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Tim Keown, ESPN Senior Writer
OAKLAND, Calif. — Everybody said goodbye to Oakland Athletics baseball in their own way on Thursday afternoon.
After 57 seasons at the Coliseum — and decades of indecision and vitriol swirling around the team’s future — the A’s played their final game in Oakland before a massive crowd on a bright and gorgeous Bay Area afternoon.
The crowd was raucous, the mood festive and the fans engaged from the first pitch. The afternoon started early. The parking lot, scheduled to open at 8 a.m. — more than 4 1/2 hours before first pitch — instead opened at 7 a.m. after the line of cars waiting to get into the stadium backed up traffic on I-880.
The fans gathered in the lots to cook breakfast, drink beer and alternate chants between “Sell The Team” and “Let’s Go Oakland.” A man who has made a side hustle of impersonating A’s president Dave Kaval roamed the parking lot in a suit and tie, never breaking character. Fans, if they chose, could have purchased a margarita or psychedelic mushrooms from the small-business popups on the pedestrian bridge connecting BART to the Coliseum.
“People who have never been here will look at this scene and be surprised,” said longtime A’s fan Jorge Leon, the president of the Oakland 68s, a community-based fan group. “To those of us who have been coming here since we were kids, this is just what it’s always been before everybody got tired of being lied to.”
The A’s announced a deal to move to Las Vegas in April 2023, and this past April they announced a three- to four-year stay in a minor-league stadium — Sutter Health Park — in West Sacramento, beginning next year. The team’s lease at the Coliseum ended after the final out Thursday, and negotiations between the city and the A’s on an extension fell apart nearly before they started.
“It didn’t have to be this way,” Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao, watching the game from a suite down the third-base line, told ESPN. “The people of Oakland deserve better.”
If the arrangement in Sacramento doesn’t work out, Thao said, the city would be willing to reconsider bringing the team back.
The team’s departure has been low on sentiment. Owner John Fisher’s letter to fans before the final series, in which he said he wished he could individually thank each fan despite years of gutting the team and ignoring the fan base, was seen by fans as particularly tone deaf. But on the final day, the team hit some of the right notes: former A’s pitcher Barry Zito sang the national anthem, while Dave Stewart and Rickey Henderson, both Oakland natives and A’s legends, threw out the first pitches.
The A’s took several impromptu team photos in front of their dugout before the game, and the starting nine was greeted with a standing ovation when it took the field. Members of the A’s grounds crew scooped up dirt for fans down the left-field line, and many A’s players did the same.
An hour before first pitch, Stewart stood next to the “Rickey Henderson Field” logo behind home plate, with dark sunglasses shielding the world from the tears in his eyes.
“It’s a tough morning,” Stewart said. “I can’t imagine how we’re in this position.”
Security was beefed up, with 140 Oakland police officers on site, the same as a Raiders’ playoff game, but the only real commotion came in the bottom of the ninth, when two fans ran onto the field before being quickly and rudely escorted through the stairwell in left field.
After they left the field, there were a few objects thrown onto the field, including some kelly green smoke bombs that landed on the right-field warning track. The game was stopped repeatedly in the bottom of the ninth.
For the most part, the sellout crowd of 46,889 spoke its piece through chants and signs. “Let’s Go Oakland” morphed easily into “Sell The Team,” but even those seemed relatively half-hearted. The bleacher railings contained the usual signs — “Goodbye MLB” and “Las Vegas Beware” — with a new addition behind the wall in left-center — “It’s Not Us, It’s You.”
“There’s no better city than Oakland to play baseball in,” Stewart said. “I’ve witnessed it. I was there in the great days, and this is a great baseball city. Nobody can ever say this isn’t a great baseball town. The Coliseum’s time has passed, but this is a great baseball city.”
A’s manager Mark Kotsay has a habit of writing out his lineup card in his office before relaying it to an assistant coach to fill out the official card that hangs in the dugout. After that, Kotsay rips his original card in two, lengthwise, and puts it on his desk.
After Tuesday’s game, a 3-2 victory against the Texas Rangers, a thought struck him: What if this is the last A’s win in Oakland?
His solution: If it was, he’d frame it anyway, in two pieces.
After the victory, which concluded with All Star closer Mason Miller getting the Rangers’ Travis Jankowski to ground out to end the game, it was no longer a concern.
Kotsay then addressed the fans, surrounded by his team, as the crowd remained near-silent as the manager talked about walking back onto the field after Wednesday night’s game and letting the moment sink in.
The emotion thick in his voice, he thanked the stadium workers — “especially those not coming with us” — and ended by giving a heartfelt tribute to the fans and, as he termed it, “this amazing stadium.”
“I ask one last time, for you to give us the greatest cheer in baseball.”
With that, Kotsay raised his hands as “Let’s Go Oakland” rained down on him.
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