Oldies Country: Baseball’s last dive bar: Farewell to the crumbling Oakland Coliseum

Thursday, May 4, 2023

Baseball’s last dive bar: Farewell to the crumbling Oakland Coliseum | Oakland Athletics

'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.”

Bryan Armen Graham Guardian

The stadium that’s prompted the Athletics’ move to Las Vegas was just as outdated and unfashionable as advertised. Naturally, I loved it

@bryanagraham

Thu 4 May 2023 07.05 EDT

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.

Longtime loyal A's season ticket holder will miss the old palace he's been attending for all its 55 years

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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$2 for a ticket to a recent Wednesday afternoon game against the Cubs, the stadium was just as cavernous, threadbare, outdated and unfashionable as advertised, managing to combine all the regrettable features of the dozen-plus cookie-cutter multipurpose stadiums that popped up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?

Oakland A’s fans protest the team’s impending relocation to Las Vegas during a game last week against the Cincinnati Reds. Photograph: Thearon W Henderson/Getty Images

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.

Raw sewage backs up in the Oakland Athletics’ dugout during a September 2013 game against the Los Angeles Angels. Photograph: Michael Zagaris/Getty Images

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 baseball’s most recent threepeat, 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 least delays due to malfunctioning stadium lights; a colony of several dozen feral cats that “invaded” the ballpark; dead

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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.”

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Reggie Jackson circa 1974 with As third World Series trophy

Oakland Loses A’s, Last of It's 3 Major League Sports Teams– Reggie Blasts City, Kostas says Ownership also At Fault

original Oakland A's owner Charles Finley with his Mule mascot in 1968

Editorial:

Oakland is about to lose last of 3 major sports teams after the As announced thry ha e bought land in Vegas to build a stadium.

Bob Melvin: 'I'll always be an Oakland A.'

We don't imagine the giants will be too upset if the As leave, based on their history of trying to block every possible LOCAL attempted A's move in the past, i.e. San Jose, Fremont, Sacramento, you-name-it. NO, CONVERSELY, JINTS WILL BE ECSTATIC, Especially now with their less than stellar play and resulting attendance drop. But , will old As fans cross the bay , especially to see this product - now vying for last place after five .500 or below seasons-to see their long -time nemisis?

Of course, the oakland a's never really appeared to go all out for the team - It was like they were punishing their fans for not having a new stadium and wouldn't spend the money- they even admitted -until they got a new stadium. MORE>

https://www.nbcsports.com/bayarea/giants/giants-issue-brief-statement-athletics-possibly-leaving-oakland