They are in a lose-lose situation. Their ownership wants to get out of town, Major league style, trading off all of their players, while raising ticket prices. I don't blame them for not supporting ownership, but by doing that, they are strengthening ownership's argument that baseball in Oakland is not sustainable. Doesn't help that the stadium does legitimately need to be replaced. This isn't like Atlanta where they suckered the fans into buying a new stadium 15 years into the old one. It was a poorly built, poorly maintained stadium, with leaking pipes, a rat problem, and now apparently 50 plus feral cats
Swirling gusts of trash, and leaking sewage piping fits the experience of my one and only A’s home game. Worst stadium I’ve ever stepped foot in, ahead of UNLV’s old Sam Boyd Stadium built up from its horse track days, which at least by now is torn down.
In 2015 I attended my one and only A’s home game as part of a bachelor party for a wedding we were attending in the Bay Area. From the transit platforms, chain-fenced walkways carry foot traffic over several wide, swampy canals moating the stadium. The canals are filled with large-item trash – abandoned freezers, tires, furniture, and legend has it the infrequent homicide victim too. Needless to say, with the sun out and humidity up, the sewage runoff smelled like sh*t all the way into the stadium.
Once inside the stadium only a handful of bathrooms were open for use. The rest were dead bolted shut, and the detail that got me was rather than post “Out Of Order” notices the signs on the bathroom doors stated: “Closed For Private Event.” As if a corporate event was taking place in a decommissioned bathroom.
On top of all that the Coliseum stadium workers were generally un-personable, with bleacher staff hounding anyone who wasn’t seated in their correct seats, even though the stadium was only about 4% capacity that afternoon. And when we got in line at the concessions for overpriced sandwiches the guy who did our orders kept pointing out the tip jar and guilting us as to where “people usually leave a tip.”
We left around the 5th inning. And don’t get me started on what a dump other parts of the Bay Area are – namely Vallejo and San Francisco itself.
