The Coliseum goes dark, but the A's will glow

This is the final month of a turbulent, glorious run that began in 1968.

Reggie Jackson in Oakland

The beginnings of baseball in the Oakland Alameda County Coliseum roughly coincided with the emergence of the word “funk,” or “funky.” The definitions vary, but to be funky is to be a little offbeat, a little dissonant, and by all means original. Funky pitchers succeed when perfectly rhythmic pitchers fail. Funky fashion is an alternative to a sheeplike insistence on following “style.”

The Coliseum was often chilly, and it wouldn’t win any stadium-design awards, and it didn’t imitate anybody else’s house. In recent years it has suffered a plague of sewer backups, which fits another definition of funky. But when you were there you knew you weren’t anyplace else. It was funky in the most welcoming sense, and those who regularly visited between 1968 and now saw some of the best and worst teams of alltime, and certainly some of the best and most charismatic players.

The funk officially ends Sept. 26 when the Athletics play their final game there, on their way to Las Vegas via Sacramento, like an electric car with 100 yards of range. After that, Dodger Stadium, Fenway Park and Wrigley Field will be the only baseball parks that were built with originality, and major league sports will turn out the lights in Oakland.

Now, let’s stipulate that there’s no such thing as a bad ballpark, and that every destruction of a stadium has been a tragedy of some sort (Shea Stadium is the exception that proves the rule). Oakland certainly deserves a new place, and it’s a crime that the A’s owners and various city jurisdictions never came up with one. And, like Montreal, there’s almost no chance Oakland will get an expansion franchise or lure another team there, the way Oakland did to Charlie Finley’s Kansas City Athletics, who moved there from Philadelphia. This isn’t about the immense treachery of A’s owner David Fisher. This is about hearing the volunteer drummers pounding away through all innings, the ones that Yankee owner George Steinbrnner tried to silence when his team was hitting, and it’s about the forlorn air horns in the late innings as the chill from the bay came calling. It’s about a place that was singularly Oakland, the building that contradicted Gertrude Stein’s observation that “there is no there there.” Now the A’s will follow the Raiders and Warriors out of town, an exodus that becomes all too obvious when millions drive on I-880 and see the places where games are no longer played.

The Raiders were the first team in town and the most beloved. The A’s played their first home game on April 17, 1968 and lost, 4-1, to Baltimore. They drew 50,164. The next night they drew 5,304. That pattern took hold. The A’s were rarely mediocre and the fan response ebbed and flowed with them. Seventeen times they won their division and five times they won 100 or more games. They won three consecutive World Series beginning in 1972 and played in three consecutive Series beginning in 1988. They also played sub-.400 ball in four other seasons.

The winning came from excellent scouting. The losing, for the most part, came from reluctance to invest. This year’s team has an MLB-low $63 million payroll and only seven players who make a million or more. Yet even though it usually plays in front of nobody, it has been stubbornly competitive most of the season, with lots of home runs and a dominant closer in Mason Miller. They are 64-83 and seem likely to finish ahead of the Angels, who pay Mike Trout and Anthony Rendon $75 million in 2024.

Finley had a live mule for a mascot, an innovation that, mercifully, didn’t stick. Orange baseballs came and went, too. But his outlandish uniforms would look conservative today — if he’d owned the Red Sox, he never would have dressed them in Ukrainian-flag colors — and his early 70s teams were known as the Mustache Gang. They had Reggie Jackson and Joe Rudi and Sal Bando at the plate and Catfish Hunter, Blue Moon Odom, Vida Blue and Rollie Fingers on the mound, and they had Dick Williams in the dugout, and they won even though they hissed at each other and generally despised Finley. Free agency came along in 1977 and triggered a diaspora that left the A’s with a 54-108 record in 1979 and a season attendance of 309,000. But an ownership change put the A’s on solid ground, and after Billy Martin goaded them into the ‘81 playoffs before all his pitchers burned out, they became baseball’s model in the late 80s.

Even though Jackson, Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire played there, the club’s essential figure was Rickey Henderson. He was from Oakland Tech High, and he was young and unvarnished, and he was a rock concert every time he reached base. He led the league in steals when he was 20 and also when he was 39, and he broke the alltime steals record in one of his four stops in Oakland. Henderson had some of his best all-around years with the Yankees, but, like most everyone else, he seemed most natural in green and gold.

The A’s clubhouse contained some of the best players in the history of the game, but it was also like an unkempt basement, small and unrenovated and homey. Performance was the only function. It didn’t matter what you said or how you looked or what you did at your previous stop(s). Dennis Eckersley became an MVP as a closer, and his vocabulary was all his own and now decorates the game, even though we all misconstrue the “walkoff,” which, in Eck-speak, was what the victimized pitcher did. He had the most famous walkoff in Game 1 of the 1988 World Series and, typically, talked about Kirk Gibson’s home run for as long as anyone wanted him to.

Players like Dave Stewart, Dave Parker and David Henderson came from elsewhere and found their groove, no questions asked. Black players were particularly comfortable there. The day after the San Francisco Game 3 earthquake at the 1989 World Series, Stewart drove to downtown Oakland to witness the twisted mess of the Cypress Structure, the collapsed segment of I-880 where 42 people died. For the most part, it wasn’t just a workplace.

Then there were the 2002 A’s who won 20 consecutive games down the stretch and had 100 wins for the second consecutive year. Both those teams lost in the Division Series, despite Miguel Tejada, Jason Giambi and starting pitchers Barry Zito, Tim Hudson and Mark Mulder. Remember Derek Jeter’s Immaculate Perception, the cutoff and flip he executed in the Division Series? The A’s were the victims. There was another wave of excellence with Josh Donaldson and Sonny Gray and three consecutive playoff teams, and it happened again with Matt Chapman and Marcus Semien and pitcher Mike Fiers, who was the guy who blew the whistle on the Houston Astros’ trashcan-beating hijinks. But the A’s were usually an audition. Players tested their voices in order to get the big money somewhere else. They became New Haven for everyone’s Broadway.

The Coliseum saw seven Most Valuable Players, five Cy Young Award winners, seven Rookies of the Year. It saw Dallas Braden pitch a perfect game and, later on, join the drummers in the outfield. It saw Billy Beane put forth a new evaluation plan that would de-emphasize pure Athleticism and put a premium on getting on base and hitting home runs, a process that was misrepresented in the “Moneyball” book and movie but permeated the rest of baseball. It saw, or heard, PA man Roy Steele, the “Voice of God,” with a gruff, conversational baritone that you would not find at the Columbia School of Broadcasting or anywhere else.

Now, until it becomes a housing development, the Coliseum will remain by the side of the freeway, 21 feet below sea level. Those who found life and funk inside its walls will have to fight their own depression.