When Your Favorite Teams Leave

 It’s a sad day when your hometown loses its last major league sports team. The Oakland A’s played their last home game yesterday.

I was an A’s fan for decades through:

—The dynasty of three World Series victories in the 1970s. Reggie Jackson, Joe Rudi, Rollie Fingers, Vida Blue, etc.

—Billy Ball of the 1980s: Billy Martin’s tantrums. Ricky Henderson’s speed. Great starting pitching, not much hitting.

—The “Bash Brothers” of the late 1980s and early 1990s.  Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire tore up the American League with their hitting before being disgraced for their use of steroids.

—Money Ball of the 200s: Billy Beane put together great teams despite a small budget, using boring statistics rather than intuition to pick players.

—After that, not much. Few winning teams. I lost interest. The Washington Nationals were my team.

My favorite story about the A’s involves Watergate, of all things. I was managing the news desk for The Associated Press in Washington on Oct. 20, 1973, when the “Saturday Night Massacre” broke. It was a huge story when President Nixon fired three top officials who were investigating the Watergate scandal.

As the tumultuous evening ended, my boss, Walter Mears, , said, “Mike we need you to come in on Sunday and handle the reaction story.”

“But it’s the seventh game of the World Series tomorrow!” I said. “My Oakland A’s are playing.”

“Well, I’m sorry, but I will try to make it up to you.”

I did watch the  game on TV between news breaks, but Mears did a very generous thing. He SOLD me his tickets to the Washington Redskins the next Sunday. Tickets were VERY hard to get back then.

It was a great game, and it was worth it. And the A’s won the World Series!

-0-

Oakland also lost the California Seals NHL hockey team in 1976, the Golden State Warriors basketball team in 2019 and the Oakland Raiders football team in 2020. I had the pleasure of helping cover three Raiders’ games for The Associated Press in the John Madden years of the 1970s. never felt that Oakland and San Francisco could support two major league sports teams anyway. The A’s will play in Sacramento until moving later for Las Vegas.

The writer Gertrude Stein once complained of Oakland, “there’s no there, there.” But it’s not yet a minor league town. Not when another Oakland native might be elected president.