We Play(ed) Here - Episode 2 - Oakland Coliseum and The Friends We Hold Near
A decaying Coliseum and its importance to the town of Oakland, California.
Baseball fandom is a lot different than any other major sport in America. Maybe it’s because of how relaxed and calm baseball is as a sport compared to football, but baseball seems to have a more personal connection to those who cheer on their favorite teams. You feel more connected to the players, the uniforms, and most importantly for our discussion, the stadiums. This is especially important and/or prevalent if it’s your hometown team. In the first episode of this series, I talked about the former Metrodome in Minnesota and its feeling of being a shared home for Minnesotans (like me). For the people of Oakland, California, it’s the concrete donut named the Oakland Coliseum. Yes, it is still a stadium in use. The Oakland Athletics still play baseball here, and have since 1968. It shouldn’t be included in this series, one might cry out. Yet I am the author, and there is a profound story to be told about this stadium, the team it hosts, and the fans that call it home.
To get this out of the way, yes the Oakland Coliseum (also known as Oakland–Alameda County Coliseum, Network Associates Coliseum, McAfee Coliseum, Overstock.com Coliseum, O.co Coliseum, and RingCentral Coliseum) is a dump. It’s old, not really designed for baseball anymore, a relic of the multi-use stadium era, and just kinda ugly. For most of its history, its main tenants have been the aforementioned Oakland A’s and the NFL’s Oakland Raiders, who had two stints at the stadium. The Raiders' time at the stadium is more well-known than the Athletics’, and if you ask A’s fans, it’s more controversial as well.
For most of its history, this is what the Coliseum looked like: an open-ended section with views of the Oakland Hills out towards center field in the baseball configuration. It still wasn’t perfect by any means, it had the flaws of most multi-use stadiums and the still prevalent massive foul territory which made sideline views feel like you were watching from miles away. But it was a much more aesthetically pleasing ballpark than its other multi-use counterparts at the time. The Raiders jumped ship to Los Angeles in 1982 due to Oakland’s lack of desire to renovate the stadium to suit the needs of owner Al Davis (you might have heard of him). The A’s were then the lone tenant of the coliseum until the Raiders’ L.A. tenure ended just like their first Oakalnd tenure: Al wanted a new stadium in L.A. but wasn’t getting his wishes. Oakland, on the other hand, was more than happy to welcome the Raiders back, but Davis still had one condition: increased capacity and more luxury seating. The city agreed to these terms and the Raiders returned to Oakland in 1995. The result was a structure that became known as Mount Davis.
The tide of public opinion began to change. A stadium that used to feel like a home for both football and baseball now felt like a home for football and a random building where baseball happened to be played. Mount Davis was hated from the start. It blocked the views of the Oakland Hills, it was overly steep and felt far away from the playing field (an issue the stadium already had for baseball), and was overall just an eyesore in the opinion of the fans. Even worse, its effects on attendance were small and short-lived. The A’s have placed tarps over the Mount Davis seating sections for almost every game since 2006, owing to the aforementioned issues. It helped the Raiders a little longer, but even they began to tarp it off in 2013, when they became in danger of not selling out home games and requiring the NFL to black them out in the local television market.
The Raiders would eventually leave again when their demands for a new stadium in Oakland never became realized (a common trend), jumping ship for the giant toilet bowl in Las Vegas in 2020. Mount Davis has seen few openings since, mostly for big games like Giants/A’s and playoff series. It still draws the ire of fans, and has been the main blame for the stadium's slow descent into unbearability in recent years. But A’s ownership also has a part in this, as the current ownership group led by John Fisher is largely despised by the fans. To quote a piece by David Hill from Oakland A’s FanSided site White Cleat Beat, “Owner John Fisher does not care one iota about having a winning team or possibly taking home a championship. Instead, he cares far more about how the A’s can help pad his bank account. The fact that they are now receiving money, which will go right to his coffers instead of to the A’s payroll, likely makes him happier than any title ever would.” It has caused a rift between the organization and its city and fans, who often feel forgotten and unwanted by their own team. As the rumors fly that the team might move to Las Vegas, why should fans care? Do they care? If you look at attendance numbers, one might come to the assumption that fans wouldn’t care if the A’s moved to Vegas. Yet, this ignores the ownership group actions — slashing of payroll, trading away stars, rising ticket prices — that have driven these numbers down more and more. It also ignores, most importantly, the fans who do show up, and the fans who do care about this team.
There is no fanbase in baseball as devoted as that of the Oakland A’s. The energy they bring to every game is something that cannot be found elsewhere in American sports. Their devotion through the past few years defines what media people think about Oakland and its baseball team. They play in a dump! Why do they fans put up with it? Why doesn’t the team move to the marvelous world of Las Vegas? To quote Alan Chazzro from his piece ‘In defense of East Oakland's Coliseum and its diehard A's fans’, “I’m here for the Coliseum until the day one of us is no longer standing. It’s where my adolescent dreams were shaped, where I went on my first date with my now-wife nearly 15 seasons ago, where we hotboxed Jettas and cooked carne asada in the parking lot before games and where — no matter what else was going on in the world — I could count on the truest Bay Area characters to roll deep and represent amid the waves of gentrification happening all around us.”
The city of Oakland has seen two of its three major league sports teams leave in the past few years; only the A’s remain. Yet, the fans and people of Oakland don’t break. The Coliseum is home. The Coliseum has provided memories that other ballparks wish they could. While everything falls apart around them, A’s fans don’t give up. Even as ownership tries to run the team out of town, drive the fans away, the mighty few will remain. They will be cheering, banging their drums, playing music, and supporting this team until the day the world burns up. The Coliseum will be this stage for as long as it stands. The stage for Oakland to show it’ll never go away, no matter how hard you try. Maybe the A’s will move to Vegas, who knows? For now, as the 2023 season begins, and A’s attendance still makes headlines for being so “astronomically” low, remember who is there, the joy and memories made at the ballpark. It might be a dump, but the Oakland Coliseum will always be a place for Oakland to come together and be themselves in the face of it all.
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