A 12:37 first pitch.
The Oakland Coliseum is a stadium that the self-appointed cognoscenti have long since left for dead.
A “concrete monstrosity . . . perhaps America’s most hated stadium,” wrote Kevin Draper in 2017.1 The sewage-in-the-dugouts story becomes the backdrop for one after another report on the latest attempt to close the place down.
Built in 1966, this brutalist structure became the only home that baseball’s Oakland Athletics (re-located from Kansas City in 1968) have ever known, and it has twice hosted American football’s peripatetic Raiders (1966-1981 and 1995-2019).
Oakland Coliseum is one of the few “multi-purpose” concrete donuts that has not (yet) given way . . .
. . . to something new and gleaming and purportedly more intimate, an anchor for the kind of insta-neighbourhood that urban renaissance developers (with dollar-signs for eyes) dream about.
It’s easy to see the appeal of the new parks (in baseball as in other sports, as in many countries). Dramatic “downtown,” “waterfront” settings, with their swanky bars and viewing decks, their gourmet pretzels, their playgrounds and ferris wheels.
But they and the experiences they’re peddling fast become affordable mostly to the wealthy, connected, and corporate clients. As impressive as Camden Yards in Baltimore or T-Mobile Stadium in Seattle are for the fan who can afford to attend, does every baseball franchise have to leave the old neighbourhood and go the same way?
Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles isn’t a fair comparison with Oakland Coliseum for several reasons, not least its natural setting in Chavez Ravine and the notable deepness of the Dodgers owners’ pockets.2
And yet Dodger Stadium is the older brother (1962), and is similarly basic, bare-bones as a structure.
Bullpens and the relief pitching cores are shoehorned into seemingly impossible spaces.
The scoreboard screens are tiny by today’s standards, resisting the “ultra-mega-jumbotron” trend,
re-focussing the senses on the game, on the setting, on the “dodger dogs,” on the people
with whom you are experiencing
an afternoon or evening.
This is to suggest that it’s the relentlessly positive, “retro” spin the Dodgers put on their old place —its every colour shade and design feature— that makes the real difference.
The Dodgers venerablise. They don’t preserve so much as re-create a classic mid-twentieth-century aesthetic to love. Every sea foam rivet is carefully accompanied by a renewed story-line that includes their Brooklyn past (and those eastern Dodgers’ 1955 world series win) and puts their home park —and themselves— in a league with Fenway Park in Boston (1912) or Wrigley Field in Chicago (1914).
I COULDN’T HELP but wish the A’s and their old park could find their own version of this way. Because when Oakland Coliseum gets left behind, a lot of the people —families, long-time ball fans— will be abandoned too.
The Coliseum has been home to great baseball moments, even beyond the A’s world series wins and appearances. On 8 May 1968, Jim “Catfish” Hunter pitched what was then only the ninth perfect game in major league history.
And think of the moustachioed Rollie Fingers (#34), of Dennis Eckersley (#43),
and of lightning-fast Rickey Henderson (#24).
I’m way too early for my day game at the Coliseum (the lions haven’t even clocked in yet). It’s accessible to all of the Bay Area by rapid transit,
just a couple of stops from downtown Oakland.
Two members of staff lead me to their secret bit of shade —“está aquí, atrás”— while we await the gates.
On this day, as at the evening game I attended, there’s not a speck of the coldness or dinginess the critics harp about.
On the contrary, this is a spacious, beautiful place.
With a relaxed atmosphere of considerable allure and charm.
Attendance has been poor of late, but not so on the days I was there.
The diehards bring picnics, sing and bang drums.
A species of kindness rarely associated with professional sports (or “professional” anything) reigns.
People —fans of all ages, security, concession attendants, hot dog vendors— create an infectious vibe of calm enjoyment, and seem to be pulling as one.
They pick up on my curiosity, and share their place’s nooks and crannies,
its quirks and stories.
I heard a number of versions of, as one woman put it, “I grew up in this park.”
Some will persist in calling it boring. Others, with reason, will complain about how corporate control, television viewerships, and ratings wars (versus other sports and entertainments) have conspired to ruin the game.
But baseball can still be like walking with a donkey.
There is no choice but to give in, slow down, to wait and see what unfolds. It can be an enclave of experience away, a meditative opportunity.
Best if you can attend an entire series, or at least two games in a row. Because of the hay-wire contemporary world of consta-distraction that some embrace and others endure, it takes a moment to give in to time rather than try to tame it.
There is much to notice.
No pitcher’s warm-up rituals or rhythms are the same.
A catcher’s devisings are, if anything, even more mysterious and meticulous.
Players and coaches study an opponent’s records and tendencies obsessively, and the level of statistic-gathering is through the roof.
But no fielder’s approach to a given hitter or baserunner is entirely predictable. No sinker from one pitcher’s hand and arm angle is the same as another’s.
Just when you think all is set, that events are about to unfurl “like last time,” a twist of fate. The sabremetricians’ quantitative scrolls, their empirical analysis of in-game activity, goes out the window. Intuition, gut-instinct, whispers back.
You can comprehend but never control.
A manager whose team is in the field, perhaps responding to a tidbit of information from a coach or to the imminence of a next hitter, will pop out of the dugout, signal to the umpire and call time. He calls time.
Then takes his time.
After his stroll out to the pitcher’s mound for a conversation with his hurler, the skipper will be joined by the catcher, and then, more often than not, by the infielders.
They all want to know what’s up, what’s coming.
With an entire stadium looking on, those in the congreso at the mound speak into their gloves or hands. They are wary of being lip-read by an opponent, or by some camera-wielding chancer seeking the slimmest of hints as to what the offensive team is conjuring.
Before long, the umpire traipses over to break it up.
The manager, and perhaps a pitcher who will be replaced, slowly depart the scene. More time passes. More waiting.
As with life —as with the donkey who has eaten the dandelions she presently desires and pondered the advisability of the path ahead— there is a re-set, and the game resumes.
After being crushed in the first two evening games by the resurgent A’s
—much to the delight of the Oaklanders— my visiting Blue Jays deigned to awaken briefly from a mid-summer slump.
Not that the game’s result really mattered.
I enjoyed being among the fans in Oakland, California, in their quirky, oft’condemned Coliseum. The experience spurs thought of other things, including far more favoured places.
One evening a gentleman stopped me in my tracks as I made for an exit, gifting me with what —apropos of nothing—has to be the finest of send offs.
“If you’re going fly-fishing,” he said, “you give me a call.”
*photographs and sketch by Kenneth Mills (July 2022).
“The Oakland A’s are Trying to Solve Their Stadium Problem. Still,” New York Times 12 September 2017. But see the rejoinder in the same paper’s pages by Jack Nicas, who recognised the value of character and accessibility of “ugly . . . cheap, gritty, and fun,” and felt the affection in Oakland. He pointed out that if Chicago’s Wrigley Field and Boston’s Fenway Park are indeed “classic pubs,” and if the Marlins’ new stadium if a “flashy … nightclub,” then “the Coliseum [in Oakland] is baseball’s last dive bar”: “The Beauty of America’s Ugliest Ballpark,” New York Times 2 October 2019.
The Dodgers 2022 opening day payroll of 263.5 million dollars is highest in the major leagues, in contrast to Oakland’s ca. 50 million. It was no coincidence that Michael Lewis’s Moneyball (2003) —made into a film of the same name in 2011— focussed on how a sabremetric approach to winning without deep pockets (a system of statistical analysis that acquires “bargain-bin” players other clubs are ready to discard, and, against the odds, rekindles their potential and motivation in a new environment) focussed on how an iteration or two of the Oakland A’s were able the beat the odds. In the present moment, the Tampa Bay Rays (in their much-reviled Tropicana Field) are another such club, spending considerably less with their direct divisional rivals, yet highly competitive.
Lines up with what one reads about the Warriors' move across the Bay, which is sad. As with bands, the real money's in merch and events these days. As far as I know, historians have yet to get in on that game (t-shirts, historians for hire). Soon?
Maybe the undeserved “hatred” of the Coliseum lies in its poor fit with the new look of gentrified Oakland, but thanks for turning attention to its beauty. Hard to hope performance fills the stands, but America doesn’t treat its real monuments so well.