OAKLAND — Managers Mark Kotsay of the Oakland A’s and A.J. Hinch of the Detroit Tigers got a chance to sit down and talk inside the Coliseum on Sunday before their two clubs played each other. The two former Major Leaguers shared memories and told stories about the 57-year-old stadium, which will host its final big league game later this month.
“It’s a special place, because it’s the first time I ever called myself a big leaguer,” said Hinch, who made his MLB debut in Oakland as the A’s catcher on April 1, 1998, “and there’s only one place that I’ll ever feel that way, and that’s here.”
The A’s concluded their penultimate homestand in Oakland on Sunday afternoon with a 9-1 loss to the Tigers before an announced crowd of 11,250 at the Coliseum. The loss clinched a third consecutive below-.500 season for the A’s (62-82), who now have won just one of their last five games.
Now only six games at the Coliseum remain after the A’s and the City of Oakland earlier this year were unable to agree on extending the team’s lease aging facility beyond this season. The A’s have played in the city since 1968.
After the A’s upcoming road trip with three games in Houston, followed by six in Chicago — three against the White Sox and three against the Cubs — the A’s will return home to Oakland for presumably the final time.
The A’s host the New York Yankees from Sept. 20-22 and the Texas Rangers from Sept. 24-26.
Then it’s probably all over for MLB in the East Bay, with the A’s scheduled to play at Sutter Health Park in Sacramento from 2025 to 2027 while they wait for construction on their planned $1.5 billion ballpark next to the Strip in Las Vegas to be completed.
The A’s organization’s goal is to open the park by Opening Day in 2028, although questions about how owner John Fisher will fully finance the stadium’s cost remain.
For now, it’s hitting home for Kotsay and A’s fans that the team’s final games at the Coliseum are rapidly approaching.
“Definitely, the closer it gets, the more it comes to a realization,” Kotsay said. “As I’ve always said, you don’t know what kind of emotion you’re going to have when the final day comes.
“It’s going to be a tough homestead. I do. I think the weekend series will be a little bit easier, obviously, than the final series. And I still think that, as each day goes by, there’s probably more emotion that goes along with it.”
To mark their final year in Oakland, the A’s have been bringing in a handful of former players for each Sunday home game. Before their series finale against the Tigers, the A’s hosted outfielder Eric Byrnes and infielder Adam Rosales, who were joined on the field for a ceremonial first pitch by Dallas Braden, now television color analyst for the team.
Byrnes, the Redwood City native who made his MLB debut with Oakland, played for the A’s from 2000 to 2005 and relished returning to the Coliseum, where he attended numerous games as a kid with his dad. Sunday was likely his last time seeing a big league game inside the stadium.
“It’s certainly cool to come and maybe get a little closure,” Byrnes said. “But most importantly, I think it’s not about the building, it’s about the people, right?”
Byrnes and Rosales established themselves as fan favorites with their hustle and blue-collar approaches to their craft. Those two and Braden signed autographs for hundreds of fans before Sunday’s game, with a few hundred more stuck in line by the time they left for their pregame duties.
It’s fair to say several of those fans, and others, might have been attending a game at the Coliseum for the final time.
Tim Petropulos, 64, of Fresno, said he’s been coming to A’s games at the Coliseum since the team’s first season in Oakland. As Petropulos and his son, Daniel, lined up for autographs, he said it’ll likely be his last time inside the facility.
“The people here that are here, they’re die hard,” Daniel Petropulos, 35, said. “Whether they come to the games or not, they love this team, and they live and breathe it. It’s kind of a dagger to the heart.”
“I’ve been coming here since my mom was pregnant with me,” said Mathew Moorhead, 41, of Antioch, adding that his family held season tickets from 1968 until the MLB player’s strike in 1994.
“This is going to be hard for me,” Moorhead said, “because this is going be my last day game.”
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There is little disagreement between anyone associated with the A’s that the team needed a new ballpark. But years of negotiations between the city officials and the A’s for a new stadium at Howard Terminal reached the finish line, and the A’s announced in April 2023 that they had a binding deal to purchase land in Las Vegas.
The A’s could have stayed in Oakland while their Strip-adjacent ballpark was constructed. But the team rejected a five-year lease extension at the Coliseum in April. The deal included an opt-out clause after three seasons and required the team to pay $97 million as part of an extension fee.
Now, one homestand at the Coliseum remains, and the goodbyes are well underway.
“I walked around the ballpark today,” Hinch said. “I went up to Mount Davis. I remember coming here as a super young, pretty naive guy of what the big leagues were all about, and this was the first introduction. So it is bittersweet to come here for the last time.”
After Sunday’s game, fans were again allowed to come down to the field and walk around the basepaths. It was an opportunity to be on a big-league field that seemingly everyone in attendance wanted to enjoy, perhaps for the final time.
“They can’t play here forever. There’s too many issues,” A’s fan Daniel Petropulos said. “But they had a beautiful place over there in Jack London Square. It would have been awesome. But what sports team professionally is ever going to come to Oakland? Everybody’s gone and what they’ve seen happen here, this city’s done with professional sports.”
