Thank you, Oakland A’s
By now, much of the anger has dissipated. The takes have gone cold, the vitriol has been spewed, and all the jokes have been told about the dumb owner who was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple. The Oakland Athletics will soon be history, which means it’s time to move beyond the sadness of the funeral and instead move on to a well-deserved celebration of life.
In that spirit, this should be said: Thank you to the Oakland A’s.
Oakland had its own team for 57 summers. And by extension, every kid like me who would get more out of baseball than just a fun distraction. This game brought me closer to feeling like I belonged.
In retrospect, it made perfect sense, the tension that came with growing up in rival cultures. My parents came to the East Bay from the Philippines in the 1970s, and they both had different ideas about how to assimilate. My father seemed largely indifferent to the Americanization of his children, and his enjoyment of sports seemed tied mostly to his ability to bet on the outcome. My mother, however, seemed intent on making sure we maintained a connection to our heritage. We ate the food and at least understood the language.
These are beautiful thoughts, and they stick in my mind, especially now that I have a daughter and a son of my own. But at the time, they led to a sense of not quite fitting in. The families on TV didn’t look like mine, and they didn’t eat the food my family ate. It all felt strange.
When I was nine, an older cousin introduced me to baseball by showing me a newspaper page he had taped to his wall. The flashy headline referred to the 40/40 club and the picture showed a man holding up a base in a green and gold uniform. You couldn’t miss José Canseco.
There must have been something intriguing about it, because from that moment on, the A’s became my gateway to a new world. They gave me something to look at after school and talk about the next day. I received baseball, and it was such a good feeling that the other sports would soon become mandatory viewing as well. This was the late 1980s, and the Bash Brothers ruled the American League. Rickey Henderson could run. Dave Stewart could stare through opponents before dominating them. Mark McGwire could drive the ball far. And when Dennis Eckersley came to the mound, the game was over after a series of blazing fastballs and nasty sliders. Baseball required no cultural fluency—appreciation required no translation.
I spent my summers buying baseball cards and playing Bases Loaded on my Nintendo and doing the play-by-play myself and peppering it with lines like “Holy Toledo!” because that’s what Bill King did, and as everyone knew, Bill King was the best. As my siblings got older, they started watching too, and it just made it more fun. Years later, baseball gave us something else to share.
But more than anything else, baseball gave me something to chase, and it wasn’t until later in life that I came to appreciate this as a wonderful gift. It never occurred to me that it’s not uncommon for not knowing the desired destination. While playing was out of the question, writing about baseball seemed at least within reach. Soon, the goal became to get into the press box. Thanks to a few lucky bouncers, that happened.
Every fall, a Hall of Fame ballot arrives in my mailbox. I was there when Derek Jeter hit his 3,000th hit. I was there when Dallas Braden gave Alex Rodriguez an impromptu lesson on workplace boundaries. I was there when the Chicago Cubs won their first World Series since 1908. And yes, I was there when Bartolo Colon hit a home run.
It may sound crazy, but no matter what happens, I can always say that I know what it’s like to touch a dream.
This wouldn’t have happened without the Oakland A’s.
As I list my blessings, it’s clear that so many of them stem from baseball. It remains a constant in my life. It’s there in the background of so many conversations with my brother. It was there this summer on our big family camping trip, when we mimicked the batting positions of the 1988 A’s starting lineup, crouching like Rickey and swinging the bat like Carney Lansford. It was there 20 years ago, when we lost one of my sisters far too early, and we did something we all knew she would have wanted. That’s why she retires with the No. 3 jersey of her favorite A’s player, Eric Chavez.
I often think about my sister, especially now, and wonder what she would think of how it all turned out. Journalism requires that fandom stay outside the press box door, so it’s been years since my mood depended on the outcome of an A’s game. Still, baseball allowed me to meet my wife, the Yankees fan who I’m sure once took me to see “Moneyball” so she could enjoy the heartache her team caused mine. It worked out pretty well — our kids are growing up in a house where there’s always a baseball game. So at least we know we’re going to get that part right.
Recently, as I was reading aloud from a story about Shohei Ohtani one morning—a story in which he was declared the greatest player in the game—my daughter looked up from her breakfast with a take. She’s only six, but she’s already shown the first signs of an outrageous and loving personality, not unlike one of her namesakes, my sister.
“Excuse you,” she said. “And Aaron Judge?”
My wife and I could only smile.
So, thank you to the Oakland A’s. Thank you for existing. Thank you for 1989. Thank you for being so good at baseball (most of the time). Thank you for the Big Three. Thank you for the 20-game winning streak. Thank you for all those Sunday afternoons in right field with my brother and my best friend. Thank you for inspiring a very lucky kid, who grew up to be a very lucky man, who desperately hopes that somewhere in Sacramento or Las Vegas, there’s a kid who can still be touched by something as great as a baseball team to call your own.
(Top photo of the Oakland A’s celebrating winning the 1989 World Series by beating the Giants: MLB via Getty Images)
