Mario Salvini is an Italian sportswriter who often writes about baseball and other sports for Gazzetta dello Sport. This is his perspective, even from 6,000 miles away.
After all, we should all have suspected something, seeing for so many years that they had the A’s on their cap and not the O.
In the days of Kansas City, there were the K and the C. But it is also true that the A was already a classic a century ago in Philadelphia since the Phillies had the P.
In Las Vegas, who knows? We will find out. And before that, we will see you in Sacramento.
“We tried,” wrote owner John Fisher. This is how he titled the Athletics’ long farewell message to Oakland. It should be remembered that Fisher had refused to pay minor league players $400 a month during the pandemic. However, he tried. He says, “Over the years, we have proposed five different sites to build the new stadium.” But nothing. And so the story of the Oakland A’s ends here and now, on the evening of September 26, 2024.
Obviously, it inevitably sold out at the Coliseum: 46,889 paying spectators. All there to cry. To say, “I was there.” To have the sensation, even physical, undoubtedly painful, of something that ends forever. And then, because we in baseball are made like this, we are there when there is history to live. Always. Even if it is a bad ending.
It lasted 57 years. Among the thousands of photos of pain, one of a man showed up at the stadium with a sign—something like those taken in elementary school, and then the teachers stuck on the walls in the hallway. It was a kind of collage, with his photo as a boy and a caption: “I was there for the first pitch, in 1968. I am here today for the last one.”
In between 57 seasons, an entire life. I imagine the A’s were the backdrop. A constant in the spring and summer days while everything was happening. A slightly naive sign, the difference between going to the stadium in America and having the ultras tell you what to sing and maybe think.
The Oakland A’s story ends here and now; that of the A’s goes on, as it continued after the farewell to Philadelphia in 1954 and after the move from Kansas City in 1967. The restlessness of a club that is the most itinerant in baseball and yet is, or above all, the third most successful ever after the New York Yankees and St. Louis Cardinals.
A video of Wednesday’s game was already filmed yesterday, with a groundskeeper near the balustrade of a grandstand armed with a shovel to fill the glasses and bottles the fans handed him. To fill them with red dirt. The dirt of the Coliseum that people wanted to take home, no matter in what kind of improvised container.
Red grains to remember 57 years on the east coast of the Bay that, in a few years, has lost everything: basketball, football, and now baseball. Baseball has consistently declined uniquely, starting with those green and gold uniforms, green and gold, like Brazil. Colors are only partly inherited. Charles Finley had thought of making them gaudy, almost psychedelic, spirit of the times of the 70s, the glittering era of the club. Golden, in fact.
Last night, they sent another video before starting the last of 9,200 and more games as A’s Oakland. Grainy, blurry, sepia images. Heartbreaking. The heroes are called only by name: Vida (Blue), Reggie (Jackson), and Rollie (Fingers). And Catfish (Hunter), of course. Catfish, Pescegatto, and baseball is poetry, mythology, and mockery. In Oakland it was more than anywhere else.
From the start. From a moment after, the team was moved from Missouri to Northern California. With Vida, Reggie, Rollie, and Catfish. And Sal. Sal Bando, the captain. And Gene, the catcher, Gene Tenace (real name Fiore Gino Tennaci). They were dazzling in those unlikely uniforms. They were fiercely mustachioed – The Mustache Gang – they were very good.
In 1972, 1973, and 1974, they won the World Series, three in a row.
In 2006, in Season 17 of The Simpsons, Homer and Bart Simpson must have argued about a number painted on the sidewalk in front of the house. 74. Homer takes the spray can and completes the job. Writing: “The 1974 Oakland A’s were the greatest team ever.” Of course, those A’s drove by shortly afterward. With Gene Tenace, who invited the driver, Bando, to honk and greet Homer,
In the episode, Captain Sal dubbed his yellowish self. And you understand that you can say you are immortal when you enter that fantastic world.
In those years, they told Sal, “We’ll put you in a room with another Italian boy. You have similar origins. You’ll have something to say to each other.” One who would not have a career as a player but as a coach, yes, was Tony La Russa. Bando son of Palermo, La Russa son of Catania.
Last night’s video continued. La Russa, precisely. And his Bash Brothers. Jose Canseco, Mark McGwire, Dennis Eckersley, and Rickey Henderson. The men of the World Series from the Bay. Oakland against San Francisco, the whole world on the two sides of the same small sea. Shaken by the earthquake just as the teams were on the field. And then by the sweep of the A’s against the Giants. The last triumph. It was 1989.
They never won again, the Oakland A’s. And it would be misleading to say that they never gave up. Thank goodness. They always tried. And they always managed to NOT be a team like the others. They invented Moneyball. Billi Beane invented it. And their hat, from those of Brad Pitt and Philip Seymour Hoffman, ended up on the heads of half the world. Without needing triumphs. While the team often went to the playoffs (almost) without needing money. That is, with a ridiculous budget compared to the Yankees, the Dodgers, the Red Sox, and even the Giants on the other side of the bay.
So, for decades.
Last night, it ended. With a victory: 3-2 to the (reigning) World Champions Texas Rangers. In those stands too round for a baseball stadium, the innings flowed, and the show was the people. They were all those men and women in green or yellow uniforms, with the regulation cap in which the A – last night they understood – for decades had been a harbinger of temporariness. While the players, even at home, did not have “Athletics” written on their chests. They had “Oakland”.
Finally, the players in the middle raised those caps. Manager Mark Kotsay with the paper for the speech. But then he put it in his pocket. “There are no better fans than you guys.” Some of the players filled their cups with the red dirt from the pitcher’s mound. Others just rubbed their hands with it as if to feel part of the field. While a worker filled a whole bucket.
They, the boys, the team, will be in Sacramento next year and presumably also in Las Vegas. In Oakland, there will be thousands of orphaned fans and hundreds of ticket sellers, stewards, groundsmen, maintenance workers, and unemployed people. There is a photo of one of them, Clay Wood, the head of the groundsmen, in tears. For 31 years, he has taken care of the mound, the grass in the outfield, the first and third lanes, the dugouts, and the bullpens.
Last night, while the banners still read “Thank You, Oakland,” he closed them. He closed his Coliseum. He closed everything.
And he will never reopen.
(Photo by Eakin Howard/Getty Images)
Mario Salvini
Mario Salvini is a sportswriter for the Gazzetta dello Sport in Italy.
