Requiem for a ballpark

Madonna—the highly controversial pop music performer of whom I’m generally not a fan—wrote the wistful ballad This Used to Be My Playground for the 1992 film A League of Their Own. The song laments the folding of the long-defunct All-American Girls Professional Baseball League and the long-lost camaraderie of the women who played in it.

That song keeps playing in my head as I think of Major League Baseball’s Athletics, who are preparing for their first season in Sacramento after more than 50 years at the Oakland Coliseum.

On March 31, the A’s will host the Chicago Cubs at Sacramento’s Sutter Health Park, their first home game in their temporary digs since ditching Oakland back in September. The A’s are supposedly headed for a new, publicly financed, 33,000-seat stadium in Las Vegas four years or so from now, assuming the stadium’s construction is completed on time. News reports have cast doubt on the project, however, as some in the media have questioned A’s owner John Fisher’s ability to obtain desired public funding for the new ballpark as well as necessary permits.

The A’s have decided they’d rather spend the next few years in a 14,000-seat minor league ballpark in Sacramento than a run-down, roughly 47,000-seat venue that has experienced a host of problems in and outside the park.

From a purely financial standpoint, Fisher understandably wants to move his team: Like Al Davis, the late owner of the National Football League’s Raiders, who also played at the Coliseum, and Davis’ son Mark, who inherited the Raiders after his father’s passing, Fisher covets the lucrative pot of gold that comes with a new stadium. When he couldn’t obtain a suitable location in Oakland or other nearby San Francisco Bay Area cities, such as San Jose and Fremont, Fisher decided to take his team to Las Vegas—the same city to which Mark Davis relocated the Raiders in 2020.

Although I was born in Oakland—not even five miles from the Coliseum—and grew up in San Jose, I no longer call the Bay Area home. And though I rooted for them in my formative years, the A’s are no longer my team. Still, in the 1996 movie Sleepers, the narrator describes Hell’s Kitchen, a New York City neighborhood, as “a place of innocence ruled by corruption.” I can’t help but think that line could just as easily apply to the Coliseum, which provided the backdrop of so many life experiences and helped shape me as a person.

Let’s start with the innocence part: My dad, who suddenly and unexpectedly passed away in November, took me to my first A’s game at the Coliseum when I was eight—Father’s Day, 1984. I had no idea at the time that I would get hooked on baseball or that I would one day become a journalist paid to watch and write about sports, including at the Coliseum. But the Coliseum is where it all took root, and my dad watered the seeds as he took me to more games there over the years.

As a Little Leaguer, I made trips to the Coliseum with the teams I played for and marched around the field with my teammates and other youth ballplayers from across the Bay Area—including my little sister, whose ticket I bought with my allowance. I remember feeling slightly starstruck as I passed in front of the visiting team’s dugout and saw Toronto Blue Jays outfielder George Bell, whose face I recognized from a baseball card, mere feet away.

Since my time in Little League coincided with the Athletics’ glory years of the late 1980s and early 1990s—when the A’s went to three straight World Series and won one—my teammates and I celebrated our on-field successes not with high fives, but forearm bashes, the way A’s sluggers Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire (aka the “Bash Brothers”) did it.

Canseco and McGwire are where the corruption part comes in. Canseco was my lesson in the pitfalls of hero worship: No one rooted harder for him than I did in 1988, when he became the first major leaguer ever to hit 40 home runs and steal 40 bases in one season and won the American League’s Most Valuable Player award. I later learned that Canseco was a steroid user and an abusive husband—a great baseball player, yes, but not someone I wanted to be like.

I could no longer root for him after that.

At least, I thought to myself, I still had McGwire, whose autographed baseball—a gift from my uncle—sits on a shelf on my desk in my home office. He, too, turned out to be a steroid user, tainting my memories of his on-field feats.

It was at the Coliseum where I learned that professional sports can be a cruel business: The A’s have had a succession of owners who put winning teams on the field just long enough to fill seats, then either traded away their best players or let them take their talents elsewhere because the owners didn’t want to shell out big money. I’ve also seen the Raiders and the National Basketball Association’s Golden State Warriors, who played next door to the Coliseum at what is now called Oracle Arena, shake down the City of Oakland for public money to improve their respective venues, only to abandon those venues years later and leave the city stuck with the bill.

Oakland, population 435,000, has now lost all three of its major pro sports teams in less than a decade. No other major city has experienced a comparable mass exodus.

Still, the Coliseum used to be my playground. That’s how I’ll always think of it.