dented, smashed or splattered.

“There was definitely a science behind it,” Johansen told Yahoo Sports. “You’ve got to pick the ones that aren’t too firm. You need them a little ripe so when they hit, they splat, but they can’t be so soft that they smash in your hand as you throw them.”

Chucking tomatoes may have been cathartic for A’s fans, but some were eager to accomplish more. They weren’t naive enough to think they could persuade Fisher to stay in Oakland or sell the team, but they wanted to find a way to combat his narrative that A’s fans’ lack of support was somehow to blame for the franchise’s desire to relocate.

The answer popped into the mind of Clary, the baseball coach at Vacaville High and an A’s fan since 1977. Clary proposed a reverse boycott, a defiant show of force from long-suffering A’s fans to refute Fisher’s lie that they don’t care about their team.

The game that Clary picked for the reverse boycott initially caught Leon by surprise. He chose a Tuesday night home game against the Tampa Bay Rays on June 13, 2023, the sort of mundane matchup that might draw a couple thousand fans under normal circumstances.

“Why don’t we do it on a weekend so that we don’t have to work so hard to bring people in?” Leon protested.

“That’s not the point,” Clary answered. “The point is to do it on a random night that ordinarily would be empty and show the country that we’re here.”

The help of the Last Dive Bar and Oakland 68s transformed Clary’s hare-brained idea into a wildly successful protest. They spread the word to A’s fans on social media and raised enough money to give away more than 7,000 kelly green “Sell T-shirts.”

The day before the reverse boycott, Leon told friends he’d be thrilled if they drew 15,000 fans. Much to his surprise, nearly 30,000 showed up to the Coliseum, far and away the A’s largest crowd of the season to that point.

The most spine-tingling moment came at the start of the fifth inning when the crowd went silent as A’s reliever Hogan Harris came set to pitch. It stayed pin-drop quiet for a few moments until the fans unleashed a thunderous chant of “Sell the team! Sell the team!”

“That was a beautiful moment,” Leon said.

And yet he admits that it was also somewhat “bittersweet.”

That’s how it would be most nights in the Coliseum, Leon says, if the A’s just had different owners.

One final goodbye

The mood at the Coliseum wasn’t quite so defiant 14 months later as the A’s played their final home game in Oakland.

The 46,889 fans who packed the stadium on Thursday afternoon launched into a handful of “Sell the team” and “F— John Fisher” chants but mostly just soaked in their last chance to watch the A’s in this setting.

Carfuls of fans began lining up outside the Coliseum gates as early as 7 a.m. The first arrivers poured into the Coliseum concourse to find “Thank you, Oakland” mowed into the centerfield grass and the clinching game of the 1972 World Series playing on the outfield video boards.

The nostalgia overload was inescapable all day as the A’s brought back Barry Zito to sing the national anthem, invited Henderson and Dave Stewart to throw out the first pitch and played videos of iconic Coliseum moments between innings. Fans cheered as if a playoff spot was at stake, especially after A’s centerfielder JJ Bleday made a remarkable diving catch to rob Carson Kelly.

There was palpable anger and bitterness but no major incidents. A couple smoke bombs landed on the right-field warning track with two outs in the ninth inning and a handful of fans hurled debris after Mason Miller recorded the game’s final out.

Since the departure of the A’s will leave Oakland without a major professional sports franchise for the first time since 1960, the lingering question for East Bay fans is essentially … what now? Do they still root for the A’s during the club’s three-year pitstop 80 miles east in Sacramento before the eventual move to Las Vegas? Do they sever ties altogether? Do they pledge only to attend A’s road games in the future to avoid putting money in Fisher’s pockets?

For Duritz, it’s an easy decision. The Counting Crows frontman has lived in New York for years. He is used to watching his favorite teams from afar.

“I think I’ll always love the A’s,” Duritz said. “I don’t think that will ever change for me. There’s something about the green and gold on the lawn that just does it for me. I just think it’s sad.”

For Clary, the wound is too fresh for him to know for sure. It saddens him that he won’t be able to take future grandkids to A’s games the way he did his own sons. Maybe he’ll keep watching the A’s on TV and rooting for them from afar. Or maybe he’ll gravitate to a team that has one of his former Vacaville High players in its farm system.

“It’s easy to root for guys you’ve known since they were little kids,” he said.

Count Leon among the A’s fans who’s adamant he’s done supporting the team. He’ll throw the time and money he spent on the A’s into Oakland’s independent league baseball team, the Ballers, and the city’s two minor-league soccer teams, the Roots and the Soul.

“All we have to do is start again from ground zero,” Leon said. “This is a town that never quits. It’s up to us in the community to lift up these teams that want to be here.”