A’s leaving: Oakland comes to grips with departure of Athletics

OAKLAND, Calif. — The Athletics had long ago carved out a Jekyll-and-Hyde legacy as one of Major League Baseball’s most successful — and sad-sack — franchises. Under their belts: nine World Series titles and 19 seasons of futility punctuated by 100 or more losses.

This, though, is different. Now, legions of A’s fans view the team as the sport’s most treacherous under the ownership of billionaire John Fisher, an heir of the family that founded The Gap in 1969 — one year after the A’s moved to Oakland, California, from Kansas City, Missouri.

Just a few years after embracing “Rooted In Oakland” as their motto, the A’s this week are coming to the end of their 57 see-sawing seasons in a city regularly overshadowed by the mystique of its storied neighbor, San Francisco.

“I know these times coming to the games are always going to be among the best years of my life,” longtime A’s fan Will MacNeil, 40, rued as he contemplated the end of an era that’s crushing a community’s soul. “And for a billionaire owner to rip it away from me, it’s frustrating.”

A baseball team that has moved twice moves again

The A’s exodus from Oakland will give the team the dubious distinction of being the first Major League Baseball franchise to have moved on four different occasions. After starting in Philadelphia in 1901, the A’s moved to Kansas City in 1955, then to Oakland in 1968, with California’s capital city of Sacramento and Las Vegas next in the peripatetic pipeline.

No place has been the A’s home for as long as Oakland, where they’re the last professional sports team in a two-county region known as the East Bay — home to 2.8 million people living across the water from San Francisco.

Through the years, the baseball team became an emblem of East Bay’s grit and flair. The A’s glory years have included the colorfully attired, mustachioed “Swingin’ A’s” during the first half of the 1970s, the muscular and swaggering “Bash Brothers” of the late 1980s, and the scrappy underdogs of the 2000s that yielded a real-life fairy tale in the film, “Moneyball,” based on the Michael Lewis book that ushered in the era of data-driven analysis.

Through those decades, the A’s stadium — the now-crumbling Oakland Coliseum — became an East Bay hub where people of all races, ages, incomes and backgrounds rallied around a common cause.

“It was really like the public square,” lifelong A’s fan Jim Zelinski said earlier this year. His father brought him to the team’s first game at the Oakland Coliseum on April 17, 1968 — a 4-1 loss to the Baltimore Orioles before a crowd of 50,164.

Rooting for the A’s connected everyone from longshore workers at Oakland’s bustling port to the tech geeks of Silicon Valley to hippies from nearby Berkeley to technology to subversives forged in the cauldron of a city where Huey Newton started the Black Panthers and Sonny Barger led a notorious chapter of the Hells Angels.

“The A’s are such an indelible part of this community,” Zelinski said. “Everybody was so proud of not only the teams, but there was also this sense of, ‘Hey, this is us! This is the East Bay!’”

The bond between fans and a community is strong

Other beloved sports teams have spurned their devoted fans by moving elsewhere through the decades, but none of them have been jilted in quite the same way as the East Bay.

The NFL’s Raiders already turned their back on Oakland twice. They did it first in 1982 when they moved to Los Angeles before coming back in 1995, only to leave for Las Vegas in 2020 — the year after the National Basketball Association’s Warriors hopped over the bay to San Francisco.

“It’s taken so long for this move to evolve that it’s been like a slow death eating me up very single day,” said A’s fan Mike Silva, 72, wiping away tears as he showed some of his old ticket stubs.

After the A’s decided to follow the Raiders to Las Vegas, Fisher poured more salt into Oakland fans’ wounds. Rather than stay in the Coliseum, Fisher chose to move the A’s 85 miles northeast to a minor-league ballpark in Sacramento for at least the next three years while waiting for the new stadium in Nevada to be built.

“I know there is great disappointment, even bitterness,” Fisher acknowledged in an open letter to fans released Monday. ” I can tell you this from my heart: we tried. Staying in Oakland was our goal. It was our mission, and we failed to achieve it. And for that I am genuinely sorry.”

Some are coming out to the bitter end

Many devout A’s fans have been boycotting games in disgust this season. Those who still come, like Will MacNeil, regularly lead chants of “Sell the team!’” before lobbing a profanity at Fisher.

MacNeil, known as “Right-Field Will” after being a fixture in the Coliseum’s bleachers for nearly 20 years, has accumulated about 200 A’s jerseys during his fandom. He estimates only 20 fit him now because of the weight he put on while drowning his sorrow about the team’s move in beers.

“This move really destroyed me,” MacNeil said as he cheered the A’s on to a victory in May.

Zelinski, the fan who attended the A’s first game in 1968, spent nearly 30 years fighting to keep sports teams in Oakland. When the season started, he still didn’t want to believe it would all be to no avail.

“I had some of the greatest memories of my life at the Oakland Coliseum,” Zelinski, 65, said in April. “The A’s are such an irreplaceable part of the East Bay culture that I don’t think people can quite grasp what incredible sadness there is going to be like at that final game in September.”

He will never find out. After a long battle with bladder cancer, Jim Zelinski died June 7 — the same day that A’s outfielder JJ Bleday slugged a home run in the bottom of the ninth to catapult the team to a 2-1 victory.

Here in Oakland, as a quiet end approaches, that sets us up to leave you with an observation that former Baseball Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti once made about the sport. It hangs over Oakland this week like a misplaced curveball: “It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart.”