Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, the fifth-oldest stadium in Major League Baseball and the home of the A’s since 1968, has been called baseball’s last dive bar. A brutalist concrete doughnut short on grandeur and long on character, seated next to a Bart station at the center of an industrial waste land, no one could ever mistake it for the sport’s revered old cathedrals such as Boston’s Fenway Park, Chicago’s Wrigley Field or Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles.
When I paid the princely sum of $2 for a ticket to a recent Wednesday afternoon game against the Cubs, the stadium was just as cavernous, threadbare, outdated and unfashionable as advertised, managing to combine all the regrettable features of the dozen-plus cookie-cutter multipurpose stadiums that popped up throughout the US in the 1960s and 70s. Schoolkids in loosely assembled groups scampered excitedly through the aisles and about the large swathes of empty outfield seats. The trough-style urinals in the men’s rooms were leaky and rusted and the stained-concrete concourses stank of stale beer. All in all, the last place you’d take someone you were trying to impress. Naturally, I loved it.
Maybe it’s down to a misspent youth watching Phillies games from the bare-bones 700 level of Veterans Stadium, but there’s something about the simpler, stripped-down gameday experience that I’ve always preferred to a patch of grass surrounded by a point-of-sale processional. Nostalgia is a powerful narcotic, but the Coliseum experience stands out in an age when 99% of America’s sporting temples have come to resemble shopping malls. Of course the few active venues remaining today that compare to the Oakland Coliseum are part of a vanishingly brief shortlist. In the NFL, only the Buffalo Bills’ home ground even comes close (and its days are numbered). Another is Pimlico Race Course, the creaking 153-year-old home of thoroughbred racing’s Preakness Stakes. And then?
No sooner did I arrive home that Wednesday night than it was announced that A’s owner John Fisher, reclusive scion of the Gap clothing store empire, had purchased 49 acres of land close to the Las Vegas Strip for a billion-dollar retractable-roof stadium, all but guaranteeing the team will be out of Oakland once their lease at the Coliseum expires after the 2024 season. Amy Lau had it right: Everything fades. Nothing lasts.
None of this comes as a shock to anyone that’s been paying attention. The A’s have been trying to leave the Coliseum for at least three decades. Fisher has openly shopped the team to Vegas for years while letting the roster and its infrastructure crumble, even as the team’s valuation has soared to an estimated $1.18bn in the decade and a half since he bought it for $180m. This year’s team has a payroll of $56.8m, lowest in the majors by some distance, with only 11 players earning more than $11m and a scant two under contract for next season. Oakland’s starting pitchers are 0-15 with an 8.51 ERA. To no one’s surprise, they’ve lost 25 of their first 31 games – including by scores of 18-3, 17-6, 13-1, 12-2, 11-0 (twice) and 10-1 – putting them within a reasonable shot of the 1899 Cleveland Spiders’ major-league benchmark for futility.
It’s unnerving enough to watch the plot of Major League unfold, only without the Hollywood ending. But there’s something deeply troubling knowing the Athletics’ departure means that Oakland will have lost all three of her major-league sports teams in the span of a decade – with the Raiders having relocated (also to Las Vegas) and the NBA’s Golden State Warriors having moved to the $1bn Chase Center in downtown San Francisco.
This rickety building wasn’t always a symbol of decay. From their 1968 arrival in Oakland, the A’s have amassed the sixth-best winning percentage in the majors. Since then, the Coliseum has played host to six World Series, including one of baseball’s rare threepeats, featuring a colorful cast including Catfish Hunter, Gene Tenace, Rollie Fingers, Sal Bando, Vida Blue, Blue Moon Odom and Reggie Jackson. The Raiders, their longtime co-tenants, won a couple of Super Bowls while calling it home. (And, yes, it’s where Nick Foles once threw seven touchdowns in a game.)
Of course, the Coliseum was beyond saving even before the Vegas move, rendered obsolete by the game’s modern economics if not health-department standards. Among the problems that have beset the Coliseum in recent years and pushed it beyond preservation: at least four delays due to malfunctioning stadium lights; a colony of several dozen feral cats that “invaded” the ballpark; dead mice in a soda machine; the postponement of a game for more than three hours while crews pumped four inches of untreated sewage out of the visitors’ dugout; and, most recently, the opossum that has taken over the visiting team’s press box.
Yet there’s an authentic experience that will be lost that won’t be recovered when the A’s skip town: a character that could be found in Oakland’s industrial southeast that won’t make the southbound trip after next year. And baseball will be poorer for it. “It’s a giant concrete toilet bowl,” former A’s outfielder Eric Byrnes said. “But it’s their toilet bowl and it’s a special toilet bowl.”