Sometimes There Are No Heroes
"," wrote New York sportswriter Franklin Pierce Adams, over 100 years ago to start what might be baseball's most famous poem. He was lamenting the dominance of the Chicago Cubs trio of Hall of Fame infielders – Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers, and Frank Chance – for ruthlessly breaking the hearts of New York Giants fans year after year.
Flash forward to 2024 and one of the most successful, yet maligned franchises in Major League Baseball history – the Athletics – with the as well as the are ruthlessly breaking their Oakland fan’s hearts. This is not new to baseball – the Montreal Expos transitioned to the Washington Nationals twenty years ago – and despite residing in Oakland for fifty-seven years the A’s carpetbagged their way here via Kansas City and Philadelphia.
That said, Oakland has been a special place. The Oakland Coliseum was once billed as the "Home of Champions". In a six-year period in the 1970’s The Oakland A’s, the Golden State Warriors, and the Oakland Raiders won five championships. But the Warriors abandoned Oakland in 2019, the Raiders moved to Los Angeles in 1982, back to Oakland in 1995 and then left for good for Las Vegas in 2020. Now the A’s are moving to West Sacramento. WTF!
Yes, because the A’s latchkey trust fund billionaire owner doesn’t want to don a paper bag over his head while he attempts to build a clam shell domed stadium on the Strip in Vegas he’s ripping the band aid off the A’s fans hearts three years early. Today was the last game ever in Oakland…
In the 1970's my dad took my brothers and I to watch the "Swinging A’s," who won three championships in a row in an era before Pat Riley could even dream "threepeat". Something, by the way, his teams ultimately never accomplished. But I digress. The A’s had Hall of Famers you knew by one name -- Reggie, Catfish, and Rollie -- and All Stars like Sal Bando, Joe Rudi, Vida Blue, and one of my favorites growing up, Campy Campaneris. I still have his bat day bat under my bed from a game long ago.
In 1980, a new owner arrived, Walter Haas Jr., and he did something most professional owners don’t do…he treated the team like a community asset instead of a cash register. He quickly paired two Hall of Fame radio announcers – Lon Simmons and Bill King – and rolled out Billy Martin's "Billy Ball" which helped jumpstart the franchise again and begat what would become the greatest leadoff hitter in MLB history. Rickey Henderson was from Oakland and was one of a kind in so many ways -- whether in setting the all-time MLB stolen base and runs scored records, frequently speaking in the third person, or not cashing a million dollar check so he could frame it on his wall!
In the late 1980's and early 90's Dave Stewart, who snuck into the Coliseum when he was a youth, stared down Roger Clemens year after year in the playoffs, won twenty games four consecutive times, and helped the "Bash Brothers" and Hall of Famers Tony LaRussa and Dennis Eckersley go to the World Series three straight years and win a title. People say Oakland can't afford players and don't draw enough fans...But in 1990 they had the third highest attendance and in 1991 the highest payroll in baseball.
But then different owners, with different priorities took over...and the A’s never invested in the team as they had before. Instead, intentionally oscillating between three or four good years before trading off their best players for young (and inexpensive) talent and enduring three or four bad ones before reviving.
In the 2000's the revival was on and I took my boys to their generation of heroes – Jason Giambi (who my oldest so took a shining too he named his giant stuffed pink dog that he slept with, "Giambi"), Miguel Tejada, Eric Chavez, and the Big Three. Eventually these All-stars, besides Giambi who had fled to the Yankees, were the drivers behind perhaps the best baseball movie ever – Moneyball – showcasing how a team with less than 1/3rd the payroll of the Yankees could win twenty games in a row on the way to the playoffs. Of course, in typical Hollywood fashion, those players were barely mentioned…
And unfortunately, that year and for four consecutive years the A’s lost in game five of the best of five game opening round playoffs. In the 2000 playoffs, I took my oldest, who was not quite three at the time, to root against the Yankees. Like the A’s, he put up a good fight, but in the 5th inning he was exhausted – it was nap time. So I rolled up my sweatshirt for a pillow and he curled up under our seats and took his afternoon nap while the crowd roared.
In 2010 we saw perfection and got a piece of history. Dallas Braden, who is unique in that he is one of only 200 or so players (less than 1% of all players) to play his entire career for one team, did something even more unique. He pitched a perfect game – no one reached base -- on Mother’s Day with his grandmother looking on. We secured the ball that represented the 21st out thanks to Ryan Sweeney, who clearly had no sense of history and after catching a fly ball to end the 7th inning, tossed it to the fans (me!).
In 2012, the A’s had one of the most improbable playoff runs of all time with Josh Donaldson, Yoenis Cespedes, Coco Crisp, et al. With a losing record at the end of May and trailing the Texas Rangers by 13 games on June 30th the A’s won the division on the last day of the regular season – the only time all year they were in first place. I skipped work with the true believers…
The A’s then took the Tigers and Justin Verlander to the final game of the playoffs, but again lost. Still the fans – including myself and my boys – did something I’ve never seen before or since. After the game had ended the entire crowd, instead of quietly exiting with heads down, stood, cheered, and chanted "Let’s Go Oakland" for ten minutes as the players came back on the field for a curtain call...Not a manufactured curtain call, but one from the hearts of 50,000 fans...It was the most incredible outpouring of love, connection, and pure fandom I've ever seen in sports. Despite ultimately coming up short, the Oakland A’s had given every dreamer, every underdog something critical to life -- hope…
In 2018, the A’s delivered hope again. With a makeshift rotation – including Brett Anderson, a pitcher who happened to see General Manager Billy Beane at a Spring Training gym and didn’t have a job at the time so approached him…and was signed -- they stunned the baseball world by going from a losing record in mid June to winning 97 games and making the playoffs. Eventually, though, this set of great players – Matt Olsen, Matt Chapman, Marcus Semien, and more -- were traded off.
The bad years were back again. This time not only with two 100+ loss seasons, but an announcement earlier this year that they were leaving Oakland forever. Hope does not always spring eternal… Gertrude Stein, who was raised in Oakland in a different era, once noted about the city "there is no there there"... And while she wasn't writing about Oakland’s major professional sports teams, she might have unwittingly hit on the most apt description of the eternal vacuum that has begun.
So many fantastic, shared memories with people you only knew as part of a rag tag fan community… Who lived to "celebrate good times" – the most walk-off victories in all of MLB during the A’s run in Oakland… And in the dark times still had a blind belief – "In Billy we Trust." And while baseball is not for everyone, for many it provides something powerful -- a zen like rhythm, calmness, almost a meditative state – to help you get through the vagaries of life.
I was there today for the last A's game in Oakland -- with Krazy George and 46, 889 fans filling their memory banks one more time. The Oakland A’s are no more. Tossed into the dustbin of history so a billionaire could chase a few dollars more. What once was a proud A’s fan’s cascading chant -- "Let’s Go Oakland" -- has now become "Let Go Oakland". It’s the saddest of possible words…