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The Oakland A’s on Thursday are ending more than a half-century of playing baseball at the Coliseum with one final home game.
The A’s host the Texas Rangers in a day game scheduled for 12:37 p.m. The team will hand out a replica version of the Oakland Coliseum to the first 25,000 fans who enter the stadium that hosted its first A’s games in 1968.
The team is moving for at least three years to Sutter Health Park in West Sacramento, the stadium of the San Francisco Giants Triple-A minor league affiliate Sacramento River Cats, before a planned move to Las Vegas for a stadium the A’s hope will be ready by 2028.
A’s owner John Fisher sent out a letter to fans earlier this week noting the team’s four World Series championships, six league pennants and 17 division titles won in Oakland. Fisher sought to explain the team’s move out of Oakland, saying they “proposed and pursued five different locations in the Bay Area” but “came up short.”
The most recent proposal by the A’s for a ballpark in the Bay Area was at Howard Terminal near Jack London Square on the Oakland waterfront after other prior attempts to move the team from the Coliseum, which it shared for years with the Oakland Raiders football team.
‘We tried’
Fisher’s letter said, “I know there is great disappointment, even bitterness” about the last major professional sports team leaving Oakland, joining the Raiders who moved to Las Vegas and the Golden State Warriors basketball team that moved across the Bay to San Francisco.
“Though I wish I could speak to each one of you individually, I can tell you this from the heart: we tried. Staying in Oakland was our goal, it was our mission, and we failed to achieve it. And for that I am genuinely sorry,” Fisher said.
The letter was derided by critics of Fisher who didn’t buy his explanation for why the team was moving to Las Vegas and noted he misspelled the name of the Loma Prieta earthquake that famously interrupted the World Series between the A’s and San Francisco Giants in 1989.
Trevor May, who pitched for the A’s last season, was among the most vocal critics.
“‘We tried.’ lol. The fact that you STILL think that anyone cares about that at this point shows, once again, your lack of understanding of WHY people love the game. You love owning stuff, just not your actions. Either stand up with pride or keep hiding. Pick one, we’re tired,” May wrote on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.
The A’s lost the final night game of their tenure at the Coliseum on Wednesday, falling 5-1 to the Rangers. Thursday’s game is sold out, with tickets on resale sites like StubHub costing about $100 for upper deck seats.
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