Giants-A’s—An End to “Baysball”

“Baysball,” lt was nicknamed—a sporting rivalry that was without bitterness but not without spirit. The Oakland Athletics and the San Francisco Giants crossing bridges to play a meaningful game.

Chicago Cubs fans never would support the White Sox. As you know, the head of the Red Sox calls the NY Yankees the Evil Empire.

It hasn’t been that way in Northern California.

During the 1989 World Series, known as the Earthquake World Series, between Oakland and San Francisco, The New York Times ran a story on how different it was here.

The headline was something like “A region in love with itself.”  And you did see those caps with A’s on one side and Giants on the other? It would never happen in any other area.

Which, of course, is quite accurate.

So is the fact Sunday’s game at the Coliseum was the last between the A’s and the Giants before Oakland shifts to Sacramento. “Interstate 80 match-up” doesn’t have the same poetry as Baysball. 

Putting it into perspective, the Giants ending up with a 4-2 victory in 10 innings doesn’t seem to mean as much as the sad news that the series—as we knew it—was done.

We’re left with memories that mean so much to baseball. It’s difficult to think of the A’s without relating to the Giants, who by 10 years preceded the A’s by moving to the area. The Athletics came with heavy baggage.

They were owned by troublesome Charles O Finley—who could build a winning ballclub along with dozens of enemies.

The day in 1968 those Kansas City Athletics—who in an earlier time had already been in Philadelphia—announced they were coming to Oakland. Sen. Stuart Symington said, “Oakland is the luckiest town since Hiroshima.”  If you don’t know your history go to Google.

Finley got on people’s nerves, underpaid his players, and won. Meanwhile the Giants, who successfully attempted to keep Oakland from the West Bay claiming territorial rights to everywhere from San Jose to Marin, were not winning. 

Oakland, with players such as Reggie Jackson, Catfish Hunter, and Joe Rudy took back-to-back-to-back World Series Titles in 1972, 1973, and 1974.  

Indeed, the Athletics were in the Coliseum, which they were forced to share with the Raiders, while the Giants had a stadium under construction. That didn’t stop the A’s from lording it over San Francisco, putting signs on AC Transit buses that, to paraphrase, said “While they were building a ballpark we were winning championships.”

It was all in good fun, and isn’t that the idea of sports?  We will be missing that, and we’ll be missing A’s vs Giants. We will all be poorer for the way “Baysball” has been taken from us.

It’s messy for the A’s as usual, but they still beat the Phillies

The mess for the Oakland Athletics seems to be getting messier. Not on the field where it should matter, but in the off-balanced world of stadium envy and franchise shifting

Baseball has reached that mythical half-season period known as the All-Star break. But what’s been broken, other than the usual number of bats, is the promise the sport belongs to the fans. Particularly those in Oakland, who are losing their team, slowly but unfortunately, surely.  

Try repeating the idea that the team belongs to the people who attend the games and that the owner is “merely a caretaker”. What A’s owner, John Fisher, is taking is the team out of Oakland.

The plan is the A’s eventually will be moved some 80 miles or so to Sacramento as a way stop before then heading another 500 plus miles to the Nevada desert. The A’s then are going to Las Vegas, where it’s been 110 degrees or hotter for 10 consecutive days. The wish most likely is in time the weather will cool down if the unfortunate scheme to take the A's out of Northern California will not.

Then again Las Vegas will have a domed ballpark, if and when it is constructed. The team, while filled with individuals whose primary benefit has been affordability, very well can hit, run and just when you least expect it, win. Sunday the A’s overwhelmed arguably the best team in the majors, the Philadelphia Phillies, 18-3 (that’s the Phillies not the Eagles to be clear) and took two of three games. A few days earlier the Phillies swept the Dodgers in three games.

True this isn’t football or basketball. In baseball, the bottom dwellers often do well against the top teams. Still, what the A’s did, Lawrence Butler hitting three home runs in what legitimately could be called a rout, is worthy of recognition. So are the impending troubles the A’s could face in moving to Sacramento, where the natural grass could be replaced by artificial turf at Sutter Health Park, where they will be sharing the complex with the minor league River Cats, the Giants triple-A farm team. It would be the only artificially turfed stadium without a roof in the Majors, meaning summer temperatures would be uncomfortable because of the heat reflected off the playing surface. 

“Decisions needed to be made sooner rather than later because there’s a lot of work to be done to assure the well-being of the players who are going to have to make adjustments to accommodate the decisions the league is making,” Tony Clark, director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, told John Shea of the San Francisco Chronicle,

If that sounds confusing, what else would you expect when the A’s are involved? It has never been easy from the time the late Charlie Finley brought them to Oakland from Kansas City.

But the old A’s won 3 consecutive World Series titles in Oakland.  Amazing how cursed this franchise seems to be off the diamond.

Are the Athletics once again the Amazing A’s?

The Amazing A’s, what the Oakland Athletics were called in the 1980s, when they were winning World Series championships in rapid order.

Yet, in a way, the A’s of 2024 seemed no less amazing. Until the last few days, when the Texas Rangers and reality ganged up to ruin a good story and perhaps a good record.

Baseball is a sport of relative balance. The best team still loses 60 times. The worst team still wins 60 times. Unless it is the Athletics of 2023, who had a jarring 50-112 mark. 

Hapless. Hopeless. But not surprising. 

In baseball, just as with autos and wine, you get what you pay for. Want a Mercedes or a bottle of Domaine Romanee Conti? It’s going to cost you. The same goes for players such as Shohei Ohtani or Bryce Harper. What management was paying for was a lot of players who weren’t ready for the bigs (and might never be).

That was last year. And the year before. Now the roster is respectable, and the A’s play has been even more so. They had a six-game win streak. Which would also be a tenth of the victory total the previous year.

So we were only a month into the schedule? Don’t rain on our parade. Enjoy the present. A’s manager Mark Kotsay deserves a smile or two. It’s not his fault he doesn’t have the same people as the Yankees.

As we know, the A’s are based somewhere between the devil and the deep blue Lake Mead.  Talk about instability. They’re called the Oakland A’s, someday they will be moving up Interstate 80 to Sacramento and then, sadly, pulling up stakes and settling down forever in Las Vegas.

That’s the current plan arranged by people who have no heart and less compassion for the maligned folks in Alameda County.

Small wonder attendance for the A’s-Rangers game Monday night at — oh yeah, Oakland — was announced at 3,965. Tell the fans you’re high-tailing it to another town or another state and they’ll be no-shows. Then again, Monday night has never been worth much for baseball by the Bay. When the Giants were at old, cold Candlestick, they had numerous crowds under 10,000. 

But the issue here is not who goes to the ballpark (or doesn’t go) but rather how the home club again, the Athletics, is doing on the field.

Better than most of us believe — hey, a six-game win streak would make most teams envious — and some way to keep people interested. 

The Athletics should escape the ignominy of being the worst team in baseball. One small step for man is one amazing move for the A’s.

In baseball’s board game, Oakland A’s become the Sacramento A’s

So the Philadelphia-Kansas City-Oakland-Las Vegas Athletics are moving to Sacramento, another wicked maneuver for baseball, which was called America’s Pastime but is little more than a board game for bored rich Americans.

Wasn’t it Bud Selig during his occupancy of the commissioner’s office who told us the sport belongs to the fans while the club owners are merely caretakers? Yeah, we all make mistakes, even millionaires. Especially so many of them, excluding the revered Haas family — who left their fingerprints and sad legacies on the game.

It was one of the French generals in World War I who was trying to explain what went wrong, they said “Ah, they handed me a disaster.”

Which is what baseball on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay was destined to become. It all started with Charles Oscar Finley, a country bumpkin with money who was able to haul the financially staggering Philadelphia Athletics to K.C.

When Finley, a penurious sort, couldn’t get what he wanted in KC — a new ballpark — it was off to Californ-i-a. Missouri senator Stuart Symington called Oakland The luckiest city since Hiroshima. Pretty good foresight.

The A’s became Oakland’s response to the San Francisco Giants, “our team.” The little city was in the Big League. That Finley had no front office but it didn’t matter because he had Reggie Jackson,  Catfish Hunter and Cap’n Sal Bando. And they also had 3 consecutive World Series Championships. Match that Giants.

What the A’s couldn’t match was a corporate backing or government backing for a new ballpark. Still, the fans cheered for their team. Still, the drums pounded in left centerfield. Still, Oakland was A’s territory.

But it also had been Raiders territory. Al Davis, loved/despised, had taken his teams — and some said the heart and soul of the region — to Southern California. He brought the team back. For a price, of course. He wanted the Coliseum not just improved but restyled, a huge section of seats built on the 50-yard line, which unfortunately also was for baseball, was the center field bleachers. Thus we had a new monument, Mt. Davis.

That distorted the baseball park. That, and overflowing toilets in the clubhouse and dugouts made it obvious the Coliseum needed to be replaced.

But talk is one thing. And in the East Bay, action is not just another thing, but rare. The line about Northern California is that it is easy to get issues voted down but virtually impossible to get them approved.

Where the owner, John Fisher, stood on all this was hard to determine. He wanted a new place to play but didn’t seem to want to get involved in how that would come about.  He was oblivious and seemingly uninvolved.

The A’s have the worst team in baseball — one win through Wednesday — as they had the worst team, by far, in 2023.

The thought seems to be to let them fall apart and because it is Oakland, and not a city like San Francisco, Los Angeles, or New York. It is going to become a reality. The team with a roster that probably belongs in the Minor Leagues, is disgracefully undermanned.  Major League Baseball is very much responsible for this. It has allowed the A’s to become what they are, a franchise now doomed to become the Sacramento A’s.

For underpaid A’s, satisfaction is a sweep of Giants

There was something appropriate, if not ironic, that Brandon Crawford, who grew up in the East Bay, and plays for San Francisco, made the final out in what almost certainly will be the final game in Oakland between the Athletics and the Giants.

The result was almost insignificant. Almost.

The A’s, seemingly the worst team in the majors (at least they have the worst record by far), beat the Giants on Sunday, 8-6, to sweep the two-game series.

Sure, the Giants are attempting to retain their lead in the National League Wild Card standings, so any loss, to the A’s or any other franchise, is damaging. But we’re dealing with the big picture here, the one from which the A’s will be eradicated — or moved to Las Vegas. As if there is any difference.

That the A’s drew some 27,000 fans Sunday to the very maligned Coliseum after more than 37,000 Saturday, continues the idea the A’s should not be dragged away to Nevada or anywhere else.

Yet, the individual who owns the team — dare we refer to him as a gentleman? — is determined to upend the status quo, and because, for the most part, he’ll be universally supported, is destined to get his way — and get the money.

Sometime long-ago sport was called the “opera of the poor.” That was when tickets to say, “Rigoletto,” were expensive and those seats in the bleachers could be purchased on a working person’s salary. But as we know too well, nowadays the price of court-side locations at Lakers and Warriors games, for a start, requires a large withdrawal from the bank.

That said, the loyal patrons who are willing to buy, e.g. those remarkably determined A’s fans, deserve something more than to have their favorite team hauled off to a location where the locker rooms are marble and the field is sprinkled with sequins of gold.

Not that the highbrows involved in the academic side of festivities are much different. The appearance of the A’s this past weekend was timed unfortunately with what has become the complete disruption of intercollegiate athletics. What used to be the Pac-12, which billed itself as the “Conference of Champions” has been, well, destroyed. 

Yes, for money.

And does this have any connection to the Lakers giving Anthony Davis a contract extension worth $186 million? Indeed it does. True, it’s another sport, but dollars are dollars, and that figure alone is about double the Oakland A’s annual payroll.

It’s a different world, one sadly that probably will be filled with slot machines and croupiers for the A’s. All their fans can do is find satisfaction that their team won what looks like their final game in Oakland against the Giants.