As an era ends, Oakland comes to grips with Athletics departure

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OAKLAND, Calif. — The Athletics had long ago carved out a Jekyll-and-Hyde legacy as one of Major League Baseball’s most successful — and sad-sack — franchises. Under their belts: nine World Series titles and 19 seasons of futility punctuated by 100 or more losses.

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This, though, is different. Now, legions of A’s fans view the team as the sport’s most treacherous under the ownership of billionaire John Fisher, an heir of the family that founded The Gap in 1969 — one year after the A’s moved to Oakland from Kansas City.

Just a few years after embracing “Rooted In Oakland” as their motto, the A’s this week are coming to the end of their 57 see-sawing seasons in a city regularly overshadowed by the mystique of its storied neighbor, San Francisco.

“I know these times coming to the games are always going to be among the best years of my life,” longtime A’s fan Will MacNeil, 40, rued as he contemplated an ending that is crushing a community’s soul. “And for a billionaire owner to rip it away from me, it’s frustrating.”

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A baseball team that has moved twice moves again

The A’s exodus from Oakland will give the team the dubious distinction of being the first Major League Baseball franchise to have moved on four different occasions. After starting in Philadelphia in 1901, the A’s moved to Kansas City in 1955, then to Oakland in 1968, with California’s capital city of Sacramento and Las Vegas next in the peripatetic pipeline.

No place has been the A’s home for as long as Oakland, where they’re the last professional sports team in a two-county region known as the East Bay — home to 2.8 million people living across the water from San Francisco.

Through the years, the baseball team became an emblem of East Bay’s grit and flair. The A’s glory years included the colorfully attired, mustachioed “Swingin’ A’s” during the first half of the 1970s, the muscular and swaggering “Bash Brothers” of the late 1980s, and the scrappy underdogs of the 2000s that yielded a real-life fairy tale in the film, “Moneyball,” based on the Michael Lewis book that ushered in the era of data-driven analysis.

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Through those decades, the A’s stadium — the now-crumbling Oakland Coliseum — became an East Bay hub where people of all races, ages, incomes and backgrounds rallied around a common cause.

“It was really like the public square,” lifelong A’s fan Jim Zelinski said earlier this year. His father brought him to the team’s first game at the Oakland Coliseum on April 17, 1968 — a 4-1 loss to the Baltimore Orioles before a crowd of 50,164.

“I remember my dad telling me how sports can bring everybody together, creating a sense of pride and identity,” he said.

Rooting for the A’s connected everyone from longshore workers at Oakland’s bustling port to the tech geeks of Silicon Valley to hippies from nearby Berkeley to technology to subversives forged in the cauldron of a city where Huey Newton started the Black Panthers and Sonny Barger led a notorious chapter of the Hells Angels.

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“The A’s are such an indelible part of this community,” Zelinski said. “Everybody was so proud of not only the teams, but there was also this sense of, ‘Hey, this is us! This is the East Bay!”‘

A storied ballpark is left behind

The Coliseum, lovingly known as baseball’s “Last Dive Bar” after a 2019 story in The New York Times drew that analogy, is a remnant of the 1960s when cities built stadiums designed to be used for both baseball and football. Its deteriorating condition is why Fisher began looking to build a new stadium for the A’s soon after he bought the team for $180 million in 2006.

For all the derision aimed at the facility, the Coliseum has been the site for three of the 24 perfect games thrown in baseball history, and it’s the place where Rickey Henderson set the record for career stolen bases. It also has been the been the backdrop for the four World Series championships the A’s won in Oakland; only the Yankees, with seven championships, have won more since 1968. Seven winners of the American League’s Most Valuable Player award have starred for the Oakland A’s, as have five pitchers who won the league’s Cy Young award.

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Three of the A’s World Series title were won in consecutive years under the ownership of Charles O. “Charlie” Finley, who brought the team to Oakland from Missouri.

Finley brought his mule “Charlie O” with him to serve as the team mascot and made an unsuccessful push to get the leagues to use orange baseballs and allow designated runners. But before selling the A’s in 1980, Finley also pushed for night games during the World Series so more people could watch the games on TV and the designated hitter rule so fans wouldn’t have to watch pitchers try to hit. The former is a staple today, as is the later — though purists still debate it.

Finley died in 1996, long before the 50-year reunion of the 1974 World Series champions held in June. But his niece, Nancy Finley, flew in from Texas to represent the family during the ceremony at the Coliseum, where she worked for much of the 1970s. It will likely be her last visit; she can’t bear the thought of attending the A’s final game in Oakland on Thursday.

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“I wouldn’t want to be there. It would be too hard,” Nancy Finley said. “I can’t stop having flashbacks whenever I go back there. I have every section, row and seat memorized.”

The bond between fans and a community is strong

Other beloved sports teams have spurned their devoted fans by moving elsewhere through the decades, including the baseball’s Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants in 1958 and the National Football League’s Colts, whose moving vans left Baltimore for Indianapolis in 1984 during the middle of the night.

But none of them have been jilted in quite the same way as the East Bay.

“It’s taken so long for this move to evolve that it’s been like a slow death eating me up very single day,” said A’s fan Mike Silva, 72, wiping away tears as he showed some of his old ticket stubs.

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“You can still cheer for them after the move, but you are just gong to be cheering for the uniform,” he said. “It’s not the same. ”

The NFL’s Raiders already turned their back on Oakland twice. They did it first in 1982 when they moved to Los Angeles before coming back in 1995, only to leave for Las Vegas in 2020 — the year after the National Basketball Association’s Warriors hopped over the bay to San Francisco.

After the A’s decided to follow the Raiders to Las Vegas, Fisher poured more salt into Oakland fans’ wounds. Rather than stay in the Coliseum, Fisher chose to move the A’s 85 miles northeast to a minor-league ballpark in Sacramento for at least the next three years while waiting for the new stadium in Nevada to be built. Hundreds of A’s employees and Coliseum concession workers, including some who had been there for more than 40 years, will be laid off when the A’s leave Oakland behind.

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On Monday, after staying fairly mum during the final season, Fisher wrote an open letter to fans and the community. His words echoed with regret.

“The A’s are part of the fabric of Oakland and the East Bay and the entire Bay Area,” Fisher wrote. “I know there is great disappointment, even bitterness. … I can tell you this from my heart: we tried. Staying in Oakland was our goal. It was our mission, and we failed to achieve it. And for that I am genuinely sorry.”

Some are coming out to the bitter end

Many devout A’s fans have been boycotting games in disgust. Those who still come, like Will MacNeil, regularly lead chants of “Sell the team!”‘ before lobbing a profanity at Fisher.

MacNeil, known as “Right-Field Will” after being a fixture in the Coliseum’s bleachers for nearly 20 years, has accumulated about 200 A’s jerseys during his fandom. He estimates only 20 fit him now because of the weight he put on while drowning his sorrow about the team’s move in beers.

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“I know I shouldn’t have been because it’s only sports, but this move really destroyed me,” MacNeil said as he cheered the A’s on to a victory in May.

Zelinski, the fan who attended the A’s first game in 1968, spent nearly 30 years fighting to keep sports teams in Oakland. When the season started, he still didn’t want to believe it would all be to no avail.

“I had some of the greatest memories of my life at the Oakland Coliseum,” Zelinski, 65, said in April. “The A’s are such an irreplaceable part of the East Bay culture that I don’t think people can quite grasp what incredible sadness there is going to be like at that final game in September.”

He will never find out. After a long battle with bladder cancer, Jim Zelinski died June 7 — the same day that A’s outfielder JJ Bleday slugged a homer in the bottom of the ninth to catapult the team to a 2-1 victory.

Here in Oakland, as a quiet end approaches, that sets us up to leave you with an observation that the former baseball commissioner, A. Bartlett Giamatti, once made about the sport. It hangs over the community this week like a misplaced curveball: “It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart.”

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