Athletics turn out lights in Oakland

One by one, they have left Oakland.

First, the Golden State Warriors headed back across the bay to San Francisco in 2019, a return for a basketball franchise whose recent championship reign has been defined more by glitz than grit. Then, a year later, it was the itinerant Raiders heading to Las Vegas, the eye patch on their gridiron bandit logo obscuring an apparently wandering eye.

On Thursday, the final departure became all but official: Major League Baseball owners unanimously approved a move to Las Vegas by the Athletics, who not long ago used the marketing catch phrase “rooted in Oakland.”

There is still much for the ballclub to sort out. The Athletics have another year on their lease in Oakland and their new stadium — a $1.5 billion, 30,000-seat ballpark with a retractable roof for which the Nevada Legislature approved public financing — won’t be ready until 2028. Where they will play in between is an open question. The Nevada teachers union is angling to put the subsidy on the ballot for voters.

But the A’s impending move, as inevitable as it has seemed, landed in Oakland like a fastball to the ribs.

“I don’t want this to sound hyperbolic, but for me it’s not only the death of the A’s, and of professional sports in the East Bay,” said Jim Zelinski, who more than a decade ago co-founded Save Oakland Sports, one of several groups that sprouted up over the years to keep teams from leaving the East Bay. “What this vote symbolizes for me is, this is really the death of the common, everyday fan.”

The working man has long been a central figure in American sports, attracted to the games as a diversion from the 9-to-5 grind and viewing them as a more level playing field than other societal arenas, the workplace among them.

As professional sports began to expand west in the late 1950s, Oakland — anchored by ship building, automobile manufacturing and its port — became an obvious landing spot.

Within little more than a decade, Oakland became home to the Raiders of the upstart American Football League, the Athletics, the Warriors and, briefly, the California Golden Seals of the National Hockey League, who for a time played in unfashionable white skates.

All the teams played at a complex centered on a vast asphalt lot, flanked by a major freeway and a rail line.

Soon, the lot will be vacant. This is not because Oakland has changed; it has largely retained a working-class ethos, albeit with California rents. Rather, the business calculus for teams has evolved.

Franchise revenue is now driven more by television deals and sponsorships than ticket sales, though those prices have skyrocketed. The transformation of sports into media products has relegated cities to backdrops and fans to props — a point that was driven home during the coronavirus pandemic when the games went on in vacant or mostly empty stadiums.

The Athletics have sought a new stadium for decades, under at least three different owners. They have tried to build a new ballpark south in Fremont and San Jose, downtown at Laney College or by the water at Howard Terminal, as well as at their current site.

Still, the Athletics continued to be competitive, reinventing themselves by shrewdly using data to assess undervalued skills, a process that became known as “Moneyball,” after the bestselling book. The A’s have not reached the World Series since 1990, but they’ve been in the playoffs 11 times since 2000 — more than the New York Mets and the San Francisco Giants, and just as often as the Boston Red Sox.

Attendance had lingered in the lower third, though drum-pounding fans in right field causing a nightly ruckus added a degree of atmosphere. But when the team began its latest teardown, trading away its best players for prospects rather than paying their accelerating salaries, fans finally had enough of owner John Fisher, who before last season had raised ticket prices in what many sensed was a ploy to suppress attendance as a pretext for moving.

The A’s averaged 10,276 fans last season, the fewest in baseball. They finished 50112, threatening for a while the record for futility set by the expansion Mets in 1962.

Fans who did turn up at the Coliseum often wore T-shirts or carried banners urging Fisher to sell the team.