Thoughts on the A’s Leaving Oakland for Las Vegas Via Sacramento
April 4, 2024
The news today that the A’s will leave Oakland at the end of the 2024 season and play in Sacramento until their new stadium opens in Las Vegas is sad, but not surprising. A’s fans have felt reluctantly resigned to this since the A’s first announced that they would leave the Bay Area last year.
Even though I left the Bay Area more than thirty years ago, I have remained an A’s fan. Before I had a driver’s license I would walk from my house to the closest bus stop, take a bus to the BART station, ride BART to the Oakland Coliseum station, walk across the concrete footbridge to the stadium, and buy a ticket to sit in the bleachers. I still remember the woman in the bleachers who was in love with A’s shortstop Walt Weiss.
I used to lay in bed at night, listen to legendary A’s broadcasters Bill King and Lon Simmons, and keep score of A’s games. Those hours of lost sleep have helped me earn low rarity scores playing Immaculate Grid because I can fill in names like Wayne Gross and Dave Revering.
I have an Oakland A’s sweatshirt and baseball hat that I proudly wear when I watch them play. I have an A’s key chain. I bought an A’s case for AirPods. In the winter, I sometimes put an A’s blanket on top of my bed. My wife recently offered to buy me an expensive birthday present. But I told her that all I wanted was a framed photograph of the Oakland Coliseum to put over my desk in my office. Whenever I travel to California to visit my parents, if the A’s are in town, we go to the Coliseum to watch them play. My son still jokes with me about the troughs in the men’s restrooms.
Most A’s fans, the stubborn few that are left, have vented much enmity toward A’s owner John Fisher, team president Dave Kaval, and baseball commissioner Rob Manfred. I share those feelings, as those three seem only concerned with maximizing profit, regardless of where the team plays, and have no loyalty to Oakland or to the A’s fans all over the Bay Area who have supported the team for almost sixty years.
But the city of Oakland cannot escape blame. How does a city lose four major professional sports franchises over a span of 42 years? (I am counting losing the Raiders twice) The only conclusion to draw is that the political and economic leaders of Oakland have neither the money nor the desire to support a major professional sports team at the level that a city needs to do.
But my bitterness is moderated by a dose of reality. Recently I watched the Ken Burns documentary about Jackie Robinson. At one point, there was black and white footage of the Brooklyn Dodgers playing the New York Giants. Read that sentence again. Within a few years of that game, both teams would leave New York for California. I am writing these words in Baltimore, where the two major professional sports teams are—the Baltimore Orioles, formerly the Saint Louis Browns, and the Baltimore Ravens, formerly the Cleveland Browns. The Baltimore Ravens replaced the Baltimore Colts who left for Indianapolis in 1984. Drive an hour south from Baltimore on I-95 and you can watch the Washington Nationals, who used to be the Montreal Expos. The Washington Nationals replaced the Washington Senators who became the Minnesota Twins in 1960. Even the A’s moved to Oakland after playing in Kansas City after playing in Philadelphia. The fact is that sports teams move cities. It happens more often than we want to admit. The A’s are the latest in a long line of franchises that have moved on to gr$$ner pastures.
The real losers here are the Bay Area fans who will not be able to see the A’s play locally anymore and the employees of the Oakland A’s or the Oakland Coliseum who will lose their jobs. They are the ones that I feel sorry for. I have lived outside of the Bay Area longer than I have lived inside of it. Nowadays, I check the A’s schedule each season as soon as Major League Baseball releases it and mark my calendar for when they play in Baltimore, Washington DC, and Philadelphia. A’s fans in Oakland will not be as fortunate.
