The A's are no longer affiliated with Oakland

OAKLAND, Calif. – Adam Curtis would have blushed at how obvious the metaphor was: As a thick layer of police and security guards surrounded the foul lines, guarded the field and threatened the 46,889 fans in attendance, the Oakland Coliseum's PA blared “Celebration” for the last time. . It was a final, fitting insult to the fans of the Athletics, a team in the AL West that, as of today, plays its home games in Oakland. Someone in the building, maybe just one person, had reason to celebrate – not the fans, but them.

I wondered what the final major league game on Oakland soil would look like if John Fisher and the other owners who voted unanimously for it destroyed the future. Would it be a party? A riot? How would the Oakland A's, an organization whose stated position to its own fans and the world at large for three years has been more or less this: We don't exist; Do not consider us or our producthandle a sell-out audience? It turns out that a fun funeral is still a funeral, and the energy that A's fans brought to the Coliseum served primarily to underscore the irrationality at the core of the situation. They showed the baseball viewing world what the A's meant to them, while Fisher and his organization showed how little that meant.

The gates to the Coliseum parking lot were scheduled to open at 8 a.m., but fans arrived so early that traffic backed up on the 880 and the parking lot had to open an hour early. My train was full three hours before first pitch, and my final ride across the BART bridge to the Colosseum made the portal metaphor I've always played with a little more literal, as a vendor expanded the usual offering of T-shirts and micheladas with it Psilocybin chocolates (a friend had bought and eaten some the night before and vouched for their effectiveness).

The crowded tailgate was soundtracked by Too $hort, Peso Pluma, occasional metal riffs, the ever-present Mac Dre and a 12-piece band banda Group. Two fans in mourning veils walked around handing out black roses. I threw footballs and Wiffle balls, talked to fake T-shirt sellers and people selling tacos, and saw more TV reporters than I ever imagined would attend an A's game, including the crew a Taiwanese branch. A man sipping champagne displayed a sign that read “JOHN FISHER CAN BURN IN H*LL.” A father and daughter shot Modelos together. A security guard burst into tears as he handed his friend three tickets, one of which was for his friend's child, whom he was meeting for the first time. Dallas Braden took photos and chatted with anyone willing to get in line. I spoke to a fan who was carrying a two-foot framed photo of someone standing on the Coliseum field in a crisp yellow A's jersey. It was her cousin with whom they attended A's games before her death.

Every person I spoke to, and every person every other reporter spoke to, told a similar story (the best was this guy's). They loved the A's, they loved coming to A's games with their friends and family, they loved the other A's fans, and they found John Fisher simultaneously disgusting and unfathomable. Fisher's venal, nepo-child origins are well established and, in Defector's case, explained at length through Suetonius of Bay Area sleaze, but what I, and apparently many other A's fans, find most frightening is his deep soul lying indifference.

One cannot simply rationalize Fisher's maneuver; Greed gets you so far there, and the rest can only really be explained by cruelty or stupidity. Anyone who disagrees with either statement, as every A's fan will for the rest of their life, will suffer psychological harm. Not only were the A's taken away, they were taken away under malicious, gnomic pretenses. A rich man ruins something in a way he doesn't care about or really understand, and for no good reason. That sounds too much like all the areas of life that are supposed to be improved through the joy of sport.

Inside, Barry Zito sang the national anthem and local hero Marcus Semien officiated the game for the visiting Rangers. Concessions were completely inaccessible to anyone unwilling to lose three of their final nine innings of Oakland A's baseball. My friend Seung somehow met a guy from Saskatchewan who flew in for the entire three-game series just because he wanted to experience something for the last time. In the fourth inning, fans behind home plate released a giant white beach ball, and the crowd successfully threw it away from security all the way to the third base line until it fell onto the field, where a security guard faked a pass back to the field at one point, twice the crowd before he pulls out a knife and stabs the balloon. As I said, the metaphors weren't subtle.

Thursday felt like a playoff game at 1.5x strength. Oakland has and always has had the capacity and will to equip even a brutalist restroom like the Coliseum with a fantastic audience when an event calls for it. I think it's necessary to put this shock in the context of the last three seasons.

Until last month, the Colosseum was a cemetery: largely closed to the public; populated primarily by visitors and possums; an aura of past glory that felt increasingly haunted; a large open space with lots of corners where couples can have semi-clandestine sex. The A's did this on purpose. Team payrolls have always been among the lowest in the MLB, but after a good 2021, the club washed everyone who was innocent to good to essentially stop functioning as a baseball team.

They began a sort of parallel existence, playing ostensible major league games just because they had to and losing, while Fisher and organization president Dave Kaval worked toward their true goal of leaving Oakland. They raised ticket prices to scare away fans and it worked. They bet that a prolonged death would make people apathetic, and it worked. That means the last game was on Thursday, but the Oakland Athletics died a long time ago. And yet they still had to play one last game. For Fisher, it was like hosting the funeral for a man he had killed.

The people were there to create one last memory. The beer flowed freely, everyone took photos and the anger gave way to preventive nostalgia. (A delightful moment: A man recording a front-facing video of himself popping a joint offers blows to two stadium employees and they happily pick him up.) The camera in the stadium studiously avoided any fans who had a SELL-T- wearing a shirt or waving with a The PA supervisor said a warm goodbye to the flag and the team thanked the fans they are leaving behind. The impending move, about which Fisher has tried to say as little as possible, was treated by everyone associated with the A's as something natural and inexorable, like the weather. The A's are not move, the A's are is moved.

I found the honorifics insulting. Any expression of gratitude was a lie. It's insulting to be asked to celebrate 57 years of baseball in Oakland when all that history is evaporated for nothing. The team has viewed fans as an active obstacle, an obstacle to its quest for desert oblivion. The most honest thing you could have said to the thousands gathered would have been Thanks for the money. Personal responsibility does not deserve the slightest thanks for making possible something that is so dear to so many people and is now being lost. It was breathtakingly cynical and mostly effective.

After the seventh inning, the crowd briefly felt its own power, and for a moment the predicted chaos seemed possible. Someone threw a green flare into the outfield, briefly stopping the game, and two fans ran onto the field to loud cheers. Shouts of “SELL THE TEAM” and “FUCK JOHN FISHER” were occasionally picked up by large sections of the audience, once so loud that the PA operator tried to defuse them with a dissonant rhythm. People started snapping off cup holders behind the seats; Some of the seats themselves had been stolen in recent days. It rained cans and bottles and Mason Miller's attempt to end the game was stopped several times.

And then the game was over, and baseball in Oakland was over.

Afterward, manager and former player Mark Kotsay gave a speech about how great Oakland is, and the players applauded the fans and grabbed some dirt from the mound. Some fans cried, others screamed; Everyone grieved in their own way. For the most part, people stood silently where they were, not rushing onto the field to end their time in the Colosseum in self-annihilating glory, nor shuffling home to put the past behind them. It ended, but it didn't end until you left.

By the way, the A's won the ball game 3-2. A fitting end to the Oakland Athletics project. Despite a modern ownership bent on sabotage, despite playing in a dilapidated ballpark, and despite regularly fielding teams on shoestring budgets, the A's won, as they had often done over the decades, and performed beyond their means. No matter where John Fisher ends up, the same can never be said of him.