It’s impossible not to love what the A’s did on Tuesday night, throwing open the doors of the Coliseum for free admission and parking for their game against the White Sox. It made for a beautiful baseball evening in the East Bay, with a near-capacity crowd of 46,028 in perfect weather making a joyful noise throughout the A's 10-2 win.
With the A’s decked out in sweet throwback uniforms as part of the 50th anniversary celebration of their first game in the ballpark, it was like traveling back in time to the days when Reggie, Catfish, Campy and the rest of Charlie Finley’s crew wore the green and gold.
The event earned them national attention and some local notice, which might have been the more impressive feat given that the Warriors and Sharks are both in the playoffs and the Giants are the Giants. It was a good idea well-executed, even if it didn’t accomplish much beyond creating a one-night reminder of what baseball in Oakland used to be.
As fun as it all looked, the A’s have well-known, long-standing issues that won’t be solved in a single feel-good evening. What they proved on Tuesday is as follows:
- They have a sizable fanbase that’s hungry for a good reason to come out and support their team.
- People dig freebies.
That’s really about it, and neither of those facts is exactly breaking news. No matter how many temporary splashes they make with smart marketing, everyone knows that nothing will change for the A’s on a long-term basis until they break ground on a new ballpark or a major Coliseum renovation, and/or until they prove to fans that they are out of the business of trading away their best players before they get expensive.
That second issue will take time to address. There have been indications from A’s president Dave Kaval that the A’s plan to stop being a glorified farm club for teams who are more willing to spend, but given their history, until they sign players like Matt Chapman, Matt Olson and Sean Manaea to deals into or beyond their arbitration years, fans have every right to be hesitant about investing too much of their money or emotion in this team.
The ballpark problem, as anyone who’s been paying the slightest bit of attention knows, is more complicated. It has been tangled in a morass of local politics and ownership issues, with countless stops and starts and proposed sites and artists’ renderings all amounting to nothing. It is an issue in need of a resolution, one way or another, and maybe outside interest from other markets will be the impetus needed to push a plan, any plan, over the finish line. The A’s don’t appear ready to bolt overnight, but there are rumblings elsewhere that bear monitoring.
On the same day that the A’s had their free admission game, the news broke that a Portland group working to bring a major league team to the city made offers on two large parcels of commercial real estate for the purpose of building a 32,000-seat big league ballpark. The A’s would be an obvious target for the Portland group, and folks up north are already salivating.
“Know up front that the people in the Northwest mean no harm to Oakland,” Oregonian columnist John Canzano wrote on Tuesday. “This isn’t personal, but we’d love your MLB team.”
He went on to describe the Portland Diamond Project as “motivated, (with) the financial resources and the luxury of a number of viable stadium sites and … well-positioned to do what the city of Oakland is not. Namely, build a new stadium and fill it up regularly.”
That gives the A’s at least a little more leverage in their dealings with city officials, who don’t want to see a repeat of the soon-to-be Las Vegas Raiders situation.
A spanking new downtown ballpark would be ideal, but the truth is that no matter how high a standard the Giants set with AT&T Park, the A’s don’t necessarily need a destination-type stadium to thrive in this market. A complete renovation of the Coliseum would likely be enough to get fans to come out again, provided the organization puts a team on the field that can consistently compete. Maybe that’s the third lesson that came out of the Tuesday night experiment. It won’t take a tape-measure home run on the stadium issue to make the A’s viable — a solid double could do the trick.
Attendance sank back down closer to its normal levels on Wednesday afternoon at the Coliseum. Less than 24 hours after the big turnout, the A’s announced a paid attendance of 13,321.
Strangely, though, in the eyes of Major League Baseball Wednesday’s crowd was bigger than the one Tuesday night. MLB announced that it would not count the 46,000-plus toward the A’s attendance figures because its standard is “paid attendance.” MLB may not recognize the big crowd, but that doesn’t matter. What’s important is that the A’s figure out a way to ensure that Tuesday night won’t be such an aberration that it seems like just a pleasant dream.
(Top photo: Ezra Shaw/Getty Images)
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