Kurtenbach:

Fans show their disdain for A’s management by not filling up Coliseum on perfect day for baseball.

OAKLAND » Thursday was a perfect day to go to the ballpark. Eighty degrees, clear-skied, and with a decent breeze to boot — it was the kind of East Bay day that makes the rest of the nation, and even some other Californians, jealous.

It was the kind of day that should not — nay, cannot — be spent in a press box, so I took in the Opening Day matchup between the Angels and the A’s from the stands.

There were plenty of good seats available.

The 2018 A’s are a team that has legitimate playoff aspirations; they were playing against the best player in baseball, Mike Trout, and the sport’s top oddity, the Japanese Babe Ruth, Shohei Ohtani; it was the nicest day of 2018 (man, was it gorgeous outside); and it was Opening Day, which, in my book, is a holiday.

And yet, with that perfect storm of posi- tivity brewing, the A’s were only able to announce a paid attendance of 27,764 Thursday afternoon, nearly 10,000 people fewer than their last five opening games. ( Meanwhile, the Marlins and Rays both drew over 30,000.)

There are roughly nine million people living within an hour- or-so drive of the Coliseum — 11 million if you include our friends in the Sacramento area — and yet the A’s were able to convince less than half of one percent of all of those people to come out to the ballpark Thursday. The stadium wasn’t even half-filled.

That’s an embarrassment. But the A’s frontoffice brass should only blame themselves.

These A’s might be a teamon the rise — I predict that they’ll contend for a playoff spot this season — but the depressed Opening Day turnout is the natural byproduct of years of the franchise and its fans’ toxic relationship.

The story following Thursday’s 6-5 extra-inning walk- off win over the Angels should be noth- ing but optimistic. The A’s fought their top rival for a playoff spot tooth-and-nail and came out victorious. I don’t know much about omens, but that seems like a good one for the upcoming season, no?

But there’s a hang-up with pushing a story like that: How could you be optimistic about the A’s organization?

Most winters, the A’s hurt their fans by losing or trading the team’s best — and most expensive — players and replacing themwith cheaper options. It’s all part of the organization’s rebuild that never ends.

But this past offseason, that blow-up wasn’t a roster issue, but an off-thefield one.

Everyone knows that the Coliseum is one of the worst stadiums in North American professional sports and that it’s the organization’s oft- cited justification for frugality, but this was supposed to be the offseason things changed in that department.

As such, at the end of the 2017 campaign, there was nothing but opti- mism about the A’s floating around Oakland. The roster was young and talented and put together a nice late-season surge — any outside observer could see that Oakland was poised to be a team to possibly fear in the years to come. Unlike in years past, the A’s, from the top of the organization to the bottom, made it clear they had a plan to keep that young talent when their cheap, rookie contracts expired.

The way A’s president Dave Kaval planned it, the A’s were going to have finalized a ballpark plan ahead of the 2018 season, a plan that would put the A’s in a new home, flush with cash (relatively speaking), by 2023, right around the time that promising youngsters Matt Chapman, Matt Olson, Dustin Fowler, Sean Manaea and Jharel Cotton’s first big league contracts would be ending.

“I think right now we’ve just got to operate that (the new ballpark) is going to happen,” A’s vice president Billy Beane said at last year’s end- of-season media availability. “The other option is one we’ve done my entire career here, which is a constant churn... I’m churned out.” Guess what? It didn’t happen. The A’s might have made a grand proclamation about a new ballpark near Laney College in September, but those plans blew up in spectacular fashion three months later when the Peralta Community College District board of trustees declared they would no longer work with the team.

Since then, Kaval has taken pages out of the Donald Trump political playbook in order to distract from the fact that the team has no viable ballpark plan in sight: he tweets a bunch, he’s built his version of The Wall (the much-ballyhooed but ultimately inconsequential Treehouse bar in left field), and is picking fights with the team’s cross-bay rivals.

All that might just be public relations in 2018, but A’s fans need more than aggressive branding.

They need a reason to believe their team is no longer minor league in comparison to the rest of the majors. (Minor leaguestyle gimmicks don’t help that.)

They need a reason to believe “the churn” is over, once-and-for-all.

Perhaps a winning season brings some more casual fans to the ballpark. I know I’m excited about the season, but I’m a baseball nerd and I don’t have to pay to get in (yet).

No, longtime A’s fans, whose hopes are trampled upon year after year, need more than wins to be convinced to come back — they need serious investment from recluse billionaire owner John Fisher, either in the team or in a new stadium.

But with payroll so low the MLB players’ union filed a grievance against the team ( blame Fisher, not Beane) and with the Coliseum emerging as the A’s only viable option for a “new” park, it’s evident that despite plenty of bluster, things haven’t really changed in Oakland.

And until things do change, why should any fan become emotionally or financially invested in this team?