MICHAEL LIEDTKE
Associated Press
OAKLAND, Calif. -- The Athletics had long ago carved out a Jekyll-and-Hyde legacy as one of Major League Baseball's most successful -- and sad-sack -- franchises. Under their belts: nine World Series titles and 19 seasons of futility punctuated by 100 or more losses.
This, though, is different. Now, legions of A's fans view the team as the sport's most treacherous under the ownership of billionaire John Fisher, an heir of the family that founded The Gap in 1969 -- one year after the A's moved to Oakland from Kansas City.
Just a few years after embracing "Rooted In Oakland" as their motto, the A's this week are coming to the end of their 57 see-sawing seasons in a city regularly overshadowed by the mystique of its storied neighbor, San Francisco.
"I know these times coming to the games are always going to be among the best years of my life," longtime A's fan Will MacNeil, 40, rued as he contemplated an ending that is crushing a community's soul. "And for a billionaire owner to rip it away from me, it's frustrating."
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A record move
The A's exodus from Oakland will give the team the dubious distinction of being the first Major League Baseball franchise to have moved on four different occasions.
After starting in Philadelphia in 1901, the A's moved to Kansas City in 1955, then to Oakland in 1968, with California's capital city of Sacramento and Las Vegas next in the peripatetic pipeline.
No place has been the A's home for as long as Oakland, where they're the last professional sports team in a twocounty region known as the East Bay -- home to 2.8 million people living across the water from San Francisco.
Through the years, the baseball team became an emblem of East Bay's grit and flair. The A's glory years included the colorfully attired, mustachioed "Swingin' A's" during the first half of the 1970s, the muscular and swaggering "Bash Brothers" of the late 1980s, and the scrappy underdogs of the 2000s that yielded a real-life fairy tale in the film, "Moneyball," based on the Michael Lewis book that ushered in the era of data-driven analysis.
Through those decades, the A's stadium -- the now-crumbling Oakland Coliseum -- became an East Bay hub where people of all races, ages, incomes and backgrounds rallied around a common cause.
"It was really like the public square," lifelong A's fan Jim Zelinski said earlier this year. His father brought him to the team's first game at the Oakland Coliseum on April 17, 1968 -- a 4-1 loss to the Baltimore Orioles before a crowd of 50,164.
"I remember my dad telling me how sports can bring everybody together, creating a sense of pride and identity," he said.
Rooting for the A's connected everyone from longshore workers at Oakland's bustling port to the tech geeks of Silicon Valley to hippies from nearby Berkeley to technology to subversives forged in the cauldron of a city where Huey Newton started the Black Panthers and Sonny Barger led a notorious chapter of the Hells Angels.
"The A's are such an indelible part of this community," Zelinski said. "Everybody was so proud of not only the teams, but there was also this sense of, 'Hey, this is us! This is the East Bay!'"
A storied ballpark is left behind
The Coliseum, lovingly known as baseball's "Last Dive Bar" after a 2019 story in The New York Times drew that analogy, is a remnant of the 1960s when cities built stadiums designed to be used for both baseball and football. Its deteriorating condition is why Fisher began looking to build a new stadium for the A's soon after he bought the team for $180 million in 2006.
For all the derision aimed at the facility, the Coliseum has been the site for three of the 24 perfect games thrown in baseball history, and it's the place where Rickey Henderson set the record for career stolen bases. It also has been the been the backdrop for the four World Series championships the A's won in Oakland; only the Yankees, with seven championships, have won more since 1968. Seven winners of the American League's Most Valuable Player award have starred for the Oakland A's, as have five pitchers who won the league's Cy Young award.
Three of the A's World Series title were won in consecutive years under the ownership of Charles O. "Charlie" Finley, who brought the team to Oakland from Missouri.
Finley brought his mule "Charlie O" with him to serve as the team mascot and made an unsuccessful push to get the leagues to use orange baseballs and allow designated runners. But before selling the A's in 1980, Finley also pushed for night games during the World Series so more people could watch the games on TV and the designated hitter rule so fans wouldn't have to watch pitchers try to hit. The former is a staple today, as is the later -- though purists still debate it.
Finley died in 1996, long before the 50-year reunion of the 1974 World Series champions held in June. But his niece, Nancy Finley, flew in from Texas to represent the family during the ceremony at the Coliseum, where she worked for much of the 1970s. It will likely be her last visit; she can't bear the thought of attending the A's final game in Oakland on Thursday.
"I wouldn't want to be there. It would be too hard," Nancy Finley said. "I can't stop having flashbacks whenever I go back there. I have every section, row and seat memorized."
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