The Loneliest Team in Baseball (published 2022)

OAKLAND, Calif. — On a quiet night earlier this month, fewer than 3,000 fans attended an Athletics game. The lumbering old coliseum was so empty and quiet that the visiting Tampa Bay Rays players could hear the crisp pronunciation of every spotlight coming their way.

Rays outfielder Brett Phillips said one of his teammates told him that when he was at bat, he could clearly hear a fan in the stands mocking his poor batting average. Phillips missed the jibe, but was asked what he did hear from the bare stands that night.

“I heard a pin drop,” Phillips joked. “Does that count?”

A new baseball season is a time of hope in many baseball cities, including Oakland, but the first few weeks of the 2022 campaign have served to peel back the veil on long-festering problems for the Athletics. Things may have reached crisis levels.

That May 2 game, between two teams with troubling attendance problems, drew just 2,488 fans, the lowest attendance of the season in the majors and the A’s smallest in more than 40 years. The team’s once-loyal fan base appears to have given up.

Why wouldn’t they do that?

Their favorite players are routinely traded for cheaper alternatives. Their vast concrete stadium, while retaining a stubborn charm for some, is dilapidated and grossly outdated. The organization, meanwhile, speaks openly about its long-distance relationship with Las Vegas.

The A’s have been on the hunt for a shiny new stadium or an energetic new city for years, creating a kind of uncertainty that almost encourages fans to stay away.

“It feels like the last days of the Montreal Expos before they moved to Washington,” said Jorge Lopez, 36, a construction catering manager. A former season ticket holder who now attends about 10 games a year, Lopez sat with his partner, Megan Harter, in a lonely section of the stands at a game during the Rays series.

“I just want to take it all in before they leave,” Lopez said.

Through the first five and a half weeks of the season, the A’s rank last in Major League Baseball in attendance, averaging just 8,421 fans per game through Saturday in a stadium that holds nearly 57,000. In 2019, the year before the pandemic, they averaged 20,521. Attendance that year was low for the league, but still respectable. Late that season, Oakland hosted the American League wild-card game — also against the Rays — and 54,005 showed up, sending the Coliseum into a frenzy.

With attendance plummeting, A’s fans face three possible outcomes: The team gets a coveted new stadium on the Oakland waterfront (an initiative that faces numerous obstacles); it moves to Las Vegas or another city; or it falls back on the same old solution it’s had for the past half century: stay in a park that, like Angel Stadium in Anaheim, opened in 1966 — making it older than every MLB stadium except Wrigley Field, Fenway Park and Dodger Stadium. No one would confuse the Coliseum with those classic cathedrals.

A’s President Dave Kaval says staying put is no longer feasible, especially now that the nearby San Francisco Giants dominate the market with a beautiful park next to the San Francisco Bay. That stadium opened in 2000.

“Having a visionary, waterfront stadium in Oakland is especially important because we’re a two-team market,” Kaval said. “I have to compete with the Giants, and I can’t have a substandard product or people will just go to their games.”

Kaval has become a lightning rod for disgruntled fans and irritated civic leaders, but he argues that the A’s are at least fighting to stay in Oakland, spending $2 million a month on the waterfront project. That’s more than they spend annually on all but one player, shortstop Elvis Andrus.

“I think it’s true,” said Kevin Peters, 33, an A’s fan from Oakland, about the team’s insistence that it’s making an effort. “The Raiders and Warriors left. I think the A’s are stingy, but at least they’re trying to stay in Oakland.”

Despite his protests, Kaval has been open about the team spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a month exploring the Las Vegas option.

The Athletics are the last of a triumvirate that once cohabited on the sprawling concrete lot along Interstate 880 in Oakland. The NFL’s Raiders, who also played at the Coliseum in two separate eras, relocated to Las Vegas permanently in 2020. The NBA’s Golden State Warriors, who played in an arena just a stone’s throw from the Coliseum for 51 years, moved into a gleaming new palace in San Francisco in 2019, not far from the Giants’ ballpark.

Only the A’s remain standing, giving the stadium a ghost-town feel, with shuttered concession stands, dark concourses and cracked concrete. Behind center field stands Mount Davis, the massive, view-obstructing seating structure built when Al Davis brought the Raiders back from Los Angeles — a monstrosity that may be the only part of the stadium visible from space.

In the past, fans just had to accept it all, but this year it feels different.

“It’s an unfortunate situation for everybody,” said infielder Jed Lowrie, who played for the A’s for seven years, including three years in which the team reached the postseason. “As a professional, as a player in the big leagues, you have to do your job. We understand there’s grievances, but that’s beyond my pay grade. Hopefully it can be resolved. Let’s put it this way: It has to be resolved.”

For the past 22 years, the A’s have made a science of maximizing modest resources to field competitive teams, a process memorialized in the book “Moneyball.” They’re playoff regulars, but the heartbreaking process of cutting out top players before they reach free agency appeared to have reached a tipping point this spring after the two Matts — Chapman and Olson — were traded to Toronto and Atlanta, leaving fans with only souvenir jerseys to remember them by.

“They’re trading all of our players away,” said Drew Hernandez, 18, a student at Las Positas College in nearby Livermore, speaking in an empty, echoing tunnel beneath the stands during one of the A’s’ recent games with the Rays. “It’s got to stop.”

The A’s players, coaches and management are in a difficult position, caught between the devoted but angry fans who support them and the wishes of the team’s owner, John J. Fisher, as Lowrie called him.

It’s not easy to see beloved and talented teammates leave.

“Our model is one where we cycle players, and in that cycle there are times when fans don’t understand and maybe don’t appreciate what we’re doing here,” said Mark Kotsay, the A’s new manager and a former Oakland player. “But we have a loyal fan base, and that’s really all that matters.”

That loyalty, tested and stretched for decades, is starting to wear thin. Ticket and parking prices went up this year, and some skeptical fans feel the team is deliberately putting a mediocre product in a dilapidated stadium to depress attendance, giving the A’s more leverage to move the team or get permission — and tax breaks — to build a new stadium in Oakland.

“Have you ever seen the movie ‘Major League’?” Harter asked. “That’s what it is. They don’t want fans showing up so they can exercise.”

The idea of ​​a new stadium in Oakland isn’t a new concept. The current plan would put a new, swanky park at the center of a $12 billion development at the Port of Oakland’s Howard Terminal, near downtown. Of course, it would require all sorts of public permits and subsidies to make it a reality.

a recent vote by an important committee of the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission recommended going forward, arguing the space is not needed as part of future seaport development.

That vote changed Kaval’s vision, but more hurdles remain to be overcome, including a key vote in the Oakland City Council on the financial details of the deal.

“If they vote no, we’re done; the project is over,” Kaval said. His attention would then turn to Las Vegas, an option that also depends on the outcome of the vote there.

Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf strongly supports the Howard Terminal plan and praises its economic benefits to the entire area. In an interview, she said she had learned hard lessons from the “big lie” the Raiders had spread on Oakland and that the experience would ensure that protective measures would be put in place to protect the government’s finances.

She was optimistic that the project would go ahead, but said it would be expensive if it didn’t.

“It would be a tremendous loss for future generations of Oaklanders, not just Oakland A’s fans,” she said. “This is much, much bigger than baseball. This is about taking this precious asset, the waterfront, and making the most of it for future generations.”

If the stadium is ever built, it will mark the first time the Athletics — an original American League franchise dating back to 1901 in Philadelphia before moving to Kansas City, Mo., in 1955 and then to Oakland in 1968 — have had a stadium built specifically for them since Shibe Park opened in 1909. That stadium opened to much fanfare as baseball’s first concrete-and-steel facility, but in a sign of things to come, the team was eventually forced to share it with the Phillies.

Kaval said the Howard Terminal park would add “hundreds of millions” to the team’s revenue stream and end the demoralizing cycle of personnel changes that has been a reality for the franchise since its early days under Connie Mack.

While all this is happening, the A’s continue at the Coliseum and the few fans who do show up (many in their Chapman and Olson jerseys) enjoy what could be the final days or years of the Oakland Athletics.

After that recent game with only 2,488 fans in attendance, Phillips, the Rays outfielder, addressed several of them at the railing near the dugout as he left the field.

“I thanked four of them,” Phillips said. “I told them, ‘I know the guys in the other dugout really appreciate you guys being here.’ Sports are popular and exciting because of the fans. They’re the most important part of the game.”