No need to be sentimental about the archaic Coliseum
Attendance will be sparse tonight when the Athletics return home for the first time since owner John Fisher took part in a press conference touting the move of his franchise to a Triple-A ballpark in Sacramento.
While Fisher and president Dave Kaval deserve all the scorn heaped upon them by an angry fan base, it's a familiar look for the Coliseum. It's always been the OaklandAlameda County Coliseum, although it's had a number of sponsorship agreements — Network Associates, McAfee, O.co, Ring Central.
Regardless of the name, it's the place third baseman Sal Bando called the “mausoleum” in 1973 and has never been anything more than a boring concrete and steel structure.
Here's the strange part: Although it outlived its usefulness years ago, the Coliseum still has a few redeeming qualities. It's got great access to the 880 freeway and BART. It has a marvelous grounds crew (led by Clay Wood) which has consistently produced one of the league's best playing fields — especially since the Raiders left after the 2019 season.
It's got a spacious, comfortable clubhouse the A's took over after the Raiders left. Plenty of room for 26 players given that it used to hold twice that for football. Fisher's sweetheart deal with Sacramento, rather than have his rent increase dramatically in Oakland for the next three years, will have the players sharing a home with the River Cats and taking a step back in terms of facilities at TripleA Sutter Health Park.
There may be a rodent at the Coliseum now and then, but one of the first things I saw working at Oracle Park the other day at the media entrance was a rat trap. Sound the alarms — rodents live where there's lots of food waste, so they're at every stadium in the country.
Regardless, nobody ever showed up at the Coliseum because of the structure itself or the vibe it created.
Spare me how the ambience was ruined when Mount Davis blocked the view of the Oakland hills. I grew up going to games at the Coliseum and can't remember a single instance of anyone talking about the panoramic vista until it was gone.
It certainly didn't matter in the Charles O. Finley years, which included three World Series championships from 1972 through 1974 and only once broke 1 million fans —and that was by a scant 764 in 1973. In those days, even winning wasn't enough to bring the fans out.
It wasn't until 1988 — eight years after the Haas family bought the Athletics from Finley — that the A's drew 2 million fans in a season.
And while Haas and Co. spent actual money, marketed
smartly and were civic and community minded in a way Finley never was, putting people in the seats had more to do with the product on the field than anything that was taking place off it.
Win, and fans will come. Maybe not to the extent they would at a shiny new stadium, but it's worth noting that of the dozen times the A's have broken 2 million fans since they arrived in 1968, they averaged 94 wins in those seasons and had a losing season exactly once. That happened in 1993, Tony La Russa's final year as manager.
The high point was 1990, when the A's averaged 35,805 per game, drew 2,900,217 fans and trailed only Toronto (3,995,294) and the L.A. Dodgers (3,002,396).
Fans weren't coming to see the stadium or the beloved hills. It was the Bash Brothers, Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire. It was Rickey and Dave Henderson, Dave Stewart, Bob Welch and Dennis Eckersley.
Special moments at the Coliseum were authored by those players and the people in the seats that came to watch them play. Nobody loved the Coliseum, they merely tolerated it because it had the best show in town.
The Coliseum wasn't special, but you take any facility and include announcers such as Bill King, Lon Simmons and Ken Korach and its appeal is enhanced dramatically. Same goes for clubhouse manager Steve Vucinich and others behind the scenes dealing with pending layoff notices who helped give the last of the cookie cutter stadiums (Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, etc.) some personality that had nothing to do with the stadium itself.
That personality has manifested in a grass roots “Sell” campaign that appears unlikely to affect Fisher but is a noble cause. It's not like anyone wants to save the Coliseum itself. It's not worth it in the same way Candlestick Park, rightfully demolished in 2015, wasn't worth it.
Rather, the hardcore A's fans who are making themselves heard want the club to stay put in a new local home with new owners that care about more than an economic bottom line.
Given the club's difficulties at drawing fans over much of the last 57 years, it's fair to wonder if there are enough of them to sustain the team in terms of attendance even with a new home unless they get back to the top of the food chain in terms of quality play.
Management has decreed through its payroll it has no interest in competing. And that's a problem when history suggests fans won't flood any A's stadium unless their team is a consistent winner.
But it would be great to watch them try rather than have the A's slink off temporarily to Sacramento until such a time their bandbox pipe dream on the Las Vegas strip becomes reality.