OAKLAND, Calif.—Moments after an era-ending final A’s game here, manager Mark Kotsay grabbed a microphone and led a raucous “let’s go Oakland” chant with the more than 30,000 people who stayed long after a 3-2 win over the Texas Rangers on Thursday afternoon.
Thirty minutes later, devoted fans were still lined up in the lower bowl looking to fill plastic cups with Coliseum dirt for a memento.
Next year, the A’s will play in Sacramento at Sutter Health Park, the current home of the Triple-A River Cats. Eventually, they will relocate to Las Vegas.
Much of Oakland’s faithful will decline to maintain their support following the move, put off by the lost decades-old fight to keep the club in the Bay Area.
On Thursday, they said goodbye. The vibes were mostly positive, as they had been the prior night. Players received a standing ovation as they took the field. When starting pitcher J.T. Ginn departed in the top of the sixth, he received a thunderous applause. The right-hander clapped with his glove to acknowledge the warm reception.
Supporters stayed on their feet for most of the last three innings. They reacted positively to Kotsay’s on-field speech.
There were a few interruptions, though. People threw at least three green flares onto the field, stopping play, and a pair of fans trespassed the diamond in the ninth inning before security guards tackled them. “Sell the team” signs could be spotted all over the venue.
That aspect of Thursday’s farewell game tracked with the entire history of the Coliseum. Oakland baseball almost always tangoed with tension between supporters and ownership—but not with players.
Only five years after the A’s arrived from Kansas City, the first upswell of emotions spilled onto a national TV broadcast. At Game 6 of the 1973 World Series against the New York Mets, fans took aim at then-owner Charlie Finley, whose reign was marred by penny-pinching and a persistent itch to take the organization elsewhere.
According to an Oct. 21, 1973, newspaper report of the scene from The Telegraph-Herald, A’s supporters hung anti-Finley banners at the Coliseum, with one reading, “A’s Fans For Oakland Ownership. A Million Fans Can’t Be Wrong.” Some people chanted for Finley’s ouster during the seventh inning stretch.
Relocation threats and poor attendance under Finley culminated in a near-move to Denver, which didn’t yet have the Rockies. But fans rallied back when the Haas family bought the club in a last-minute 1980 acquisition born from community desperation.
In 1979, the A’s played a home game with a crowd of 653, one of the lowest attendances in MLB history. Exactly two years later, following Finley’s sale of the team and a doubling of payroll, a then-record 50,000 people showed up for opening day at the Coliseum, according to a San Francisco Examiner article from 1981. In a two-season span, the number of A’s season ticket-holders went from 75 to 3,500.
By 1990, Oakland boasted one of the highest payrolls in MLB and welcomed the third-most fans per game at about 35,000. The A’s made the World Series three seasons in a row in those glory years.
The subsequent decade, however, saw the popular Haas family sell the club. Worse, the local government green-lighted the Coliseum’s pricey Mount Davis extension—a woeful plastic surgery that obscured the rolling Oakland hills behind the outfield wall—to bring back the NFL’s Raiders. Amid these changes, the A’s didn’t reach the playoffs from 1993 through 1999.
Relocation threats resumed, first involving nearby Bay Area cities Fremont and San Jose. Talented A’s rosters hemorrhaged key players such as Jason Giambi, Miguel Tejada, Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder and Barry Zito.
“I didn’t want to leave,” Tejada told reporters ahead of his first game back at the Coliseum after signing with the Orioles as a free agent in 2004. “They made me leave. I’d have taken less money to stay in Oakland.”
Before the mass exodus of its young homegrown standouts, Oakland respectably ranked 19th in attendance in 2001, 18th in 2002, 17th in 2003 and 19th in 2004. But soon after, attendance dwindled to the very bottom of MLB.
It didn’t help that the nearby San Francisco Giants managed three World Series parades in five years (2010, 2012 and 2014), or that the decaying Coliseum became the joke of the baseball world.
Since 2020, Oakland has ranked 29th or worse in attendance four consecutive seasons. Yet the painful 25-year attendance slide that accelerated post-pandemic shouldn’t overshadow the electric moments fans defiantly produced.
Oakland’s epic 2012 chase-down of the Texas Rangers to win the AL West on the final day of the season inspired fans to show up in droves and create their own soundtrack. Songs, dances, drum lines and chants organically formed in the bleachers. The Balfour Rage. The Bernie Lean. A recurring Carly Rae Jepsen sing-along.
It was a team with MLB’s second-lowest payroll that was picked to finish last and trailed the Rangers by 12 games on July 1, 2012.
After clinching the division at home on Oct. 3, 2012, in front of 36,000 people, players reciprocated the love received from supporters by doing a lap around the field to high-five members of the crowd who had refused to leave after the final pitch.
A week later, people cried with joy at the Coliseum when Coco Crisp drove a walk-off single to right field in Game 4 of the 2012 ALDS to extend a miracle season with a furious ninth-inning comeback. Strangers hugged each other in the stands. As Seth Smith dashed home to score the winning run, the late Ray Fosse, then working the radio call as a color commentator, let out a scream from the deepest depths of his soul.
The Detroit Tigers, who were the postseason foil to the A’s in 2012 and 2013, shared appreciation for the Coliseum environment.
“I like bars with music, but this is a little bit loud,” legendary manager Jim Leyland quipped about October in Oakland. “So it does get in the eardrums. Thank God I don’t hear that well.”
“This ballpark is unique the way you have to walk by the fans to go out to the field, so I’m walking by the fans and they’re yelling as much stuff as they can at me,” said longtime A’s bogeyman Justin Verlander in 2013. “It’s very hostile and it’s a lot of fun, really, to be on the mound. Everybody in the ballpark [they] are rooting against me and yelling as loud as they can.”
“Something I’ll never forget,” said another future Hall of Fame pitcher, Max Scherzer.
More recently, Rays manager Kevin Cash said Oakland’s 2019 wild-card game crowd at the Coliseum—its last home postseason contest outside the pandemic season that prevented crowds—was “maybe the loudest I’ve ever heard a ballpark.”
Fan demographics contributed to a stadium vibe that, as former A’s infielder Jed Lowrie once put it, “always feels like there are more people than there actually are.”
The Coliseum was one of the most affordable major U.S. sports venues to visit. While many devoted sports fans, the lifeblood of a sports industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars, increasingly felt priced out of live events all over the country, including across the bay at Oracle Park, going to an A’s game at the Coliseum remained a feasible proposition.
As a result, Oakland baseball’s high points held crowds that seemingly represented the average working citizen of the community more than many other professional sports franchises.
After Thursday’s goodbye, that atmosphere has gone the way of the dodo bird, the wooly mammoth, the saber-tooth tiger. Bludgeoned to an ugly death. A comparatively soulless Las Vegas entertainment scene awaits.
The Bay Area’s working-class community lost an imbalanced fight. Oakland, its back on the relocation ropes as far back as the 1970s, held out as long as it could. This is how David vs. Goliath goes in the real world.
On both Wednesday, the last night game at the Coliseum, and the finale Thursday afternoon, fans here embraced Nelly’s Ride Wit Me blaring over the PA system. “Oh why must I feel this way?” they sang in unison. “Hey, must be the money!”