The Joy of the Oakland A's Baseball Experience, and the Triumph of Hyper-Capitalism
First the joy: an enormous, crumbling concrete bowl stadium filled with love, the vibe an anything-goes dancefloor at a raucous wedding. My brother, Jonah, my seven-year-old son, Winston, and I plop down behind Pedro, a finish carpenter from San Jose, who’s wearing a swaggy Kelly Green A’s starter jacket. Winston has brought an A’s sign he made out of green and gold legos. Pedro loves it so much he gives Winston a pack of baseball cards. Then he turns to Jonah and I and asks, “You want some fireball shots?” We’re nursing beer cans we snuck in the bottom of a backpack, but we shrug. It’s the Oakland A’s baseball experience, a big party of strangers with a baseball game playing in the background. Sure, why not tuck a fireball shot into our coat pocket.
A coat that is draped over a seat next to us. For we have the row to ourselves, and several rows behind us. And yes it’s Bay Area baseball, but it’s August in East Oakland, so we are in shirtsleeves, the temperature a flawless 67 degrees.
The players on the field exude zeal, even as they are on pace for another 100 loss season. There’s Esteury Ruiz, a blazing fast slap hitter from the Dominican Republic, who leads all of baseball in stolen bases. Shortstop Nick Allen trots to home plate to choice white Reggae jams and a vintage ‘92 centerpart haircut.
About that sound system. It mostly emanates from the scoreboard in right field— a huge boom box essentially. It blasts funk and Hip Hop, the occasional country song for those who’ve trekked in from Tracy or Merced. When not blasting tunes, a campfire intimacy prevails. One empty night game, two vuvuzelas traded plaintive honks across the stadium, like a pair of friendly whales keeping tabs on each other across the Bay.
The fan base represents Oakland—racially diverse and working class. At fireworks night last month on the outfield grass, a Black grandfather lays sprawled in front of us next to his two granddaughters, necks craned in awe, their pigtails silhouetted against the burst of color. On the right, a white sheet metal worker from Concord wears his A’s gear along with his union hat. Behind us, a Mexican-American family from Hayward features Mom belting out the lyrics to every song. When the show ends Dad mutters, “Dang, I’m gonna miss this shit bro, this is a tragedy the A’s are leaving.” I turn around and we engage in some emotional co-venting.
The Coliseum is called the last dive bar in baseball. In its current state, it feels more like a rundown, cozy community center. Concrete chunks are missing in the walls. You can park in the Bart parking lot for free. Buy a hat for ten bucks on the short walk over the causeway. And sit pretty much wherever you want. If you aren’t able to sneak your beer in, you can drink it on the ramp, as the sun sets over deep East Oakland. A DJ plays in the Left Field stands, and fly twenty-somethings mix it up on the dancefloor with flopsy toddlers and hipster parents in overalls. And the bathrooms are gloriously empty, so you’re in and out between innings, not missing a pitch.
Green and gold dazzles in every direction, in gorgeous and creative combinations. Nobody’s making business deals. Or taking out clients who spend three innings in line getting garlic fries ‘cause they’ve heard that’s the thing to do.
Part of what makes the Oakland A’s baseball experience so lovely is exactly what makes it commercially non-viable. This is the argument owner John Fisher—who refuses to make a public appearance, even as his relentless push to Las Vegas assures his name will be forever cursed—has bid MLB commissioner Rob Manfred and A’s President Dave Kaval to peddle for him. (East Bay U.S. Representative Barbara Lee drafted a letter and legal challenge under anti-trust provisions because Manfred’s spin has been so biased).
Indeed, the Oakland’s A’s Coliseum experience is a rebuke to every trend in consumer culture. This season, kids are free on Sundays. One afternoon in 2018, I biked down to the park in the 5th inning, and tried to buy a ticket. All the ticket windows were closed, but after receiving shrugs from stadium workers, they pointed me vaguely “to talk to that guy” over there. I couldn’t find that guy, but I was in the stadium, so I bought a hot dog, sat behind home plate and took my shirt off.
The underlying giant sucking sound of our culture is coming from our couch. It’s the ability to stay rooted in your living room with a remote in hand and a seemingly infinite buffet of streaming options. I’m not immune to the lure of high-level at home content. And a night out on the town can feel like a full frontal attack on one’s wallet. When I’m sitting mid-deck with my shirt off in my flip flops, bathrooms empty, the music bumping, I have the flavor of Oakland into my living room. A semi-socialist community center of misfits, and I fit right in.
And yet it now looks like this is the swan song. I was working out of town for the Reverse Boycott game at the Coliseum on June 12th, but caught the last few innings at Sports Attic II, a bar in Mendocino County. “The Market is open, bro. That’s what this is all about,” a young, longhair IBEW worker said, eyes wide. In the same week that the PGA tour made a deal with noted human rights abuser Saudi Arabia and their LIV golf tour to merge, it’s hard to argue otherwise.
And so the Oakland A’s, community carnaval of outfield drums and parking lot tailgates, of doing the Bernie lean and Dollar Day Wednesdays, is going to the nerve center of 21st century hyper-capitalism: the lower-brain stem salon called Las Vegas.
I recently visited Vegas for research, and when I was able to locate a locals bar, West Side Oasis, in Vegas’ historically Black West Side neighborhood, I had a great, homely evening. I’ve got nothing against Vegas. If tickets are still cheap, I will probably take a trip down there and sit in the upper deck with my shirt off. Just to see.
My son Winston will then be thirteen years old, possibly disenchanted or disinterested in baseball. The A’s pennants and posters of Khris Davis and Jose Canseco will have migrated from his shared bedroom with his baby sister to the tool shed next to my Bash Brothers poster. Born in New York and raised in Oakland, Winston is not a Giants fan. I’ve fallen so in love with the Oakland A’s Coliseum baseball experience, I’m not sure I can go back to the Giants either.
And I grew up in San Francisco, a diehard Giants fan. I spent frigid Monday evenings at Candlestick, wrapped in a sleeping bag in the Family Pavilion section (Ticket Price: $5), chanting “U-Ribe!” Friday nights in the rowdy bleachers, fifty yards behind the outfield chain link fence, watching Giants-Dodgers fan brawls break out and trying in vain to catch Chili Davis and Jeff “Hackman” Leonard homers (Ticket Price: $2.50). I fell asleep listening to Hank Greenwald and Ron Fairly on my bedside clock radio. I tried eating Vick’s Vapo Rub because Kevin Mitchell, my favorite player, did.
The Giants were the team that played in my city. Tickets were cheap, and my brother and I could take the bus to the ballpark, and make it a full day experience. The stadium was a huge (it fit over 60,000 fans) concrete bowl from the late ‘60s westward expansion of baseball. (After the Coliseum is torn down, only Dodger Stadium will be left from that era.)
But Jose Canseco was the biggest star in baseball, so that’s who I was for Halloween in 1988. My Mom ironed on white letters to an A’s T-shirt and I was the best 65 pound Jose Canseco with tortoise shell glasses 3rd grade ever saw. I listened to Bill King call the A’s games on KFRC. And I’d make the pilgrimage out to the Oakland Coliseum, where a machine of a team paraded through opponents.
The A’s had a lineup of He-men bashers: Jose, Big Mac, Hendu, Dave Parker, Carney, and then they got Oakland’s own Ricky Henderson. They had multiple 20 game winners: Stew and Welch and Moore, the custodial-efficient setup man Rick Honeycutt and wild-hair closer Eck. The Giants were the underdog franchise, the A’s were the juggernaut. A trip to the Coliseum was the bougie Bay Area baseball experience. A blast of sunshine, a view of the Oakland hills, lots of pale, leggy Walnut Creek whites in short shorts and golf visors.
In that juggernaut era, the A’s were top-five in attendance in baseball for five years in a row. In the skin-flint Moneyball teams of the early aughts they were mid-level attendance, averaging over 2 million tickets a season and 26,000 fans per game. I sat in the last row in a completely packed upper deck in October 2003 and saw Ramon Martinez and the Red Sox beat Barry Zito in game 5 of the ALDS, Terrence Long taking a called third strike to end the season. Even in 2019, the last pre-pandemic year, they averaged over 20,000 fans a game. Lively, respectable, and tickets were affordable. (They even briefly featured a small five dollar beer, that always made me buy two).
Many Oakland natives have told me they’ve been boycotting the team, tired of an insulting owner who trades their favorite players. The A’s front office has gone from trading stars a year before they hit free agency—as many small market teams do—to trading players as soon as they have value. The 2014 spurning of the Cuban cowboy, uber-hombre Yoenis Cespedes was a spirit crusher, especially when the A’s melted down in the Wild Card game to the Royals, and a season later Cespedes mashed the Mets to the World Series.
The last two years though have been a whole other level. They shipped stars Matt Chapman and Matt Olson two years before they hit free agency, then Sean Murphy, three years before having to pay him big money. In January, they traded their best starting pitcher Cole Irving, four years before he would become a free agent.
Then came the pandemic, and the momentum towards the Howard Terminal stadium deal slowed. I asked Derrick, a longshoreman for over twenty years, and a regular at my local bar, about the Howard Terminal stadium and he said, “Man, why would you try to squeeze a ballpark in that tight space? You got trucks coming in from all sides, you got a tight shipping lane, it was always gonna be a headache.”
The answer to every question has always been the same: Money. West Oakland has become a gritty bedroom community for SF tech workers, and so of course John Fisher and Dave Kaval wanted to lure that corporate suite money just across the Bay (so close tech execs would see the stadium from their downtown SF offices).
When I heard about the land deal in Vegas, I called Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao’s office. I talked to a woman who’s been answering phones for the mayor’s office for several administrations. She told me every time Fisher and Kaval left after meetings they were laughing and back slapping. What it came down to, she said, was “John Fisher hates poor people. He didn’t want to do affordable housing. He didn’t want to see poor people, he didn’t want them anywhere near his ballpark.”
She proclaimed herself no expert, but as a fly on the wall during “thousands of hours Libby Schaff and Sheng Thao’s staff put in” on the Howard Terminal deal, she believes the deal would have gone through if the Oakland City Council had scrapped the affordable housing requirement. Fisher and Kaval are grade A villians in this saga, but one can’t help wonder if the Oakland City Council didn’t overplay their hand. Did the city council think they were negotiating with REI or some other typically social-justice aligned East Bay business? Did they not realize Fisher is just a feckless billionaire of massive inherited wealth, one who sees the A’s as a national enterprise available to the highest bidder?
It's mind-boggling that owners don’t understand they aren’t managing a business, they are stewards of a communal entity that belongs emotionally, spiritually and psychically to the city and fans where they play.
More than any other sport, one’s connection to the local baseball team and players is formed through a trip to the stadium. Something about watching the brightly colored uniforms, the immaculate body language in all that negative space, isolated and untethered from the rest of the action. The way a pitcher pulls twice at his pant leg above his thigh before grabbing the rosin bag between pitches. The fluid trot off the field of the slugging right fielder, back straight and strong, knowing he’s batting third that inning.
And because baseball is played every day, it seeps into the cultural consciousness of a city. It’s on in the background in every bar. Its pastoral vibe provokes gentle conversation with strangers. It’s the last affordable professional sports experience, unlike NBA or NFL, you can hit the ballpark without spending hundreds of dollars.
And with the new pace of play changes, baseball is fast and thrilling again, with average games a half hour shorter than last year, at two hours, thirty minutes, the length of games in my 1980s childhood. I’ve been to two games this year that were over in a brisk two hours. I arrive early now, not wanting to miss a pitch of what feels like an enthralling play, with the added bonus of watching the actors warm up before the action begins, curtains always drawn on the emerald stage.
Oakland is different from every other liberal, West Coast city because it is broke. While Midwestern cities still pony up public money to fund private ballparks, corporate welfare is scoffed at in San Francisco and Seattle. The problem is that Oakland doesn’t have the corporate tax base of those tech-rich titans. The city has a budget deficit of over 300 million dollars. When I spoke to Mayor Thao’s staff member on the phone, she told me Thao was currently “in D.C., begging for money, ‘cause we need it.” The Nevada legislature seems happy to contribute 380 million for billionaire Fisher’s GoFundMe campaign to build a new stadium in Vegas.
My son Winston keeps asking why? Why do the A’s have to leave? They are treasured outings we make, a fifteen minute car trip on a whim when the weather is right. Just like I did growing up in San Francisco, when we’d pile into a neighbor’s van, or Jonah and I would take the long, multi-bus Muni ride out to The Stick.
My Dad grew up in England, so my brother and I taught him to play baseball, which he learned, gamely, in his forties. At little league games, my teammates were tickled by and tried to mimic his mottled English accent when I pitched, “C’mon Dan, just throw strikes Dan!”
I fell away from baseball as many people did after the 1994 strike, which also coincided with the beginning of high school, and a multitude of other interests: basketball, flirting, hilltop parties, free-style rapping, thrifting, neighborhood exploring—the full slate of 1990s pre-internet thrills.
The current Oakland Coliseum baseball experience feels like a return to that semi-outlaw Bay Area era, a rare connection to the “Time Before” the Bay Area became the center of the global economy. Now though, I get to bring my son, teaching him it’s OK to try to sneak in a first beer, and pulling out cracker jacks bought at the corner store for the 7th inning stretch. We move down to better seats every few innings, and I introduce him to the vendors, who were my co-workers when I was a ballpark vendor from 1998-2004 (and who will acutely feel the loss of 81 home games, which the “seasonal jobs” pessimists don’t realize is part of a slate of a year round schedule of games that adds up to full-time employment.)
The last month, Winston keeps asking me why do the A’s have to leave. And I can only tell my son the truth: ‘cause the owner is shameless. And even though he has a ton of money, he wants even more. He doesn’t care about the fans in Oakland. He doesn’t care that he is taking away the city’s clubhouse, and community center, and connection to a Bay Area that has been almost completely wiped out by the surging tide of hyper-capitalism. Everything has a price. That’s a terrible lesson to try to teach a seven year old. Because growing up in the Bay Area, there used to be limits to the market, values that co-existed with its demands. The Oakland A’s baseball experience is one of the last connections to a kinder, gentler Bay Area capitalism. Go grab some joy this season before it’s gone.