Die Hard: The Agony and Ecstasy of Being An Oakland A's Fan
Despite an ugly ballpark, miniscule attendance & a last place ball club, a small group of loyal, hardcore fans still just want to have fun
It was a cool evening and the western sky above the upper level of the Oakland Coliseum was streaked with pastel shades of orange and red. It was a beautiful sunset.
Inside the stadium, the Oakland A's were preparing to play their 160th game of the season Monday night. It would be an intimate affair with an audience so small that it seems almost sarcastic to call it a crowd.
Photo credit: Ron Claiborne
With three games left in the long baseball season, the A's were mired in last place in their division, losers of 102 games at that point. On the latest Baseball Power Rankings, they were rated the second worst team in the sport.
On this night, they were playing the Los Angeles Angels, a team that had also failed to make the playoffs, so the outcome of the game meant nothing. It was just two teams playing out the season.
For the A’s -- officially, the Athletics but no one calls them that -- 2022 was what’s euphemistically referred to as a rebuilding year. Last season, they were very good, almost good enough to make the playoffs. But they didn’t and the A’s management decided to unload their best players in what is known as a "salary dump,” and basically start all over again. By purely numerical measurements, it was a pretty good dump. The A's reduced their payroll from $109 million to $47 million at the beginning of year and lowered it further with mid-season trades. To put that in perspective, the Angels’ Mike Trout, the highest paid player in Major League Baseball, makes $37 million a year.
The consequence of such a massive salary dump was that this year’s team was not good and the attendance reflected it. This year, the A's averaged 9,973 fans a game, the lowest attendance in baseball. In recent weeks, the official attendance was often half that and, in reality, even smaller since official attendance reflects tickets sold, not actual bodies in seats.
Photo credit: Ron Claiborne
This evening, it looked like no more than one or two thousand people were on hand. Most were scattered about the field level between the two dugouts on either side of the diamond. Looking around the cavernous ballpark, I saw isolated groups of two or three people, some seated in the ionosphere of the upper deck. I couldn’t understand why. No one was checking tickets.
I bought a beer from a vendor in the stands. I asked him how business was. He shrugged and said, "You know..."
I had gone to the game anticipating a grim tableau: a losing team staggering to the finish line before a tiny, sad crowd in a stadium with the charm of mid-20th century Soviet architecture. The quiet, the echoes and the empty corridors were in fact startling. And it was jarring to see so few fans in the ballpark, but soon enough I kind of liked it. Many fans were dressed in green A's team gear or else the red of the Angels. People seemed happy, relaxed. It was just a few die-hard fans enjoying a night at the ballpark sitting close enough to the field that you could easily hear the intimate sounds of the baseball game. The explosive crack of a bat colliding with a pitched ball. A slightly muffled "whomp" of ball caught in a glove. An outfielder barking "I got it!" as he settled under a soaring fly ball. The cheerful encouraging words shouted from a fan who could enjoy the satisfaction of knowing the player actually heard him.
Photo credit: Ron Claiborne
In the third inning, I went to find a man named Jorge Leon, the president of the Oakland 68s fan club (the 68 refers to the first season the A's played in the Coliseum after moving from Kansas City). I had been referred to him by Casey Pratt, the sports producer at the ABC's San Francisco affiliate, KGO. I'd called Jorge before the game to ask where he and his group would be seated. I told him I'd be wearing a blue jacket and a gray Yankees cap.
"Why are you wearing a Yankees cap?" he said.
I wasn't sure how to read his tone. "Why are you going to the game tonight?" I said. "Loyalty."
Jorge laughed and told me he was only kidding.
Jorge Leon, photo credit: Ron Claiborne
As I got closer to the right field stands, the rhythmic banging of drums in unison grew louder. I emerged from the catacombs-like corridor of the Coliseum to behold maybe two dozen fans sitting loosely together just behind the right field wall. Some waved flags. Others pounded on the drums. Some watched the game with stolid concentration. Some stood in small groups, talking and laughing jovially.
Jorge was one of the jovial socializers. He told me he was there with his wife and two children, the youngest of whom was just a year-and-a-half old. At 37, he said he's been a hardcore A's fan for 25 years, attending 50 to 60 home games a season (out of 81), always there in right field with his fellow Oakland 68s.
"We all know each other," he says, glancing away every few seconds to keep tabs on the game. "We are fan-ily with an 'n.'"
I asked him why he was here in the waning days of what by any objective standard had been a pretty miserable season.
"It's for the love of the game and the love of our town and the love of the players, the team," he said. "Ownership is a whole different thing."
Like a lot of A's fans, he is angry with the team's owner -- a reclusive billionaire businessman named John Fisher -- and its management. (Fisher reportedly once met with employees in 2019 and told them, "A lot of people know me as that cheap owner." One employee remarked to SFGate.com that it was "so weird.") They are angry that the team, presumably on Fisher's orders, rid themselves of their best players and essentially declined to compete this season. They are angry about the team's very public threat to move to Las Vegas if they can't succeed in building a new, privately-owned waterfront stadium. That process is encumbered in red tape and financing issues. A move to Vegas is still possible.
"The flirtation with Las Vegas really backfired in a major way in this market," said Casey Pratt, sports producer at the ABC San Francisco television affiliate, KGO. "People were livid and a lot of what you see in the teeny tiny crowd size is a revolt against ownership and their flirtation with Las Vegas and then chopping of salary."
To my surprise, I also heard complaints about the team's "Moneyball" strategy that seeks to identify and sign undervalued and therefore inexpensive players. Moneyball was a great story, as a book and movie. But some fans told me they wished they would drop the winning-on-the-cheap strategy and actually sign some stars to long-term contracts.
Over the century-plus history of major league baseball, the Athletics have been quite successful. The franchise, which started out in Philadelphia in 1901, has won nine World Series -- only the Yankees and St. Louis Cardinals have won more -- and 15 American League pennants. Just in Oakland, they have won four titles, including an astounding three in a row in the 1970s and another in 1989. The following year, they drew a record 2.9 million fans. This season, they drew 787,000 fans.
"It would be wrong to cite woeful attendance figures as proof the A's cannot prosper in Oakland," Los Angeles Times reporter Bill Shaikin wrote last year. "The A's have a dedicated and exuberant fan base, and the poor attendance is largely self-inflicted. Oakland's owners cannot spend years -- or decades -- trashing their current stadium, speaking out about how desperately they need a new ballpark, and letting fan favorites leave for other teams, then wonder where all the fans went."
The Oakland 68s fans in right field, photo credit: Ron Claiborne
In our American culture, we place enormous emphasis on winning in sports. The legendary football coach Vince Lombardi captured the sentiment in his famous comment that “winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.” A lot of people consider that inspiring. Losing is failure. Failure is disgraceful. Certainly, there’s limited appeal in watching your team get beat again and again. But there’s also value, even a kind of morality in loyalty, in sticking with your team in good times and in bad, as the marital vow goes. Fandom -- real fandom -- isn't a whim. It's a commitment and an investment.
"If you walk around the stadium, you're going to see things that you're not going to see anywhere else," says Bryan Johansen, an A's fan since 1986. "The fans, the culture is what makes it and gives it that charm. Some of the down years are actually the most fun. This year was insanely fun."
Johansen has been going to A's games since 1986. Early in the 2018 season, he was in his usual perch in the left field bleachers when an A's batter was hit in the head by a pitch. Johansen leaped to his feet in a rage, screaming "What the ***!" His outburst was captured by the television cameras. The A's tweeted out the image and audio -- with the expletive deleted. It went viral. And a business was born.
Johansen and a friend started selling tee shirts with his image from the video and the WTF logo. They donated the profits to local charities.
At the end of the next season, the New York Times published an article about the stadium under the headline, The Beauty of America's Ugliest Ballpark.
"Yes, the Coliseum is ugly, but it is cheap, gritty and fun," the reporter, Jack Nicas, wrote. "The spacious confines allow fans to roam around, spread out and enjoy a comprehensive view of the game. It all adds up to a baseball experience that stands out in the increasingly homogenous ballpark landscape. The Coliseum is baseball's last dive bar."
"'Baseball's last dive bar'," said Johansen. "I saw that line and I thought, 'That's got to be a banner.'"
Photo credit: Lastdivebar Instagram account
Soon, Johansen was selling banners, shirts, pins and all kinds of Coliseum souvenir items emblazoned with the slogan. It replaced the WTF business. He estimates they've sold around 10,000 items, raising over $70,000 for charity.
Photo credit: Getty Images
For years, the Coliseum, the fourth oldest stadium in baseball, has been the target of scathing criticism. It's been derided as The Mausoleum. It's been dismissed as "drab, concrete mass of seating." It's been ridiculed for infestations by rats, feral cats, ants and an opossum. What was once a pretty view of the Oakland hills behind centerfield was blotted out in 1996 when three tiers of stands were erected in centerfield to accommodate the return of the football Raiders to Oakland.
Neither Jorge nor Bryan cares.
"I love it," Jorge told me, as the drummers around us drummed. "I love the stadium. I wouldn't change it for the world."
"Four World Series have been played there," Johansen said. "Some of the greatest players to ever take the field walked those hallways. So to disrespect that, I would never do that. The physical appearance doesn't matter to me. It's the memories, the history, the nostalgia of that place that means so much."
Photo credit: Ron Claiborne
Monday night, the A's trailed the Angels 4-0 going into the eighth inning. Then they scored two runs to cut the deficit to 4-2. In the bottom of the ninth, they scored two more runs to tie. And in the bottom of the 10th, pinch hitter Tony Kemp singled in the winning run. The few fans still in the Coliseum ballpark went crazy, then quietly they left the ballpark. On this autumn evening, there was joy in Mudville.
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Cover photo credit: Ron Claiborne