Goodbye, Green and Yellow Brick Road

I saw my uncle Myron the other day for the first time in a few years. I don’t know him that well, but I always liked him. He was the gentler version of my dad. Since my father died in 2017, I’ve pledged to see him more, but it hasn’t really worked out. I’m a busy guy, and I don’t prioritize him as much as I should. But this time I was already going to be in his neck of the woods, so I called him up, and he suggested we meet at a Stewart’s gas station near his house. I had a seltzer. He had fruit salad. We spoke for about an hour, and he asked all about me, my life, and my book. He mentioned that he isn’t much of a baseball fan.

A couple days later, he sent me a voice memo, telling me the story of how he and my dad grew up less than a mile from Ebbets Field, and that they were both big Dodgers fans as kids. They went to “about 30 games a year.” Of course, it was easier to go to a game back then, when the tickets were reasonably priced and the ballpark was in your neighborhood, as opposed to 5, 10, or 30 miles outside of town. He was a true blue Dodgers fan, although that all ended when the team moved away and Ebbets Field was bulldozed. My dad continued following baseball, although he never had allegiance to a single team the way he did when he was a kid. Myron basically gave up the game altogether.

Uncle Myron was on my mind today, as I watched clips of Oakland A’s fans saying goodbye to their beloved Oakland Coliseum. For those blissfully unaware, the team’s owner backed out of negotiations with the city over a new stadium and is planning to move the team to Las Vegas, although no stadium deal has been approved there. For the next few years (at least), the A’s will be playing in a minor league stadium in Sacramento. The facilities are subpar. The field gets to around 110 degrees during the summer. It’s not ideal.

I made my pilgrimage to the Coliseum with my friend Nick this summer and wrote about it. By any conventional metric, it’s not a great stadium. It feels old and outdated. It doesn’t have any bells or whistles, and the concessions are subpar. When I went, it was damn near empty, as it has been most of the year, up until these last few games. It felt like baseball in a mausoleum. But I can only imagine how exciting it must have been when that cavernous park was filled with 50,000 screaming A’s fans. It’s a stadium that only makes sense when the team is good, which should incentivize owners to put together a good team, instead of relying on flashing lights and absurd menu items to draw fans.

As I sat there in the front row behind the visitor’s dugout, I looked at the retired numbers on the outfield wall. There were names next to them: Dave Stewart, Dennis Eckersley, Reggie Jackson, Rickey Henderson, Rollie Fingers, Catfish Hunter. Legends all. Decades later, I was watching people wearing the same uniforms playing on the same field. The grass and the dirt may have changed, and the uniforms may have ads on them now, but the space has remained the same. As someone who grieves places more than people, the loss of the Oakland Coliseum as a home for this historic franchise is nothing less than a community tragedy.

Shea Stadium, where I fell in love with baseball, was considered a dump by the late ‘90s, when a new era of beautiful ballparks was ushered in. Maybe it was. But when you’re a kid, even a dump can be magical. When I went there, I felt the ground shake with the footsteps of Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman, and Tug McGraw, names that the old-timers around me spoke of with reverence. Watching my guys—Gary Carter, Ron Darling, and Keith Hernandez, then later Mike Piazza, Al Leiter, and John Franco—play on the same field as them created a time continuum. It linked teams and generations of fans together. It reminded us that we were part of something bigger than ourselves. 

I remember the last game I went to at Shea. It was early September in 2008. My then-girlfriend and I had flown back east for a wedding. It was unseasonably hot, and I was hungover after the wedding (I have a faint memory of taking my pants off in the lobby hotel). We went to the game, and we argued badly as we looked for a place to park (the new stadium was being built in the old parking lot. We had been dating for about a year, and it was our first really bad fight. I was miserable, and the fact that I was preparing to say goodbye to a place that held more joy for me than anywhere I’d ever been probably had something to do with it. I couldn’t enjoy the game. It was too hot, I was too angry, and then reliever Aaron Heilman blew the game (just as he had blown the NLCS two years earlier), and that sure didn’t help.

I believe that no baseball park should ever be vacated, and certainly none should be torn down. I don’t care how old or out of date it is. Restore them like we do historic homes. Renovate them if you must, but leave the bones in place. Allow parents to take their kids to the same place they fell in love with the game. It doesn’t matter how shiny it is. What matters is that it has endured. 

Baseball is different from other sports in that its past and its present exist at the same time. The physical space where the game occurs is the embodiment of that core notion. And those who would tear down a piece of history to make a little more money simply do not care about this game. Don’t let them tell you they do.

Losing Shea took a piece of my soul, but A’s fans are experiencing something worse. It’s not just the stadium that’s going away. It’s the whole team. Very few fans will follow that team in Sacramento and then Las Vegas or wherever the hell they end up. It’s the end of major league baseball in Oakland, a city that has in the last five years also seen an NBA and an NFL team leave town. It is, quite simply, an unfathomable loss for the families and individuals that have made the Coliseum their home away from home for so many years.

My heart goes out to every Oakland A’s fan, every Montreal Expos fan, every Washington Senators fan, every New York Giants fan, and of course every Brooklyn Dodgers fan who has had their hearts broken for no good reason. Baseball is a cruel game, but in its purest form, its cruelty is offset by the promise of tomorrow. Even if the season ends in failure, as it does for every team but one, you can always look forward to the spring. A’s fans have nothing to look forward to right now. There is no joy in Mudville. 

A’s fans deserve better. So did my uncle Myron. So do we all.