After nearly 40 years of often eccentric and occasional championship baseball, my Oakland A’s have announced that they’re moving the team about 20 miles south to the suburb of Fremont.
Now, I was born and raised in southern California, but I’ve been an A’s fan since I was seven years old. It’s kind of a long story, but the explanation is directly related to the Oakland Raiders’ Super Bowl XV win in 1981 and a child’s naïve loyalty to all things Oaktown from that point on.
Like most modern African-Americans, my parents hated baseball (still do) and in an age before Baseball Tonight, the internet and the MLB Extra Innings digital cable package, I could only follow the A’s from afar (the newspaper’s sports section) or on local TV (when the A’s and Angels tangled).
I didn’t actually see my first A’s game live until 1989, when m’boy and his dad let me tag along with them to old Anaheim Stadium.
That was the season after Kirk Gibson made a 15-year-old cry back on October 15, 1988.
I didn’t start “living and dying” with the A’s until that ’88 season. They won 104 games on the backs bash of Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire, while Dave Stewart and Dennis Eckersley anchored the rotation and bullpen, respectively.
They would re-acquire my all-time favorite player, Rickey Henderson, on June 21, 1989 and go on to win the World Championship over the San Francisco Giants during the infamous “Earthquake Series”.
In the decade and a half since, the Oakland A’s have gone from great to good to god-awful and back to good, again. They’ve also gone from my favorite sports team to, really, my only sports team. Y’see, the Raiders, for me, have become the fan’s equivalent to f*cking the fat girl.
Only occasionally enjoyable and only as long as no one else knows.
Through the goodness that is digital cable, I’ve been able to watch nearly every A’s game, home and away, since 2002. I fly up to Oakland two or three times a year to see a weekend’s worth of games while simultaneously gorging on the mountain of popcorn chicken and fries sold behind Section 116. And, in keeping with tradition, m’boy and I still catch the A’s whenever they’re in Anaheim, even though it’s a 100-mile drive for me.
If I leave at 2PM, I can usually make it up there right before 5PM.
So, can I have an opinion on the Oakland A’s leaving Oakland?
The A’s current home is McAfee Coliseum which is, admittedly, a toilet. And, for those us who have used the toilets there, trust me”¦I’m being kind. Still, the A’s sell some of the most affordable tickets in the league and it’s not uncommon for fans to find great seats right up to game time on most nights.
But, alas, image remains everything.
Baseball commissioner, Kaiser Bud Selig, has convinced the fans and the media that teams cannot compete unless they have a shiny new mallpark to produce revenue. And, by 2010, it’s conceivable that only six of the 30 MLB ballparks will have been built prior to 1989.
Apparently, we all missed the World Series victory parades of whimsy that were held in places like Pittsburgh, Texas and Milwaukee, culminating at the respective doorsteps of PNC Park, Ameriquest Field and Miller Park.
And, that’s the part of this proposed move from Oakland to Fremont that hits the hardest for me.
Even though I’ve never lived there, it’s no secret that Oakland is the red-headed, blue-collar stepson of “The City” (San Francisco, to everyone else). Those working-class roots were reflected in so many of the Major League ballplayers that Oakland produced, such as Vada Pinson, Joe Morgan and the aforementioned Henderson and Stewart.
Oakland ownership has crawled into bed with Cisco Technologies in an overt attempt to market themselves to the tech-friendly 20-somethings who infest Fremont’s snotty neighbor to the south, San Jose. While fans who blindly support the move see it as little more than an inconvenience of a few freeway exits, the bigger picture isn’t so pretty.
Tickets that are currently plentiful will almost certainly become scarce as the average fan becomes priced right out. The A’s are promising some sort of superfluous synergy that combines the traditional baseball experience with all the bells and whistles from the future of technology, but it’s hard to imagine the appeal to the unwashed masses who fill the Coliseum to the tune of 10,000 loud and proud on an arctic April weeknight.
What the A’s are building towards is an antiseptic environment that rivals the sanctimonious sterility of that which they, themselves, have mocked across the Bay in San Francisco.
My team is trading in its identity for aesthetics.
During yesterday’s dog-and-pony show, Oakland ownership all but admitted that “Oakland” would be removed from the team moniker. The leading candidate for a replacement name is the San Jose A’s of Fremont.
The San Jose A’s of Fremont.
And, somewhere, a 33-year-old is crying.
