OAKLAND, Calif. —Moments after an era-ending last A’s game below, director Mark Kotsay grabbed a camera and led a loud “let’s get Oakland” chant with the more than 30, 000 people who stayed long after a 3-2 win over the Texas Rangers on Thursday afternoon.
Thirty minutes later, devoted followers were also lining up in the lower bowl to replace plastic cups with Coliseum dust for a souvenir.
Next year, the A’s will perform in Sacramento at Sutter Health Park, the present home of the Triple-A River Cats. Ultimately, they will travel to Las Vegas.
Many Oakland’s supporters may decline to support the move because they are offended by the club’s lost, decades-old fight to keep the team in the Bay Area.
On Thursday, they said farewell. The feelings were mainly positive, as they had been the previous night. As they took the field, people received a standing ovation. When starting pitcher J. T. Ginn departed in the top of the seventh, he received a loud acclaim. The right-hander clapped with his sleeve to appreciate the warm welcome.

The majority of the final three wickets saw the adherents stay on their feet. They reacted favorably to Kotsay’s on-field statement.
There were a dozen interruptions, though. A pair of followers trespassed the stone in the eighth inning before security soldiers tackled them, and at least three green flares were thrown onto the field to stop play. ” Market the team” symptoms may be spotted all over the place.
That aspect of Thursday’s farewell sport tracked with the whole history of the Coliseum. Alaskan sports almost always had a conflict with owners and followers, but not with players.
The first influx of thoughts poured onto a regional TV broadcast just five years after the A’s arrived from Kansas City. At Game 6 of the 1973 World Series against the New York Mets, supporters took aim at then-owner Charlie Finley, whose tenure was marred by penny-pinching and a consistent itch to get the business abroad.
According to an Oct. 21, 1973, paper record of the image from The Telegraph-Herald, A’s followers hung anti-Finley flags at the Coliseum, with one studying,” A’s Fans For Oakland Rights. A Million Fans Can’t Get Wrong”. Some individuals chanted for Finley’s impeachment during the eighth inning stretch.

A fan-made mark protesting questionable owner Charlie Finley at the Coliseum in the 1970s during the World Series.
Photo by Russ Reed/Sporting News via Getty Images via Getty Images

Relocation threats and poor attendance under Finley culminated in a near-move to Denver, which did n’t yet have the Rockies. However, when the Haas family purchased the team in a desperate 1980 purchase out of community disdain, the community rallied.
In 1979, the A’s played a household game with a group of 653, one of the lowest visits in MLB history. Simply two years later, following Finley’s price of the crew and a tripling of payment, a then-record 50, 000 people showed up for opening day at the Coliseum, according to a San Francisco Examiner post from 1981. In a two-season timeframe, the number of A’s time ticket-holders went from 75 to 3, 500.

Oakland had one of the highest payments in baseball by 1990, and it had on 35, 000 fans there per game. In those brilliance times, the A’s won three World Series appearances in succession.
The following generation, nevertheless, saw the famous Haas home sell the team. Worse, the native state green-lighted the Coliseum’s cheap Mount Davis extension—a sad plastic surgery that obscured the rolling Oakland rocks behind the outside wall—to take up the NFL’s Raiders. Amid these changes, the A’s did n’t reach the playoffs from 1993 through 1999.
Relocation threats were once more raised, first involving nearby Bay Area cities Fremont and San Jose. Talented A’s rosters hemorrhaged key players such as Jason Giambi, Miguel Tejada, Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder and Barry Zito.
Tejada made the statement before his first game back at the Coliseum after joining the Orioles as a free agent in 2004.” I did n’t want to leave,” Tejada told reporters. ” They made me leave. I’d have taken less money to stay in Oakland”.

Miguel Tejada, one of Oakland’s best-ever shortstops, said he was forced out by ownership.
Photo by Arleen Ng/Oakland Tribune

Before the mass exodus of its young homegrown standouts, Oakland respectably ranked 19th in attendance in 2001, 18th in 2002, 17th in 2003 and 19th in 2004. However, soon after, attendance dropped to the lowest level in MLB.
The nearby San Francisco Giants managed three World Series parades in five years ( 2010, 2012, and 2014 ), and the crumbling Coliseum became the joke of the baseball world, did n’t help either.
Since 2020, Oakland has ranked 29th or worse in attendance four consecutive seasons. The agonizing 25-year decline in attendance that accelerated post-pandemic should n’t overshadow the passionately produced electric moments fans caused.
Fans poured out in droves and created their own soundtrack after Oakland’s epic 2012 chase-down of the Texas Rangers to win the AL West on the final day of the season. Songs, dances, drum lines and chants organically formed in the bleachers. The Balfour Rage. The Bernie Lean. A recurring Carly Rae Jepsen sing-along.
It was a team with the second-lowest payroll in baseball who was chosen to finish last and lead the Rangers by 12 games as of July 1, 2012.
After winning the division at home on October 3, 2012, in front of 36, 000 spectators, players responded with the fans ‘ love by doing a lap around the field to congratulate those who had opted not to leave after the final pitch.
In Game 4 of the 2012 ALDS, Coco Crisp hit a walk-off single to right field to end a miraculous season and end a fiery ninth-inning comeback at the Coliseum, which was followed by cheers from fans who cried with joy at the stadium. In the stands, strainers gave each other hugs. The late Ray Fosse, who was working as a color commentator on the radio show, screamed from the deepest parts of his soul as Seth Smith ran home to score the winning run.
The Detroit Tigers, who were the postseason foil to the A’s in 2012 and 2013, shared appreciation for the Coliseum environment.
” I like bars with music, but this is a little bit loud”, legendary manager Jim Leyland quipped about October in Oakland. ” So it does get in the eardrums. Thank God I do n’t hear that well”.
In 2013, long-time A’s bogeyman Justin Verlander remarked,” This ballpark is unique the way you have to walk by the fans to get out the field, and they’re yelling as much as they can at me. ” It’s very hostile and it’s a lot of fun, really, to be on the mound. Everybody in the ballpark]they ] are rooting against me and yelling as loud as they can”.
” Something I’ll never forget”, said another future Hall of Fame pitcher, Max Scherzer.
More recently, Rays manager Kevin Cash said Oakland’s 2019 wild-card game crowd at the Coliseum—its last home postseason contest outside the pandemic season that prevented crowds—was “maybe the loudest I’ve ever heard a ballpark”.
Fans ‘ demographics played a role in the stadium atmosphere, which “always feels like there are more people than there actually are,” as Jed Lowrie once put it.
One of the most affordable major U.S. sports venues to visit was The Coliseum. While many devoted sports fans, the lifeblood of a sports industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars, are increasingly feeling priced out of attending live events across the nation, including across the bay at Oracle Park, attending an A’s game at the Coliseum remained a viable option.
In consequence, Oakland baseball’s high points attracted crowds that appeared to be more representative of the average working citizen in the area than many other professional sports franchises.
After Thursday’s goodbye, that atmosphere has gone the way of the dodo bird, the wooly mammoth, the saber-tooth tiger. Bludgeoned to an ugly death. Expect a relatively soulless Las Vegas entertainment scene.
The Bay Area’s working-class community lost an imbalanced fight. Oakland, its back on the relocation ropes as far back as the 1970s, held out as long as it could. In the real world, David vs. Goliath plays this way.
On both Wednesday, the last night game at the Coliseum, and the finale Thursday afternoon, fans here embraced Nelly’s Ride Wit Me blaring over the PA system. Oh no, I feel this way. they sang in unison. ” Hey, must be the money”!