Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, Oakland (MLB #10 - Baseball's Last Dive Bar)

 

One of the reasons we chose to do the West Coast swing this year is because this is the last year the Athletics will play in Oakland Coliseum (more properly, Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum), because they will be moving to Sacramento next year, and Las Vegas a few years after that.

There’s a bit of comedy and a bit of tragedy in the story of the Coliseum.

My sense is that it is the consensus 29^th or 30^th best major league stadium (of 30) in which to watch a game.

For one thing, the stadium is dirty, with things like cat feces and cobwebs, not to mention the opossum living in the press box. The camera in this picture, with as many cobwebs as cords, is typical, although it’s easier to see in person when all the strands are moving in the sunlight.

 

It’s also old. It’s been the A’s home since they moved from Kansas City in 1968, although it was renovated in the mid-1990s.

And I don’t know who is responsible for staffing the stadium, the team or the city, but they’ve clearly given up. We were sitting in the upper deck, and they had closed off all the concessions stands plus all but one set of restrooms. That’s OK, though, because the crowd in the upper deck was small enough that the ushers told us we could sit wherever we wanted (the tickets we bought had an obstructed view).

Finally, it’s a bit of an eyesore. A major part of the renovation was to add nearly 10,000 seats, plus 90 luxury boxes, above center field, blocking the view of the Sun setting on the Oakland Hills. If that sounds like it doesn’t make sense to do that to a baseball stadium, it doesn’t. It was done to bring the Raiders (NFL) back to Oakland from Los Angeles, and the construction is known locally as “Mount Davis,” after the owner of the Raiders. The boxes and seats were near the 50-yard-line, although far above it. But the Raiders then moved again about 20 years later, to Las Vegas, where the A’s will rejoin them, though in separate stadiums about a mile apart, near the end of the decade. What it means for baseball is that instead of the view from the upper deck being San Francisco Bay, or the St. Louis Arch, or the Rocky Mountains (Denver), or even the Iowa state capitol (Des Moines) or a bridge over the Ohio River (Louisville) or downtown skyscrapers (many parks), it’s 10,000 covered seats and a bunch of empty luxury boxes (see picture at the top).

The A’s negotiated with Oakland for a few years, trying to get the city (or maybe the county, or maybe a nearby city) to build them a new city. Part of their negotiation process was trashing the team and the stadium. The team didn’t produce the opossum or the cat feces, but they called them out. And owner John Fisher trashed the team in the sense that he slashed the team’s payroll – at the moment, their payroll is less than half of that of the team in 29^th. Not surprisingly, they have one of the worst records in the majors. Incidentally, since payroll and wins don’t always go together, their record this year is only the fifth worst, slightly better than the far more expensive Angels.

The fans are not happy. They have started staying away from the park in droves. The average attendance is slightly more than half that of the team in 29^th. Chants of “SELL THE TEAM” are now a standard, but Fisher won’t, at least not soon. The picture at the top is from a few minutes before the game, and the crowd did get bigger, but most seats were still empty.

One of the organizations most vocal about it all is Last Dive Bar, whose website describes itself as a “premier online store for unique and stylish apparel that celebrates the iconic Oakland Coliseum.” We bought the wristbands that simply say “Baseball’s Last Dive Bar.” The wristbands became very popular earlier this year when Esteury Ruiz, who led the American League is stolen bases last year, was sent to the minors after being photographed with one of the wristbands, which led to a social media conspiracy theory, that the wristband and the demotion were linked (like all good conspiracy theories, it might not be true).

One thing Last Dive Bar did was organize a reverse boycott last year. In a classic boycott, supporters of a cause are urged to stay home. In this case, supporters were urged to show up at a Tuesday night game, which nearly 28,000 of them (more than four times the average attendance) did. Last Dive Bar organized another boycott this evening, which we were privileged to be a part of, and got one of their biggest crowds of the season, if not their biggest, 16,046. The most popular item at the pop-up concession stands outside the stadium seemed to be the T-shirts in kelly green (the A’s color) that just say “SELL.”

At this point, it’s only fair to mention that there are two (or more) sides to every story.

Tonight’s reverse boycott generated a crowd that’s still the smallest crowd we’ve seen a major league game with this year. It’s not surprising that Oakland's a shoo-in for last place in attendance this year, with the team on the way out, but their highest attendance ranking this century is 16^th, in 2003, the year after the team won 103 games. They haven’t finished higher than 23^rd since 2005, although they’ve had some teams in the playoffs in that period.

It hasn’t always been that way. In 1990, the year after they last won a World Series, they were 3^rd in the majors in attendance, and they had a couple of other top 10 attendance finishes around that. But in the years when they were one of two teams in my lifetime to win three straight World Series, 1972-1974, they never finished in the top half of the majors in attendance.  

In other words, the fans generally haven’t shown up, even when times were good.

Would the fans show up if they had a new stadium? In other words, did the local government(s) make a mistake by not building a publicly-funded stadium, as Fisher wanted, and as Las Vegas is doing?

After the locals spent $200 million in the early 1990s (equivalent to nearly $400M today) to renovate the stadium to make it a showcase for football, the Raiders usually couldn’t sell out the stadium (NFL games that don’t sell out are an attendance failure), and then left town. That’s not going to make any politician, or any voter considering a bond issue, have a warm fuzzy feeling. I’ve seen places where a baseball stadium has been a key part of revitalizing a downtown area (Phoenix is one of those, St. Louis is another). I’ve also seen places where a suburban stadium has been a financial disaster. Glendale, a Phoenix suburb, built a hockey area for an NHL team, and nearly went broke. A part of it is surely that ice hockey is not a tradition in the desert, but many residents of the Phoenix metro area were born in places where hockey is a tradition. I think a big part of it is that Glendale is more than a half-hour from the central of the metro area, making it a very long trek for many. I don’t know whether Oakland is more like a central city with a downtown in need of a boost or a suburb too far away from the center.

Getting rid of Tropicana

The only stadium that I’ve heard worse things about than the Oakland Coliseum is Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, home of the Tampa Bay Rays. Not surprisingly, the Rays are currently going through the same dance with St. Pete that the A’s did with Oakland. Whether the Rays get a new stadium in the Tampa Bay area or move remains to be seen (there’s a proposition that is gaining support, but it also has opposition, and the fight is not always clean). Ironically, the A’s new stadium in Las Vegas will be on a site that includes the former Tropicana Casino. When I heard recently that “they’ve started demolishing the Tropicana for the new stadium,” I was confused, first thinking that the Rays had gotten their deal done already and were tearing down their stadium.

A tale of two (lost) cities

Years ago, Kerry and I went to a game in Montreal in the last year that city had an MLB team. This game reminded us of that some, but the reverse boycott meant that tonight’s crowd was much bigger. Even so, it didn’t feel like a major league game, because there weren’t enough people for the noise to fill the stadium. Montreal played in Olympic Stadium, which was indoors. The game we went to had about 6000 or 7000 people (the A’s typical attendance this year), but was one of the louder games we’ve been to. That’s because it seemed that everyone sat with at least two seats between them and the next person. That meant you could have an empty metal seat in each hand, and those seats made a satisfyingly loud bang when you pushed them down. So when it was appropriate to make noise, the crowd would start banging seats in unison. The ownership had given up, so they didn’t have the notes on the scoreboard exhorting the crowd to make noise, but they didn’t have to. It was only die-hard fans there, and they knew when it needed to get loud, and the seats would start to bang.

One thing this stadium does very, very well

When we can, we stay near the stadium we’re going to. In Phoenix, we have a condo close enough to the stadium that we walk. We stayed across the street from the stadiums in Reno and El Paso, within walking distance in Oklahoma City and Houston. Sometimes there’s public transit. We’ve done that in St. Louis in the past, and in San Francisco this trip. For several minor league games, we’ve driven to the stadium and paid to park. But sometimes we try to take Uber or Lyft. We found that to be nearly impossible in St. Louis and Denver, and I tried that once at Wrigley Field, and it took me more than an hour to get a ride. In Oakland, it works well. There’s a designated area, accessed from a road that doesn’t go to the parking lots, so even if they had the stadium full, the ride-shares wouldn’t be competing with the parking lot traffic. I’m impressed.

A tale of two anthems

Since Oakland was playing Toronto, the designated singer performed both the Canadian and American national anthems. We gave her a 5.5 (of 10) on “O Canada” and a 2.5 on “Star Spangled Banner.” Of course, we didn’t factor in degree of difficulty, and “O Canada” is far easier to perform well, based on years of listening to pregame rituals.

The game

Although there are many things about the stadium that feel not-quite, or not-anymore, major league, the play is. Oakland won 2-1, on a walk-off home run on the first pitch of the bottom of the 9^th inning by J. J. Bleday. Toronto’s Chris Bassitt pitched very, very well, giving up only one run in eight innings. His replacement, Chad Green, gave up the same number of runs on one pitch.

The game lasted only 2 hours and 7 minutes. It’s the shortest game we’ve seen this season, and probably the shortest game we’ve seen in many years. I’ve already said it, but I like the new rules to shorten the game.

A comment to make a person feel old

A group of young adults (in their 30s?) behind us was talking about the fact that Toronto has so many players whose fathers were major leaguers. At the time they mentioned Vladmir Guerrero Jr. and Bo Bichette (father Dante), but Daulton Varsho (Gary) played later, and Cavin Biggo (Craig) is on their roster.

Then one of them said, “But the one that gets me is Jackson Holliday. It seems like it wasn’t that long ago that Matt was playing.”

Jackson Holliday made his debut for the Orioles recently, amid quite a bit of hype, but we hadn’t realized he was Matt’s son. That’s significant because Jackson was once a patient of Kerry’s, when she was doing the non-sports medicine for the Colorado Rockies during Spring Training in Tucson. She really liked the Holliday family. She remembers Jackson (though she didn’t remember his name) – as a three-year-old.