Perhaps it’s impossible to prepare yourself for the end of something you truly love, no matter how long you’ve had to anticipate it.
Of course, that doesn’t stop us from trying. That was one theme of the many conversations I had with fans over the final days of the Oakland A’s. We all took turns predicting how we’d feel when the end finally came. On the whole, nobody knew. In every case, that not knowing seemed terrifying.
“I didn’t know anybody when I moved to California,” Sarah Dunaway told me Sunday, in the Coliseum’s south lot, ahead of the A’s matchup against the New York Yankees. She was seated beside her father, in the popped trunk of her parked SUV. She wore a black-and-green A’s hat and had her lips painted a witchy shade of the same. Behind us, cornhole bags traced sine waves in the air. Charcoal smoke prowled. Dunaway sipped on a seltzer.
Dunaway had grown up away from the Bay but as a loyal A’s fan — her father had roots in Oakland and had passed a love for the team to his kids. “Two-dollar tickets on Wednesday nights. Dollar hot dogs. That was something I could afford. So I started going to games and meeting people.”
By 2012, she was going to 40, 50 games a season and traveling with the friends she’d made in the right-field bleachers. Those friends, “ended up my extended family,” she said. She gestured with her seltzer toward the stadium. “Eighty percent of my social life came from this concrete doughnut.”
Most Oakland sports fans have similar stories about the “concrete doughnut” on 7000 Coliseum Way. Since it opened in 1966, the Oakland Coliseum Complex, in deep East Oakland, has been an almost sacred site. But for the last few seasons, many of those fans have stayed away from the place, loath to give A’s owner John Fisher any more of their money.
Over the last several days, however, they’ve returned dutifully to it, like members of a large extended family. They’ve come to tailgate and spend time with old friends in the sun-punished parking lots. They’ve come to dance in the left-field bleachers and bang tom drums in right. They’ve come to cheer, with their trademark dissident spunk, for the iconoclastic team they have known and loved for 57 years. They’ve come to say goodbye.
“The A’s are life, man,” said Anson Canseneras, a 38-year-old native of The Town and proud member of the Oakland 68s, one of the organized supporters’ groups that led the fight against Fisher’s peripatetic inclinations last summer. He looked down from the right-field bleachers as he spoke Tuesday night. “The A’s I know are community. The A’s I know are family. The A’s I know are my hometown. … I grew up in this place. I worked here. I’ve been to over a thousand games here. My dad brought me up here. My mom bought me my first set of season tickets here.” He paused. “This is all I know.”
Monique Hagan told me something similar. I met her and friend Amanda Sanos in the parking lot over the weekend. Hagan was holding her 15-month-old daughter, Evie; Sanos was with her 6-month-old son, Kaylin. Hagan had first brought Evie to the Coliseum when she was just 2 weeks old. Kaylin’s first game came when he was 11 days old. “This is life,” Hagan said.
She’d grown up in Oakland, could see the Coliseum fireworks from her deck, and had met her husband at an A’s game. “Every spring, this is what we look forward to.” Sanos, for her part, had been married on the field, in 2019. “We had our reception in the East Side Club,” she said. I asked Hagan what it was like, seeing the A’s leave. “It feels like they’re breaking a family apart.”
Owners “breaking families apart” is an unfortunate reality of the American sports scene. Over the last several decades, fans in St. Louis, Seattle, and San Diego, among other cities, have been forced to reckon with it. The toll on people — the jobs lost, the communities severed, the identities shaken and childhoods shunted — is often abstracted.
What, beyond a tax generator, can a sports team be to a city? For Kendrick Thompson, aka Ice Cold Kenny Bo, Oakland’s best-known beer vendor, the answer extends beyond community or even family. We were standing near the end of the pedestrian bridge that connects the stadium to the Coliseum BART station before Sunday’s game. Fans streamed by; Thompson shook hands with more than a few. Thompson grew up in Oakland, though in a way it’s more accurate to say he grew up at the Coliseum. Nearly his entire family has worked the place, as vendors and concessions workers. “For me it goes way back,” he said. “My biological father worked here. My mom worked here, my grandpa worked here, my grandma worked here. It goes on and on and on.”
His stepfather worked the Coliseum, too, as a beer vendor. He started bringing Thompson to games when Thompson was young. One day he asked Thompson if he’d like to try working games himself. He taught him the tricks of the trade: how to hold his money, how to remain stoic and kind when fans were drunk and rude. Thompson’s been delighting A’s fans ever since. The team’s departure, he told me, feels like a civic tragedy. “We’re losing the heart of Oakland,” he said. “We don’t really have much out here. … I have two kids, and they just started loving coming to A’s games. And they’re like, ‘Well, Dad, where are the A’s going to go? Are we going to see them again?’ I don’t really have an answer for them. It’s hurtful. It breaks my heart more and more each day. I’m trying not to cry.”
Not all fans feel sad. Some feel furious. On Tuesday night, I sat for a few innings with Jorge Leon, leader of the Oakland 68s, in the right-field bleachers. Leon has dedicated much of his life to the fight to keep the A’s in Oakland. He organized the reverse boycott in 2023. He spoke at City Hall. He traveled to the MLB owners’ meeting, last November, to confront Fisher personally.
He’s done all this because, in his mind, the A’s are more than just a baseball team. “It’s the East Bay, the entire East Bay community, that this is affecting,” he said. “For the whole time that I’ve been an A’s fan, we’ve always had in the back of our heads this fear that they’re going to move. John Fisher’s been trying to move literally since he bought the team.”
Just then, a commemorative video of old A’s moments played on the scoreboard. Upon its completion, those in the bleachers stood up, booed, and chanted “Fuck John Fisher.” Leon, hands cupped around his mouth, yelled the loudest.
Such sentiments are harder to suppress the more of yourself you’ve invested in the team. Take Nina Thorsen, one of the leaders of the crew of drummers who for more than 20 years have occupied the Coliseum’s left- and right-field bleachers. “It’s one of the things that has made Oakland unique. There’s a lot of ritual in the drums,” she told me.
We were in the parking lot Tuesday night, ahead of the first game of the Rangers series. She had her drum, a 14-inch Pearl tom she’d purchased in 2016 from a yard sale in El Cerrito, strapped around her shoulder. “We have different beats for every player,” she explained. She reached into her pocket and pulled out her phone. On it she had recordings of dozens of drum patterns, which she and her crew had devised and memorized over the years. “Last night we were not having a good time with somebody’s beat. And I was like, ‘Hey, let’s just do ‘Matt Chapman,’ just for the hell of it, and that’s a great beat in addition to just being for a great player.” Sticks in hand, she gave me a brief, punchy preview. I recognized it immediately.
Thorsen moved to Oakland from Minnesota in 1992. She attended her first A’s game in 1999 but didn’t fall in love with the team until 2000. That’s a year most people think of as the dawn of the “Moneyball” era, but it was also the beginning of the drums. “I didn’t ever meet that first batch of drummers,” she said. “But I really loved their work.”
Thorsen was initiated into the crew gradually, in accordance with “the very well-defined unwritten code” of the Coliseum bleachers. She started off shaking a tambourine and became an alternate drummer after that, called upon when starters went to get a drink, which they did frequently. She became a full-time drummer in 2016. She’s been present at almost every A’s home game ever since.
She and her crew have done more than just drum since then. “We all developed expertise on the Bay Conservation and Development Commission and the rules covering environmental impact reports in California,” Thorsen said. This was to participate more impactfully in the effort to build the A’s a new stadium in town. That effort put Thorsen in touch with A’s ownership. “I spent a lot of time talking to Dave Kaval,” she said. She paused. A tear welled in her eye. “I thought he was a friend.”
Kaval is the A’s team president. For fans, mentioning him elicits ragged emotions. For Will MacNeil, aka Right Field Will, whose voice booms like a foghorn from his seat in the first row of the right-field bleachers, the response is more like rage. “Dave Kaval’s a scumbag,” MacNeil said. Of course the same is true of Fisher. The way MacNeil sees it, the pair are dispossessing him of something personal and rare. “Honest to goodness, I’m losing my identity, who I really am,” he said.
We were standing before a fleet of portable grills in the parking lot. His eyes were shielded behind large Oakley sunglasses, which refracted the sun in wild orange shards. He was wearing a large, kelly-green A’s jersey and matching hat, but around his neck he’d cinched one of the green “SELL” flags that local apparel company Oaklandish screen-printed for last summer’s reverse boycott. It rippled behind him in the breeze. “It’s going to be weird not coming to the Coliseum, hanging around all these awesome people every day. I mean, I’ll still see some here and there, but it’s not going to be the same.”
Of course, not everyone was feeling as sentimental. “This is an old raggedy dump,” Rickey Garcia, an usher at the Coliseum, told me Tuesday night. Garcia, 75, leaned impatiently on a cane as he spoke. With his free hand, he twirled the ends of his handlebar mustache, which were so long they looked prehensile. What did he think about the impending move to Sacramento? “It’s only business,” he replied.
Others, like Bryan Johansen, co-founder of Last Dive Bar, another of the A’s fan activist supporters groups, have eschewed sorrow and rage in favor of radical positivity; maybe the A’s will end up back in Oakland one day, should the deal in Vegas fall through — which it well could. As a whole, none of the A’s fans inside the Coliseum over the last seven days seemed ready to relinquish their passion for their team just yet. They continued to marshal it in the form of support for the players, pride in their city, and, of course, hatred for Fisher.
Even so, what predominated the past week was sadness. On Tuesday night in the bleachers, all the regulars were there: Nina Thorsen with her drum and bucket hat, Right Field Will draped in his SELL cape, Jorge Leon ready with a middle finger. As they passed one another en route to the bathroom or to fetch a beer, they stopped for hugs that lasted longer than usual. They took turns assuring one another that everything was going to be OK. Tears in their eyes, they would all nod, but few seem consoled.
Two fans I spoke with seemed committed to confronting their emotions head-on. Jesse and Ethan Feldman are a father-son pair who favor the left-field bleachers. Over the last 10 or so years — Ethan’s whole life, basically — they’ve become two of the more recognizable Coliseum characters. For games, they deck themselves out in flamboyant A’s regalia — giant gold chains, broad-shouldered jackets, bold green wristbands, big sunglasses — and make a point of dancing and cheering so hard between innings and during rallies that they routinely end up on the scoreboard. For their antics they’ve acquired a sobriquet: the Left Field Hooligans.
They told me stories that reminded me, in certain ways, of my relationship with my dad. How they’d become friends here at A’s games; how cheering together had become something sacred between them. When our conversation turned to the question of what they anticipated feeling on Thursday, Jesse, who exuded an almost supernatural joviality, said he’d probably mourn: “I know I’m going to cry, because it’s just bitter.” Ethan said he’d be heartbroken. “I’m going to try to stay firm and try to hold it in,” he said.
That’s when his dad interjected. “But, hey.” He knuckled Ethan on the shoulder. “When we walk out of that game, what are we going to do?”
Ethan shook himself. “We’re going to say thank you.”
“To who?”
“Everybody,” Ethan replied. This was what they do every game, he said, as they walk out. “We say, ‘Thank you. Thank you, Coliseum staff, for another wonderful day at the ballpark.’”
