Memories of the Oakland Coliseum

Today, the Oakland Athletics will play their final home game ever. They have played in the Oakland Coliseum ever since the team moved from Kansas City in 1968. The Coliseum has set the scene for World Series triumphs and collapses. It has been home to the greatest basestealer in the history of the world, some of the most magnificent mustaches the game has ever seen, and at least one possum.

The Coliseum opened in 1966, part of the wave of multipurpose stadiums that swept the country. The concrete behemoth was never the warmest stadium, but its character was unmistakable. In recent years, it hasn’t exactly fallen into disrepair; rather, it’s been deliberately pushed. Like the team on the field, it’s been allowed to atrophy in order to demonstrate how badly the organization needs (never wants) out of Oakland. After last night’s game, groundskeepers patiently scooped dirt from the field for grateful fans who wanted a memento. Below, some of our writers share their memories of the Coliseum and the A’s in Oakland. We encourage you to share your own memories in the comments section. – Davy Andrews

Tess Taruskin
I would go with my brother and our friends to every bobblehead giveaway, and we would show up at like 8 am to get in line. We would usually play this card game called MLB Showdown, which involved cards and a special set of dice, and almost always got unnecessarily competitive. Once inside, with the bobbleheads secured, we would go down to field level for BP, and see how long we could stay there until the ushers sent us to our third-deck seats, sometimes lasting several innings into the game.

One bobblehead giveaway I attended was for Rich Harden, and I went down to the field before the game to see if I could get him to sign it. As I was pulling it out of the box, the head came unglued from its spring, and rolled into the on-field bullpen dirt. Rich Harden picked it up and asked whose it was. I raised my hand, but said, “I guess it’s your head…?” and he chuckled and signed the bill of the cap before handing the head back to me.

As soon as I learned that you could show up for BP before non-bobblehead games, I started getting there that early for every game I went to, and was often one of very, very few fans in the stands during BP. At one such game, I was out by the left field foul pole, and Mark Mulder was out there shagging flies. A ball came right to him and he bowed forward and caught it behind his back – very circus-y and impressive – but he was on the warning track behind the rest of the guys out there and they weren’t watching, so Mulder started looking around to see if anyone saw that and spotted me in the seats. I just nodded at him, and he fist pumped and tossed the ball to me.

Ben Clemens
The first time I went to the Coliseum, no one was there. I covered the 2020 Wild Card series, the year that fans weren’t allowed at games because of the pandemic. The place felt eerily silent – the loudest cries of the day came from the White Sox staffers seated a section away from me. Luis Robert Jr. hit a long home run and you could actually hear players gasp at the sound of it. It was a great experience, but a strange one too. I thought that’s how the Coliseum always was – quiet and empty.

Then I went back for last year’s reverse boycott game and saw what it can be like at its best. A’s fans packed the house even though the team was awful. It was boisterous and fun. People were equally excited to jeer John Fisher and cheer for the team. The organizers of the event had planned a few pre-arranged cheers, but there were way too many people there for any semblance of order. After one tense inning, ended by a fine defensive play, I could feel the place shaking. The stadium still sucked – the bathrooms weren’t nice, the food was abysmal, and the seats weren’t comfortable – but the atmosphere made up for it. It’s a strange and correctly maligned stadium, but when the fans are at full roar, it’s an amazing place to be.

Davy Andrews
I don’t remember anything about the game. I don’t have a picture in my head of the field or the stadium, aside from a vague sense of being overwhelmed by concrete. I just remember the souvenir ball and the bathroom. I must have been so excited to be at an A’s game, though. In my youth league, kids stayed on the same team year after year, so all the way from tee-ball through age 12, my siblings and I played for the A’s — the red A’s, the blue A’s, and finally the green A’s, with real Oakland jerseys and snapbacks. At the time, the A’s were the team, making the World Series when I was four, five, and six years old. My glove had Jose Canseco‘s signature scrawled across the palm, and even though Little Leaguers aren’t allowed to take leads, when I reached first base, I still copied Rickey Henderson’s stance from the picture on my bedroom wall: legs spread wide, fingers dangling nearly to the dirt.

My only trip to the Coliseum came during a family vacation to the Bay Area. We saw the redwood forests. But I just remember the bathrooms, which haven’t changed in all these years. There still aren’t any urinals. Instead, one entire wall is lined with long, low troughs. Well, they’re low if you’re an adult. To a child too young to visit a ballpark bathroom without his dad, they were high enough to be awkward. Two things compounded that awkwardness. The first was the stark, brutalist perspective on humanity awaiting my innocent, roughly crotch-level eyes as I stepped up to the packed trough. I was blindsided. The second was a souvenir baseball with an A’s logo printed in the middle of the horseshoe, loosely sealed in a flimsy plastic bag. I wouldn’t put it down; it was too precious.

You know what happened next. I tried to unbutton my pants. The ball tumbled from my left hand and absorbed a fusillade as it caromed crazily down the length of the trough.

How much do your parents really love you? In most cases, the answer to that question is just a sense inside you, constructed piecemeal, shaped and reshaped by moments big and small. I got my answer all at once. When the ball made it past the firing squad and settled at the far end of the trough, I watched my dad reach in to retrieve it, rinse and remove the packaging, and — although I don’t remember this part, there’s no way it didn’t happen — wash his hands for the next 35 to 40 minutes.

At some point, my brothers and I tried to use the souvenir ball in a game, but it was too poorly constructed to withstand contact with an actual bat. It went lopsided and the logo blurred, but even grass-stained and dirty, the imitation leather never quite lost its waxy sheen. It always stood out as just a little bit brighter than the rest. For years, it sat under the deck in the backyard with our other baseballs. It might still be there today.

Michael Rosen
For 10 years, I lived in the East Bay. The Coliseum was a short BART ride away, and the tickets were cheap, and I was poor. And the Mariners were there a lot, so I was there a lot, many times a year. I just scrolled back through my Instagram and saw that I chronicled at least four separate Félix Hernández starts. I cherish these memories.

Others in this piece might express this sentiment, but the Coliseum received far too much hate. Yes, it is a giant hunk of concrete — so is Dodger Stadium. The dinginess lent it a charm, captured in the spirit of “the Last Dive Bar” movement. It was a no-frills place where you could stretch your legs out in the upper deck and drink beer with your friends. (There were a couple years where they were selling a 20-ounce Drake’s Denogginizer for $10, a truly unparalleled value from an ABV-to-dollar ratio perspective.) It was never full of people, at least when I would go, but the fans present were genuinely passionate, engaged and boisterous. The drummers gave it a distinct and charged atmosphere, something closer to a soccer game than a standard major league environment. BART made it easy to get in and out. The vendors on the bridge to the train sold ripoff jerseys, street meat; I can feel the energy of the crowd spilling out of the gates and into a cool dark night.

What can I say — I love and miss the Coliseum, and I love and miss Oakland, and when I think of both, I am involuntarily laden with nostalgia, warm and a little sad. The Coliseum was my 20s, messy and unkempt but striving toward transcendence. I still haven’t accepted that it’s gone.

David Laurila
My lone memory of Oakland Coliseum is both distant and cloudy. My only visit was as a fan, this on September 4, 1992 when I was vacationing with my wife in the Bay Area. Baseball was obviously on the docket, and while we didn’t get to see a game at Candlestick Park — the Giants were out of town — we did get to see the then-powerhouse A’s host the Boston Red Sox.

Were it not for the box score, the only thing I could confidently recall is that Scott Cooper hit his first major league home run — off of Dave Stewart, no less. As Red Sox fans of a certain age will remember, Cooper’s claim to fame is having represented the club in the 1993 and 1994 All-Star games before going on to finish those seasons (and ultimately his relatively brief career) with numbers that were nothing special.

Not in my memory bank but notable upon a perusal of the box score are Rickey Henderson hitting the game’s only other home run, Bob Zupcic (!) logging three hits, and Boston winning 8-3. Also notable is that a crowd of 35,000-plus was on hand to see it happen. Things were different in Oakland back then.

Matt Martell
For some reason, my memory of this night is tinted blue. I recall a cool smell of melancholy rising up through the air as we watched the Oakland Athletics blow an 11-0 lead to the Kansas City Royals. We’d come to see an inspiring baseball story — history at the Coliseum — yet there we were watching the ninth inning unfold, wondering if we’d leave disappointed.

It was a packed house, but from my cushioned, reclining seat in the third row I could clearly see and hear what was going on in the A’s dugout. I focused on Art Howe just as he turned from the steps and said, “Hatteberg, Hattie — grab a bat. You’re hitting for Byrnesey.” I glanced at Scott Hatteberg, wearing his A’s varsity jacket, staring at his manager with a blank look on his face. “C’mon, let’s go!” said Howe, who clapped to snap Hatteberg out of his daze. “Get yourself loose!”

Instead of watching Jermaine Dye fly out to right, my eyes followed Hatteberg as he made his way toward the bat rack, flipping his jacket off as if he were Danny Zuko trying to play it cool in front of Sandy. He did some arm circles, walked toward the plate, and stepped in against Jason Grimsley. Hatteberg appeared a bit timid as he took the first pitch inside for ball one.

When he stepped out, I could feel everyone around me take a deep breath. We slid up our seats, the weight of the moment bearing down on our shoulders and tensing our entire bodies. I cracked my neck just as Hatteberg returned to the box. While waiting for the pitch, he swung his arms in slow motion; it was as if they were the pendulums of grandfather clocks adjusting to sloth time. Suddenly, I heard orchestral music with a deep, booming organ layered with strings and a higher-pitched keyboard. At first, I thought it was someone’s iPhone playing “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” but then I remembered that in this setting, all phones were turned off.

The music grew louder just before Grimsley grooved a belt-high pitch. Then, the music and crowd noise faded just in time for me to hear the thwack of Hatteberg’s bat colliding with the ball. He banana-peeled toward first and picked up speed as he realized what was happening. I couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t either. None of us could.

He broke into a dead sprint around the bases, alternately raising his right fist and windmilling his arms. Rounding third, he double-fived Ron Washington, the same man who told him less than two hours earlier that playing first base is incredibly hard. Hatteberg’s teammates mobbed him as he jumped onto home plate.

I was moved to tears, so caught up in the moment that I completely forgot about Barry Zito, Tim Hudson, and Mark Mulder, as well as Miguel Tejada and Eric Chavez. That’s because, in this beautiful game we love, it doesn’t always come down to your Cy Young winning ace or your MVP shortstop. Sometimes, an underdog like Scottie H. saves the day. How can you not be romantic about baseball?

Tess Taruskin
If I can offer one more, 2003 ALDS Game 1 is perhaps my most visceral baseball memory to date. It was a matchup of Tim Hudson and Pedro Martinez, and the Coliseum was jam-packed, including Mount Davis (the recorded attendance was 50,606). The bleachers played host to their signature percussion section, with drum beats assigned to the A’s players. (Side note, when I discovered I could personalize my iPhone’s vibration pattern, I tapped out Miguel Tejada’s drum beat. It’s still how my phone buzzes to this day.)

I was sitting in field-level seats, about 20 rows up, just behind third base; one of my best friends had a birthday coming up, and her dad’s gift to her that year was tickets to this game, and I was the lucky friend she chose to bring with her. It was a great vantage point for many reasons, not least of which being the side view of Chad Bradford’s ultra-submarine delivery when he eventually took the mound. The game lasted 12 innings, and exceeded the four-and-a-half hour mark. Then as the clock approached midnight (on a school night, no less), the game ended on a walk-off bunt (!) by A’s catcher (!!) Ramon Hernandez with two outs (!!!) at the height of the Moneyball era. The electricity in the air as we rowdy Oakland fans watched Hernandez run through first and just keep on running down the line until the rest of the team caught up to dogpile him in right field is something I’ll never forget.