“Everybody’s Leaving Town” 

By Paul Kilduff

With Major League Baseball recently green lighting the Oakland A’s moving to Las Vegas, a longtime Oakland sports fan living in San Francisco weighs in on the last team out the door. 

The Bay Bridge may only be five-miles long, but it can seem like 500. One of the best ways to measure this distance is in sport team allegiances. As a son of the East Bay living in San Francisco since the mid-’90s, I’ve held strong to my Oakland sports team vows.

I respect the achievements of both the Niners and the Giants, but respecting a team is not the same as caring about whether they win or lose.

Local sports broadcasting legend Gary Radnich used to say that he didn’t “root for laundry,” meaning that all he wanted to see was a hard fought, competitive game regardless of the uniforms of the teams playing. That makes sense from a sports media professional’s perspective, but I have no such constraints. Thus, I prefer to stay on the lunatic fringe of unabashed fandom.

Fandom begins in childhood. In my case, at the Oakland Coliseum bleachers hoping to get a ride on Charlie O the mule in the outfield (never happened). 

Or watching the heart-breaking last seconds of the Raider/Steelers AFC championship game decided by Franco Harris’s supposed “immaculate reception.” Moments later, my uncle, a Steelers fan from Pennsylvania, rang our landline to rub salt in the wounds of whoever happened to answer the phone (me). I confronted him about this years later and he made no apologies. Suck it up, kid.  

Fandom is wearing your Ted “The Mad Stork” Hendricks number 83 silver and black Raider’s jersey almost every day in Miss Pelowski’s fourth grade class at Chabot elementary. It went through the dryer so many times that the painted-on numbers started to shred and peel off which, of course, made it even cooler. 

Every Friday in the 1970s, the late, great Oakland Tribune cartoonist Lee Sussman would draw a sports cartoon illustrating all the upcoming Bay Area sports battles. I couldn’t wait.

I’m still a Raiders fan even though they left us twice – I think I was just better prepared for it the second time around. And, let’s face it, Oakland Raiders 2.0 were pretty hard to watch. Now they seem to be the perfect fit for a city devoted to debauchery. 

The Warriors? Sure, they left Oaktown too, but they never really embraced the city.

After winning the NBA championship in 1975, ownership vowed to change their name to the Oakland Warriors. Another empty promise.

Now it’s the A’s, the last vestige of my Oakland sports past, who are pulling up stakes. Soon Oakland will no longer be a Major League city, whatever that means in today’s world.

Their home, the Oakland Coliseum, while outdated and rundown, still provided a suitable environment to quaff a few coldies, hang with your buds, and, oh yeah, watch that thing they call baseball going on down there on the green grass. It was so inviting in fact that last season a couple decided to get frisky in the unoccupied third deck. OPD is still looking for them.

Realizing they couldn’t compete with the Giants’ waterfront stadium, the A’s started clamoring for their own Shangri-La. Fair enough. We all know the places proposed for this: Fremont, San Jose, downtown Oakland’s Laney College, and even the absolute non-starter of all non-starters, rebuilding on the Coliseum site (which the A’s now own half of). 

The final proposal, the Port of Oakland’s Howard Terminal – a boondoggle the A’s spent $100 million promoting, complete with the regrettable “Rooted in Oakland” slogan – made no sense from day one. Included in the dead on arrival qualities of the plan were: no parking, a stadium cut off by a railroad line, no access to BART, unworkable housing component, being across from a noisy, smelly smelting plant, opposition from longshoremen, and the laughable suggestion that fans take a gondola from one of downtown Oakland’s BART stations to get to the games. Gondolas tend to only work in Switzerland and Disneyland.

Perhaps the only real alternative for keeping the A’s in the Bay Area would have been to allow them to move to San Jose. But the Giants, flexing their territorial muscle with the support of Major League Baseball (MLB), prevented that, despite the fact that no other two team markets in baseball have so-called “territories.” When baseball eventually expands, don’t be surprised when MLB forces the Giants to accept a new team in the South Bay.

With MLB giving the A’s a deadline to acquire a new stadium by the end of this year or be cut off from the corporate welfare trough they’ve been slurping from for decades, they had no choice but to pull up stakes. 

If Gap scion and A’s owner John Fisher had been more like the Haas family (A’s owners during their last glory years in the 80s), he would’ve been willing to run the team as a break-even proposition. That’s ultimately what the dreamers in their “SELL” tee shirts wanted. News flash, he’s not. In case you haven’t noticed, not many billionaires are interested in philanthropy these days.

Shortly very few will care about the demise of the Oakland A’s. Now that it’s all about to be over – except for the very real prospect of one last lame-duck season in Oakland – I have to admit I’m somewhat relieved. Soon I won’t have to constantly hear about what a horrible place the Oakland Coliseum is. I’m looking forward to that. 

Paul Kilduff is a digital content provider who also pens the cartoon feature Kilduff’s Korner for the Richmond Review and Sunset Beacon newspapers and RichmondSunsetNews.com.