Green seats wasteland (Requiem for a Coliseum)

 The Athletics played their last game in the Oakland Coliseum yesterday, beating the Texas Rangers 3-2 before 46,889 fans. J.T. Ginn, the A's rookie starter, gave up two runs in 5.1 innings to receive the win, his first in the majors. The epically named Kumar Rocker, the Rangers' rookie starter, received the loss. The A's rookie closer Mason Miller pitched 1.1 perfect innings to become the last man to pitch in the Coliseum in a major league game. Travis Jankowski of the Nordic locks was the last man to face him. 

The Athletics have played in the Coliseum for fifty-seven years. In that time, they won four World Series and lost two more. They made the play-offs twenty-one times, and won 229 more games than they lost.

In that same time, they finished in the top half of the AL in attendance just eleven times. They finished fourth or higher five times, and four of those times were from 1989 to 1992. When they won three straight World Series from 1972 to 1974, their highest annual attendance was 1,001,000. 

Oakland got a raw deal from their owners both at the beginning and end of their Athletics era. Charlie Finley, who built the A's dynasty of the 1970s working as his own GM, was as much of a genius of obnoxiousness as he was a baseball genius. In his time as owner he alienated the fans, the players, the press, his employees, his wife... pretty much everyone. The A's hit their Finley nadir in 1979. That year, they lost 108 games and drew 3,787 fans a game. A grand total of 653 fans attended their game versus the Mariners in April. (653 was a generous number.) The Oakland Coliseum, just a dozen years old at the time, was prematurely old; A's players publicly called it the worst stadium in the majors as early as 1973. It was dubbed the Oakland Mausoleum by both fans and players. 

Charlie Finley (Getty Images)

Things started looking up a little in 1980. Finley hired Billy Martin as manager, 21-year-old Rickey Henderson stole 100 bases, and the A's finished 2nd in the AL West. But Finley's wife filed for divorce that summer, and wouldn't accept a stake in the team. Finley was forced to sell the team to Walter A. Haas Jr., president and chairman of Levi Strauss of jeans fame. 

Fans turned out in droves to see the Finley-less A's in 1981. (Ding-dong, the witch is dead about sums up their attitude.) After the A's had never drawn better than 1,075,000 fans in a year in 20 years of Finley, they drew 1,304,000 in 1981 - a year with a strike-shortened 110-game schedule. 

The Oakland Athletics' fifteen years of Haas ownership turned out to be their glory years. Their farm system was rebuilt and yielded stars like Canseco and McGwire, they hired Tony LaRussa as their manager, transformed Dennis Eckersley from washed-up starter into MVP closer, and built a fantastic starting rotation around free-agent signing Bob Welch and other teams' castoffs. 

They were in the World Series every year from 1988 to 1990, winning it all in 1989. After having slumped in attendance in their mediocre mid-1980s years, they finished 2nd, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th in attendance from 1989 to 1992. 

But they started losing again in 1993 despite having Rickey, Eckersley, a 41-year-old Goose Gossage, and three bench players named Scott, and attendance began to decline. 

Haas died in 1995, and the team was sold to a group led by two Bay Area real estate developers. The developers didn't believe in throwing around money, so they got rid of their stars and invested in their farm system. And they hired Billy Beane as their GM. Thus began the Moneyball years.

Photo from "Where has the old Billy Beane gone?" (Athletics Nation, 2017)

The Moneyball years were (famously) characterized by analytics, homegrown stars, and stingy spending. They would have plenty of success - until the postseason began. They lost four straight American League Division Series three games to two from 2000 to 2003. Attendance was middling. 

The A's were sold again in 2005, this time to a group fronted by a real estate developer, Lewis Wolff, with John J. Fisher Jr., son of The Gap's founder, as majority owner. Under this new consortium the A's have had some good teams and some bad teams, but they've never spent much money and attendance has always been bad. 

These last four years in Oakland have been particularly grim. The stadium, for one thing, has been left to molder.  

"The concrete behemoth was never the warmest stadium, but its character was unmistakable. In recent years, it hasn’t exactly fallen into disrepair; rather, it’s been deliberately pushed. Like the team on the field, it’s been allowed to atrophy in order to demonstrate how badly the organization needs (never wants) out of Oakland." - Davy Andrews, from Fangraphs' tribute to the Coliseum: Memories of the Oakland Coliseum. A good read. 

The A's payroll went from $95 million in 2021 to $50 million in 2022 after they gutted their team, and it has remained at that level since. Their payroll this year of $56 million was less than their payroll in 2004 - and in 2004 their payroll was less than a third of the Yankees'. 

The A's drew 1,671,000 fans in 2019 - and less than half of that, 701,430, in 2021. They drew 4,068 fans to a September game that year against one of their rivals in a tight Wild Card race. Some of the blame for low attendance that year was due to lingering concern over COVID, but raised ticket prices, $30 parking, minimal promotions, the aging Coliseum, and rumors of a move didn't help either. 

(From the San Jose Mercury News, 2021-9-23)

Since then, the team has turned from good to ugly, and attendance has remained rock-bottom. The A's set their plan to move to Las Vegas in motion last year, and by December 16 the move was official. Until their new stadium in Sin City is finished, they'll play in Sacramento's AAA ballpark. 

This will be the fourth time the A's have moved. 

The Oakland Athletics and their Coliseum deserve a requiem. There's a song I love that talks about death and the Coliseum: Dead Dogs Two by cLOUDDEAD. I think it's a fitting epitaph.

The first verse of lyrics (some of my favorite from any song):

From the height of the highway on-ramp we saw
Two dogs a-dead in a field
Glowing on the Oakland Coliseum green seats wasteland
Dogs, dogs we thought were dead
They rose up, rose up when whistled at
Their rib cages inflating
Like men on the beach being photographed
A guard dog (guard dog) for what? (for what?)
Against overzealous penniless Athletics fanatics
Getting into games through a hole in the fence
For the owner of the blue tarp tent
Pitched by a creek beneath the on-ramp
In the privacy of the last three
Skin-and-bony trees, devoid of leaves
And us undeceased, and with our new CDs
Zipping on dead east, Oakland

The original version of the song is pretty good, but the definitive version is Boards of Canada's remix of it. I'm a huge Boards of Canada fan, and they do a great job with this song. (It's also one of their more accessible songs, in my opinion.)

If you're interested in listening: