Keown: The joy, sorrow and celebration of the final A's game in Oakland

No crowd in baseball looks like an Oakland crowd. An Oakland crowd is people of all backgrounds, all ethnicities; people who save up to buy tickets; people who aren’t there just to take a photo that proves their presence; people who don’t care if nobody can understand how they can love a team that has worked so tirelessly to impede their joy. And kids, so many kids, a quaint throwback to the game’s roots as the affordable game, the every-day game, the people’s game. In leaving Oakland, Major League Baseball is leaving behind the most diverse fan base in baseball.

John Fisher wasn’t there Thursday for his team’s final game in Oakland, of course. He hasn’t been there, to watch the team he owns, for nearly two full seasons. What he missed Thursday afternoon, when a capacity crowd sent the A’s into their uncertain future with a raucous party, was a final thumb to the eye of capital-B baseball. The weather, the crowd, the vibe — you name it, it was very nearly perfect. The fact that he missed it should come as no surprise. He’s missed it — the entirety of life’s rich pageant as it plays out between 66th and Hegenberger — all along.

Beneath the sheer injustice and cruelty of the enterprise, there is something incalculably sad about the loneliness and isolation of extreme privilege. If Fisher gets his way, he will take his team to a minor league ballpark in West Sacramento for three or four seasons before hitching up the trailer one more time to decamp for Las Vegas. What will he find there? Certainly not this: 47,000 fans gathering to cheer and cry and remember. People with little in common beyond this team, people from East Oakland and Alamo, people whose best memories include this confounding mass of concrete, people whose lives intersect here and here alone. A’s fans have always been able to separate the product on the field — the players, sure, but also the Coliseum staff and the grounds crew and the people who make the baseball decisions — from those who are responsible for their pain. It’s easy to tell the two groups apart: One of them is there, in the building, while the other is not.

Through the Las Vegas decision to the unanimous vote of the 29 other MLB owners to the Sacramento decision, A’s manager Mark Kotsay has been the team spokesman. His job, ostensibly, is to navigate 26 mostly young and inexperienced players through 162 games while dealing with whatever news floats down from the top of the org chart. Being the spokesman for the entire organization, a role in which he turns out to be remarkably gifted, happened out of necessity. The questions were out there, waiting to be answered. Help was nowhere to be found.

Kotsay was asked earlier in the week if he could imagine contending with as many challenges as his situation has presented, and he shrugged and said, “There will be more challenges.” Like sharing a minor-league park with a Triple-A team for three or four seasons. Like wondering if he can squeeze more than 130 games a season out of any of his players as they play 81 games on artificial turf in often-extreme temperatures. Like moving twice in a span of three or four years, providing he doesn’t turn his work with the A’s into a better job before then. Each challenge begets another.

The only public-relations campaign Fisher won was the only one that counted to him; the one that convinced commissioner Rob Manfred and the 29 other owners that Oakland is not worthy of its inclusion. In baseball circles, anything pertaining to Oakland and the Coliseum fell under the heading of “The Oakland Problem.” It was a binary choice: in or out. When Fisher decided that “in” — a wide-ranging, 11-figure project at Howard Terminal — didn’t work, or didn’t work fast enough, he was out. The Oakland Problem became Fisher’s greatest triumph; everything else has been handled with the deftness and agility of a paint bucket falling from a moving truck.

In his farewell letter to fans, he expressed regret that he wasn’t able to thank each of the Oakland fans individually. He is the owner, the one in power, the one making decisions. He has every method of communication available to him at every moment of every day. For whatever reason — fear, embarrassment, disinterest — he chose to do just three interviews since announcing his intention to move the team to Las Vegas nearly 18 months ago. His only known interaction with fans happened at the 2023 owners meetings in Arlington, Texas, when three fans with an activist bent told him to do the right thing and keep the team in Oakland. His response was telling. “It’s been worse for me than it has for you,” he said. “Believe me.”

It seems unlikely the nearly 47,000 people in the stadium — the most ever for a team’s final game in a city — would agree. But by now, farewells are something Oakland does well, sadly, and the mood in the Coliseum bounced from joyous to melancholic. There were moments of near-silence, when it seemed everyone in the building was thinking the same thing at the same time, and there were moments when the circumstances lifted and it was just 47,000 people rooting for their team, record be damned.

There are so many losers. The fans lose, the community loses, the employees lose. Fisher — though he might never believe it — loses, too. The security guard at the entrance to the A’s clubhouse loses. His sniffles belying his stoic demeanor, he had one goal after Thursday’s game: to hug each coach and player who walked through his door. Handshakes were not allowed; when a player or coach reached out with his hand, he ignored it and wrapped each of them in a massive embrace. “Been here too long for just a handshake,” he said.

Head groundskeeper Clay Wood, whose mastery of the Coliseum dirt and grass made him a cult hero among players, was among the last to leave the field. Home plate had been dug up, the pitching rubber removed by the time Wood and his daughter decided there was no longer a reason to stay. As he crossed the field — his field, not John Fisher’s field or the city’s field — one final time, he walked through the batter’s box and onto the grass on the first-base side. And then he stopped, reflexively, and used the toe of his right shoe to gently usher a few particles of dirt back to where they belong.

“I can’t help myself, I guess,” he said.

And in that moment, Clay Wood was everyone who had been in the building on Thursday, and 57 seasons of days before it: aware that it’s over, but somehow still kicking.