You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone
I first went to Oakland Coliseum sometime in the summer of 1979 when I was two years old. We lived a few towns over, my dad had cancer and wasn’t doing great, so my uncle John took my brother Jeff (4 yo), sister Kelly (almost 6), and me to see an A’s game. It was a legendary disaster, we only made it a few innings. But thus began a lifelong love affair (so I thought) with the Oakland A’s.
My dad died the following spring and our family moved to a small town in the Central Valley, near Fresno. His six brothers knew one best way to bond with us: sports. Bill coached us from afar on everything and was our biggest fan; Larry was a Niners fan; David and Tim definitely weren’t, but they bet us on every Niners game v their favorite teams (the Giants and the Vikings). But Uncle Kevin? He was an A’s fan, and because of that, so were we. Every year on our summer break, we’d come back up to visit the Bay, and he’d take Jeff and me to at least one A’s game.
The routine: park at BART to save money on parking, buy cheap tickets in the bleachers and then move to better seats. Year after year. First it was Billy Ball, Dave Kingman and Dwayne Murphy, Rickey Henderson, a lot of empty seats and a Colossal Dog. You had to load it up with relish and sauerkraut, that’s the right way to eat it.
Then came the LaRussa years, the Bash Bros, three World Series in a row, two hours to leave the parking lot with Bill King and Lon Simmons on the radio recapping the game, energy still coursing through us. It was a foregone conclusion that they’d be in the postseason, and we had to sit in those cheap bleacher seats because the good seats were all full. One night, our grandpa came, too, and they went to extra innings. I made us all stay till the end even though post-game traffic would be murder, when my favorite player won it with a walkoff single. All hail Carney Lansford.
They were the soundtrack of our summer, sitting on grandma’s back deck, playing wiffle ball in the yard, anticipating the next eruption of Bill King’s voice. I can still remember searching the radio back home in Lemoore while opening a whole case of baseball cards, finding the A’s game amid the crackle of static, hearing Bill call a Mark McGwire bomb off the concession stands in left field, just beneath the ice plant.
Uncle Kevin taught us the rhythm of the ballpark. Glove on, eat the hot dog in the early innings, try to guess what’s going to happen. “Trade him” when Jose Canseco didn’t hit a home run every at bat. We bought good seats one game, and I stood up and yelled at Cal Ripken when he struck out. Nobody knew where that came from, I’d always been quiet around my family. But something about that full Coliseum energy changed me.
He taught us about our family in those quiet moments between the action. He’d tell us things we didn’t know about our dad, usually with a lot of reverence and a few laughs. Not everybody is comfortable talking about your dead dad; in fact, most people either refer to him in vague platitudes or avoid mentioning him altogether. I guess they worry it’ll dredge up the pain, to remind you of the loss. The irony? No kid who’s lost a parent needs a reminder that they died; it’s all they think about. What they want more than anything is for you to acknowledge that he lived. Uncle Kevin was one of the only people in our lives who seemed to realize that.
And he also taught us to love the A’s. I wore #4 in Little League to honor Carney and #25 in HS for the guy who played my position, Mark McGwire. When I moved to the Bay for college in 1995, Jeff and I went to a game a week. McGwire hit a HR each game my first 9 trips to the yard that year. I could go to an A’s game anytime I wanted. Was this heaven? Nope, it was the Coliseum.
One Friday night in ‘97, we bought bleacher seats but sat in the lower bowl, near the RF bullpen. The announced crowd was something shy of 7,000. A guy in an A’s polo walked up to us, and we couldn’t believe we were about to get kicked out of the seats. There was nobody else in the whole section. Kicked out? Nope, they chose me as Fan of the Game because I was wearing an A’s hoodie. I got to be on the Jumbotron (we call that Diamond Vision round here) and they gave me a gift certificate to a shoe store in Berkeley. The best part? Roy Steele, the Voice of God, said my name for all to hear.
I couldn’t wait to tell Uncle Kevin that I was Fan of the Game the next time I saw him. To this day, 27 years later, I still can’t believe that I never did. The following Wednesday, driving home from work and stuck in traffic because of a U2 concert at the Coliseum, he felt chest pains and went to the hospital. He was dead four hours later. Heart attack. 40 years old.
I can still hear his laugh, the high-pitched voice he’d use to make a joke, the way he pronounced Coloss-o dog, how he’d deal with the people who told us we were sitting in their seats. They say loss never hurts less, only less often. I say they’re right.
A few days after his funeral, Jeff and I did what we always did. We went to an A’s game. Sat in the RF bleachers and stared at the field. We weren’t there for the game. We were there for him. For the memories that place brings up. For the distraction we always turned to when we needed an excuse to hang out.
Then the A’s got good again! I spent the summer of 2000 promoting baseball for MLB in Europe, but I was right there in the first row of the RF bleachers when they clinched the division the last day of the season, hanging K signs as Tim Hudson mowed through the Rangers lineup. Friends from England emailed to say they saw me on TV. Baseball had shown me the world, and it kept me connected to people far and wide, alive and dead.
I went to 20 games a year for the next decade, including all three playoff games against the Yankees in 2001. We yelled to get a pinch runner in for Jeremy Giambi; we were right behind the A’s dugout. Art Howe didn’t listen. T Long doubles into the RF corner; why is Derek Jeter in that spot? To this day, I have still never seen proof that Jeremy was out. Show me the tag!
They may have lost in the playoffs, but the A’s were good and they kept replenishing the roster against all odds. They always kept my attention and I kept going to the ballpark, mostly with my brother but also with other friends and family. I was pretty sure I’d name my first born after Billy Beane, their revolutionary General Manager, who pulled rabbits out of hats year after year. I made instant bonds with new friends who were also A’s fans.
Jeff and I walked around Cooperstown, NY in 2009, there to see Rickey inducted into the HOF. We had custom t-shirts to get Bill King in the HOF; we met Dave Stewart on the main drag. He told us he always kicked Roger Clemens’ ass.
The specter of the A’s leaving Oakland loomed as a constant subplot for A’s fans. My first exposure to fear of an A’s flight dates to the late 80s, when my stomach was in knots when I saw a report that they were on the way to Denver. In the summer of 2000, an MLB executive told me that the league knew they “had to get them out of Oakland.” A few years later, my colleague did a deal with the A’s owners, who had recently agreed to sell the team to a group led by a developer they’d recently added to their ownership group, a former fraternity brother of the commissioner of baseball who’d been active building commercial developments in San Jose. Why did they agree to sell? “The team has to move and it’ll get ugly. We don’t want any part of that.”
I would go to playoff games and stare at empty seats, fearing the implication, finally feeling relief when most of the stadium filled up. For many years, I hoped they’d land in San Jose, 45 minutes south and flush with tech money that could lead to bigger revenues and budgets. It seemed like that was also MLB’s wish; the only outstanding issue was how to appease the Giants, who were gifted “territorial rights” to the South Bay by a former A’s owner to help prevent them from moving to Tampa. I moved to San Francisco in 2002, and in the next 10 years, a series of technologies pioneered by local companies moved the Bay Area to the center of the universe, bolstering every town with rising property values and large scale construction. One emerging winner of the booming Bay? Downtown Oakland.
In 2014, I moved to Oakland for the first time in my life. The A’s had been rebuffed from moving to San Jose, making it all the way to the Supreme Court, but they were making a real push to build a new stadium near downtown Oakland, where things were coming alive. I thought they’d finally thrive if they moved six miles north from the Coliseum to the city’s growing urban core. I bored my girlfriend (now wife) with frequent updates on the latest ballpark news. My kids were born in 2016 (alas, neither is named for William Lamar Beane), and I bought a house 1.5 miles from the Coliseum a few years later. On busy game days, admittedly rare occasions, it’s faster to ride a bike to a game than drive and park.
But then it all crashed. We rooted our faith in an empty suit who got the fanbases’ collective hopes up only to dash them in heaps of hot air, beautiful architectural drawings, and two failed ballpark location decisions that looked like the work of somebody totally in over his head. They finally walked away over a funding gap that amounted to a rounding error on the principal owner’s balance sheet.
The A’s have had four ownership groups in my lifetime. But they’ve always worn white shoes.
My last two core memories at the ballpark: Jeff and I went to the wild card game against the Tampa Bay Rays in 2019. We splurged for seats right near where we sat when Derek Jeter flipped away the playoff run two decades prior. The A’s got bombed, it was over in the first inning. But optimism about another A’s run still reigned.
And then last year, we all went back for one more game, a “reverse boycott” that Jeff actually had a hand in planning. I sat next to my Uncle John, the one who took me to that first game in 1979, and he pointed to ghosts all over the ballpark. Where he and Uncle Kevin sat for the World Series in 1973. They were always going to A’s games together back in high school. He told me stories I’d never heard before, about the generosity of my grandparents (he’s my Mom’s brother), and how he finally felt like an August that time my grandpa got furious at him because he “let” Kevin get his new bike stolen.
That’s how my parents met. My dad’s brother Kevin was best friends with my Mom’s brother, John. I’m Kevin John, named after two guys who spent their high school years going to A’s games.
I looked around the stadium and remembered a few ghosts of my own: those playoff games against the Yankees, the Fan of the Game seat, the extra inning game with Uncle Kevin and grandpa, the time I got Ray Fosse to sign a rattle for my newborn niece, when I walked around the outfield dirt with my Little League team in 1983, and all the games with my best friends over the years (Alex, Robbie, Colin and Shawn when the A’s played the Tigers or Sox, Canice, a million others). We were in the West Side Club for half the game when they won #20 in a row, then de-camped to our seats at the top of the stadium. I whined to Robbie that Scott Freaking Hatteberg was on deck, and he hadn’t hit a home run since April! They were going to blow an 11-0 lead and not win 20 in a row! Well, what he did next is literally the stuff of Hollywood lore: he hit a home run to win the game. Crazy.
And today we have the final, definitive word: the A’s are officially leaving the Coliseum and Oakland. I’ve been dreading this news for more than half my life, and I’m sad that my kids won’t have the same reference point for their relationships. I won’t get to visit those ghosts, the memories that flood back once you walk into a building, the conversations that happen when you’re sitting with somebody for three hours in the sun.
Rest in peace, Oakland A’s. You were always part of the family. Thanks for everything.
