Real fans finally get to experience baseball
A’s opener brings Bay Area crowds back to sporting events
The Oakland Coliseum, a crumbling old joint on its last legs as a sports venue, shone like a diamond in the Bay Area celestial sky Thursday.
In the huge parking lot, all day long thousands of COVID19 vaccine shots were jabbed into arms leaning out of car windows, at one of the state’s few mass drivethrough vax sites.
Inside the Coliseum was baseball, opening night for the Oakland A’s — the first game by the bay since the end of the 2019 season and played before fans not made of cardboard!
Those cardboard fans, when viewed from behind, always looked like a graveyard full of tombstones. Thursday’s crowd, though sparse due to legal restrictions, was very much non
cardboard.
In the parking lot: Medicine for the body. Inside the ballpark: Medicine for the soul. As ose Altuve of the ouston Astros dug into the batter’s box before the first pitch of the first game of 2021, at 7:07 p.m., the Oakland fans shook a year’s worth of cobwebs off their tonsils. BOOOOO!
Ah, primal boo therapy, a beautiful sound, a tuba and bassoon symphony, after an entire season of phony fan noise piped through .A systems in a pathetic attempt to lend reality to the fanless pandemic games.
The baseball gods were kind to the A’s fans, scheduling the Astros for the season opener. If you’re a baseball fan, the Astros get your juices flowing.
The ’Stros cheated their way to a World Series championship two seasons ago, by banging on trash cans, the tackiest kind of cheating. Then the Astros escaped their due retribution all last season because fans were locked out of stadiums.
Thursday, A’s fans had a solemn duty to baseball, and they executed it beautifully. The 10,4à6 fans, scattered about a stadium built for 46,000, can boo a boo that cuts to the soul.
It was a very unusual opening night. "o parkinglot tailgating, and the fans were socially distanced. The ballpark even sounded different, since beer vendors working the grandstands were forbidden to promote their wares. Shouting “Beer here!,” however traditional, can be infectious.
Thursday, what was infectious was the enthusiasm. Or was it more like love, fans reuniting with their friends, to cheer on their boys?
“I am beside myself,” said one fan, Tony Thomas, who technically was beside his pal, Madison Winn. “We were just commenting that there are only a few things in life that put a smile on your face, and one is walking through the (entrance) tunnel and seeing the field. It’s like you’re 11 or 12 years old.”
Thomas, it turned out, was here to root for Astros manager Dusty Baker. They are old friends, having grown up in the same neighborhood in Sacramento.
The ballgame experience isn’t yet back 100 percent. The usual ballpark menu has been pared to the bone by virus concerns, but you can still get a beer, even if vendors sneak up on you unannounced. One beer hawker, whom we’ll call Beerman because he said management wouldn’t want him talking to the press, said, “I’m so excited to be back. But I’m horribly out of shape. The last game I worked here was August of 2019. I’ll definitely be sore tomorrow.”
Beerman said he’s been slinging the suds here since 1996, and rooting for the A’s since he was kid living in
ake County. Many of the Coliseum vendors, ushers and janitors are longtimers, and devoted to their various crafts, and to the team.
At the Lagunitas beer stand on the field level behind home plate, the Tap Sisters were like two girls on the first day back at school after a long, boring summer vacation.
We’ll call ’em the Tap Sisters, though they’re not related, because they said they’ve been working sidebyside pulling beer since 1989. If the Coliseum on game night runs like a welloiled machine, Freda Martin and Grace Smith deserve some credit for keeping it welloiled.
“I stayed home in my house (during Quarantine) and got bored and depressed,” Williams said. “I was just cookin’ my little heart out.”
She learned to cook tamale pie and a splendid seafood fettuccine. Somebody alert Stanley Tucci.
Their job working the taps is not a popular one, because of the nonstop work, but the Tap Sisters love it, even when the occasional customer gets surly.
“I just ask "em if they’re having a bad day, is there anything I can do to help them out?” said Smith. “That makes "em feel a little guilty.”
Nobody was having a bad day Thursday. It was baseball, live baseball!
Even the mask police were having a good time. Fans are required to wear masks, unless eating or drinking, and it speaks well of A’s fans that the compliance rate was, I’m guessing, 98%plus, a testament to their intelligence and compassion.
Yolanda Guerra, a security guard, was stationed in the concourse on the field level, keeping a sharp eye out for the unmasked and partially masked.
“I’ve been an A’s fan since college,” Guerra said, scanning the passing crowd, and stopping the occasional uncompliant fan. “I used to sit in the bleachers. I love the fans, I love the game. .eople come here to have a good time.”
0odney Smith stood at a railing before the game with his two sons, 0oyal and 0odney r. Smith said his family recently moved from Georgia so he can serve as pastor of the First African Methodist piscopal Church of Oakland, the oldest historically Black church in the Bay Area, founded in 1858.
While Smith chatted, his two sons, wearing baseball gloves, stared at the field, seemingly hyp-noticed by the grass, a brilliant green that can be experienced only in person. Thursday night, the grass was greener than ever.