Sports, family and community all go hand in hand with one another. Even though professional sports leagues and teams are part of a hundred billion dollar entertainment industry where revenue and profit is king, that doesn’t mean the consumers of said industry don’t form a bond to their favorite team that goes far beyond the realm of corporate greed.
Perhaps no example is more indicative of this than what has happened with the Oakland Athletics. A baseball team with a greedy owner who turned his back on a tight knit fanbase that has been a staple of a community since 1968. Moments created in a Coliseum lovingly referred to as “Baseball’s Last Dive Bar” washed away into memory. Kids who became adults that never stopped going to games with loved ones, where wearing green and gold became a core pillar of a family’s identity.
Paul Garcia was one of those kids.
Growing up in Hayward, California, a 15-minute drive from the Oakland Coliseum, Paul went to his first A’s game in 1997 at 7-years-old with his dad, sister and a couple of friends. He remembers there was a t-shirt giveaway that day, with members of the A’s roster like Mark McGwire and Ben Grieve listed on the back, one of those obscure but detailed memories that really stick with you when you grow to love something.
Now Paul is an adult, and he will never be able to go to an A’s game in Oakland ever again. For sports fans, our favorite teams are one of the only things that connect us with our beloved childhoods, and for Paul, that’s gone now.
“It’s very traumatic because it’s not just losing a baseball team, it’s losing an entire community,” Paul said. “The Oakland A’s were more of a community than any other team. It’s the only team that chants, ‘let’s go Oakland!’, the city’s name, instead of their team name.”
Paul, who was 12-years-old during the A’s famed 20-game win streak and attended games 17, 18 and 20 of it, recalled how watching Miguel Tejada’s walk-off homer in game 18 was the first time seeing his dad show emotion.
“He was jumping up and down, screaming like a child,” Paul said. “It’s a memory I’ll always have.”
The second time he saw his dad show emotion happened five years later in 2007, when Marco Scutaro, who carried a .049 batting average at the time, hit a walk-off home run off the great Mariano Rivera.
However, in 2014 his dad stopped being a fan when the A’s traded star third baseman Josh Donaldson.
“That was the final nail in the casket for him,” Paul said.
Having a beloved star player getting traded away be referred to as “the final nail in the casket” to having fandom be stripped away from someone probably sounds strange to you if you’re not an A’s fan. But if you are an A’s fan, you would laugh knowing that Josh Donaldson was far from the final nail.
You see, the A’s have a history of trading away fan-favorite players in an effort to cut corners and not spend money on roster payroll (believe it or not, they made an entire movie about it). The aforementioned McGwire, Grieve, Scutaro, as well as countless others to don the A’s uniform, fell victim to this.
But perhaps that’s why the Oakland A’s community is so strong. Since there was a constant revolving door of players, the only thing that remained constant was having each other. And that damn Coliseum.
Paul and I only recently met. He’s about 10 years older than me, has had vastly different experiences than me and will pretty much always be in a different stage of life than me. But it’s funny how when we started talking about the A’s, how much we found in common with each other. I also was at that game when Scutaro hit the walk-off home run. I also had a dad who had the season-ticket package for weekend games. I also was devastated that I couldn’t go to the final game in Oakland because I needed to stay in Arizona at the time. My family also wouldn’t be as close as we are today if it weren’t for the Oakland A’s.
In this way, sports have an extraordinary way of transcending generations, zip codes and life circumstances to unite people. But when a team departs in the fashion like the A’s did, living traditions turn into frozen memories. The community, however, doesn’t go anywhere. Because even without a team, the stories live on. They’re told from parents to children, from old friends to new ones and even between strangers who find common ground in the team that shaped their identities. So at the end of the day, Oakland’s spirit endures—proof that you can take the team out of the town, but you can’t take the town out of the team.
