The Oakland Coliseum: Back to the Ballpark to say Goodbye
A stand at The Coliseum, Oakland, California, 4 July 2024, before Athletics vs Angels
This is a rare post about sport, and about a sport, baseball, to which I am a newcomer. I do not pretend to any expertise, and apologize to any fans who find errors. This is a story about dedication to a team, and the Oakland Coliseum, which will soon host major league baseball for the last time.
SPORT RUNS LIKE a thread through your life like nothing else. I have followed the same football team since I was six years old. I have long loved cricket, especially the physical and psychological contests fought out at the top level over five days.
Because I have spent little time in the United States—including an absence of more than 20 years from 2001 to 2022—I came late to baseball. But my first experience of watching a live ballgame on a chilly San Francisco evening in late April 2022 fascinated me. I wanted to learn more. What I learnt–alongside a host of new rules and terms–was also a story of success, failure, power, emotion, and injustice.
In California for a two-week work trip, I decided to go to a game. My weekends at home in London usually involve watching live sport on at least one afternoon or evening: football in the winter, cricket in the summer—sometimes both on those wonderful weekends in spring or September when the seasons overlap.
The nearest team to where I was staying was Oakland Athletics. All was not well with the Athletics. My first morning in Berkeley, where I was staying, I went out for coffee. I bought the San Francisco Chronicle. The front page of the sports section was about poor performances on the field, and disgruntled fans disappearing from the seats.
A view of Oracle Park, San Francisco, before Giants vs Athletics, 28 April 2022
A few days later, the Athletics were playing at the San Francisco Giants, local rivals. Oracle Park is a magnificent stadium. The waters of San Francisco Bay stretch out behind the stands. Not knowing whether I would enjoy the evening enough to go again, I went for the full experience of eye-wateringly expensive hot dog and beer as I took my seat.
I need not have worried. I loved it. What a joy to discover a new sport. This game was perhaps one for the purists rather than the new fan. The As won by a single homerun in the first inning. But I had seen enough. I bought a ticket an As home game against Cleveland the following weekend.
Oakland Coliseum was not Oracle Park. The main approach to the stadium from the BART (local transport) station crosses a canal of the kind a body might be dragged from in a detective novel. Although that Sunday afternoon (1 May 2022) there was a special admission deal for young fans, the stands were full of large empty spaces.
A view from the approach to the Oakland Coliseum, 4 July 2024
And yet there was something special here for me: not just the fascinating challenge of learning to watch and appreciate a new sport. The fans who were there showed a mixture of cynical bemusement and total dedication. The stadium may have been in need of repair, but the fans’ commitment–even through their resignation as the As lost to the Cleveland Guardians–spoke of something more valuable than stands and concourses that could be fixed if the will and the cash were there.
It was the first time in 22 years Cleveland had won a series in Oakland. The As poor results continued. The San Francisco Chronicle article had also mentioned another factor: one that worried fans perhaps even more. There was talk that the team might leave Oakland, with the owner, John Fisher, seeing a brighter future among the lights of Las Vegas.
Two years later, that is the plan. It has infuriated the fans who will lose their team from Oakland. As the New York Times predicted of Fisher in a 2023 article, ‘He will be reviled, literally for generations, long after he’s gone.’
So when I went back to the Coliseum this summer, it was for the last time. It was July 4th, the holiday meaning that the afternoon crowd was bigger than it might have been–but still sparse. I was in two minds about going. Some As fans have given up going in protest at the planned move, and I did think about whether I should respect their protest and stay away myself.
In the end I decided to go, not least because it was a chance that would not come again. The fans I was able to chat to in the queue were sad about the move, but resigned. Merchandise with the slogan ‘Rooted in Oakland’ had been altered to oppose the As’ upcoming departure.
The As beat the Los Angeles Angels 5-0. I learnt more about baseball, and saw more games during my trip to the United States. I also made sure to buy an Athletics t-shirt that said ‘Oakland’ on it.
There is a contradiction here in American sport, in this most capitalist of societies. For while the owners may move teams at will (the As themselves began life on the East Coast, and arrived in California in the 1960s, after time in Kansas), they expect public money to help them do so, and their investment is not subject to the risk of relegation, as even elite football teams are when they fall on hard times. Capitalist competition only goes so far.
And while I am grateful to the place where I learnt to love baseball, it is also a place where the fans have been treated very badly. No accountant can put a price on what the fans of the Oakland Athletics are about to lose.
The scoreboard at the end of the Oakland Athletics’ 5-0 win over the Los Angeles Angels, Oakland, California, 4 July 2024
All text and photographs © James Rodgers