*
FreeForAll Saturday laments the passing of a baseball franchise. Enjoy.
*
“. . . and the summer won’t be so pretty this year.’’ — There Used to be a Ballpark
SFGate.com
The St. Judes of sports fandom set up boycott shop in the parking lot of the Oakland Coliseum Thursday. They spent the last Opening Day of A’s baseball in tears, jeering. “Sell the team,’’ they chanted. A’s fans are equally cynical and romantic, a condition found only among jilted lovers and sports fans who, on this day, were one and the same.
The saga of the Oakland A’s represents everything that is distasteful about pro sports. Fan abuse, disloyalty, greed. Love, unrequited. The contemporary sellout to the gambling industry. Team principal owner John Fisher has a cash register for a heart. He’s moving the A’s to Las Vegas. Perfect.
The baseball passion of Oakland, CA, has been bought and sold like a stock trade. Fans are collateral damage, their love for the team as disposable as a silver dollar in a slot machine.
It was once a very good baseball town. Until very recently, the A’s were both accomplished and interesting. The A’s were really something, for quite some time.
We don’t have to remind Reds fans who stole their thunder in the early 70s. A’s relevance spanned three decades, more than a generation. Reggie and Big Mac, Vida, Catfish and Dave Stewart. Moneyball. The A’s and Rays were held up as shining examples of beating the system and winning with less.
The Coliseum was a cute and perma-sunny little ballpark, until Al Davis moved the Raiders back from LA and ruined the place.
There’s a metaphor there, if you’re looking.
You could suggest the fans had it coming. A’s attendance was routinely low. Last year’s 10,276 a game was Baseball’s lowest. Payrolls were Third World, by MLB standards. The A’s hadn’t been in the top 15 in payroll since 1994. All of Oakland’s best players left as soon as they were able.
It’s a two-way street though, isn’t it? It’s not a fan’s job to blindly throw money at a bad product. It’s an owner’s job to make the product worth paying for. Or at least to maintain the bathrooms so they’re something greater than medieval.
Baseball has been doing this since Walter O’Malley moved the Dodgers out of Brooklyn. That franchise was the precipice of what naive sports fandom can be. The Brooklyn Dodgers weren’t just tenants in Brooklyn. They were stakeholders.
The players lived in the borough, close enough to Ebbets Field they’d walk home after games. Fans invested in them because they saw themselves in their Dodgers. Furillo, Newcombe, Erskine, Campanella. The Duke. Jackie. A mixed bag of strivers, from different races and backgrounds. The fact they spent seemingly their entire careers finishing 2nd to Yankee royalty only endeared them more to the community they represented.
O’Malley moved the team to Los Angeles after the 1957 season. The solid folks of New York’s most vibrant and diverse borough got dumped for the utter shallowness of LA. “Dem Bums’’ weren’t the guys wearing the uniforms. They were the suits seeing dollar signs in LaLa Land.
It’s no different today. Brooklyn was to Manhattan what Oakland is to San Francisco. Little Bro, in the shadow of bigger skyscrapers. Anyone who has spent time in the Oakland hills can tell you how appealing the area is. Oakland has attributes San Francisco never will. The sun, for starters.
Team owners prey cynically on the fans who make them rich. They extort them for new stadia, they mock their loyalty, they disrespect them with shoddy teams, knowing their monopolies guarantee them a payday, regardless. Owners break fans hearts and they do it in the name of money. It never seems to bother them.
Oakland is Brooklyn is Cleveland when Modell left. Oakland is Irsay’s midnight moving vans pulling out of Baltimore. Oakland is San Diego without the Chargers. Oakland is a few thousand people in a parking lot outside the ballpark on Opening Day, feeling abandoned and working up a permanent cynicism.
It didn’t have to be this way. Or, maybe it did. Human nature is rarely kind, when money is involved.
TUNE O’ THE DAY. . . there used to be a ballpark, right here.
Crosley Field. No place for nostalgia these days. I'm still upset about not letting the Reds start the season off for MLB. Just as a nod to the first pro baseball team. 😔
Wow, where did you find that tune? I had no idea, but boy -Frank sure had some pipes on him... including for the sad ballad. Thought may your song would be Money by Pink Floyd.
So baseball, and the A's. I think it's a travesty what's happening in Oakland. They used to have quite the fan base, and some dang good teams - but ownership has squeezed the life out of em. If fans don't support the team, that's one thing but Cleveland supported the original Browns and Oakland the A's..... but money talks and people walk.
On the upbeat side, I am so jazzed to see the hometown Reds with this exciting and potentially very good ball team.
That's all I got for you today. Thanks for your well written pieces and I guess here's to every generation once we pass 60 and remember the good old days... whatever they may be.
By the way, do kids still ride their bikes with ball glove hooked onto the handle bars, patches ironed on the pant knees, and a ball card click. click, clicking as it clips against the wheel spokes.