Easy Sunday: Sentiment for a baseball park

I remember Fenway Park in Boston.

A baseball stadium is part of the baseball experience.

I was 10 years old in 1960. My father brought my brother and me to a Red Sox game in Boston. We had bleacher tickets, but for some reason Dad brought us in the entrance for box seats. There were empty seats everywhere amid the box seats above the first base dugout. Dad shook hands with an usher, who took us to seats in the third or fourth row. The usher wiped the seats with a cloth and said he might need to move us, but probably not. 

We watched Ted Williams play. What I remember most is Dad's later explanation about the seats. Dad said we didn't deserve to sit in those box seats. He said it wasn't fair to the Red Sox owners, who wouldn't want to give away great seats to people who paid for bleacher seats. But, he said, the seats were in fact paid for, but by people who didn't bother to show up, mostly businesses who bought season tickets to give to clients, but neglected to use them. He said the ushers made little or nothing from their ushering jobs, but that their real income came from tips, the $10 bill Dad gave the usher in the handshake. Dad said everyone, including the Red Sox owners, knew that was how it worked, but that it was done quietly, thus the handshake. It was wrong, Dad said, but a wrong thing that people didn't really care about enough to stop. The seats would have gone to waste, yet it was a kind of theft to sit there. Then again, we did buy tickets, just not those tickets. It was complicated, Dad said.  

I have never heard reference to Fenway Park without thinking about my father's troubled and uneasy explanation about the morality of our sitting in those seats. We sat in box seats three or four times that summer.

Jack Mullen, a friend from my youth, has his own set of memories about a baseball stadium, the Oakland Coliseum. He lived most of his adult life in the Bay Area. He is a fan of the Oakland A's and the Oregon Ducks. In retirement, he lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife, Jennifer Angelo. 

Guest Post by Jack Mullen

For a half century, baseball was the national pastime.

Then, on a cold, gray December day in New York in 1958 the Baltimore Colts upset the New York Giants football team in a nationally televised game that became known as the “Greatest Game Ever Played.” Once the Colts' Allan Ameche scored in overtime, baseball was no longer the national pastime. King Football has ruled the air waves ever since.

Americans have decided baseball is dull and slow. As recent year’s World Series and All-Star Game ratings show, baseball is losing viewers, not just to football, but to professional basketball as well, including the new women’s pro basketball (WNBA) league.

Baseball just lost its last vestige of panache Thursday afternoon. The Oakland A’s played their last baseball game in Oakland. The A’s offered an alternative to baseball’s “button down” corporate style, epitomized by the New York Yankees. Like my Oregon Ducks, the Oakland A’s wore flashy uniforms. Owner Charles O. Finley moved his flailing franchise from Kansas City to Oakland in 1968, and playing in a cool Oakland breeze, won three straight World Series.

Traffic backed up on I-880 as crowds came to see the final game.

The Oakland A’s have always offered what the sport of baseball needs, a team composed of cool dudes. You may have heard of Ricky Henderson stealing 118 bases in a season, or the Bash Brothers (Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire) belting the A’s to a world championship in 1989. How about the movie "Moneyball" in which Brad Pitt played Billy Beane, the GM for the scrappy 2001 A’s team that set an American League record by winning 20 games in a row.

I loved watching an A’s baseball game in that historic stadium. Sometimes good things come to an end.

The A’s owner since 2005 is John Fisher, the inheritor of the Gap fortune. Like so many other owners of professional sports, Fisher wanted a new stadium and decided to pit the city of Oakland against Las Vegas. Major League Baseball owners have always wanted to place a team in Las Vegas, and the owners of the San Francisco Giants have always wanted the Bay Area to rid itself of a local competitor.

The City of Oakland was negotiating for a new stadium with John Fisher as he simultaneously negotiated with Las Vegas until, with the backing of baseball commissioner Robert Manfred Jr., Fisher pulled the plug. Baseball owners, including the Giants’ owner Charles B. Johnson, voted unanimously to relocate the Oakland A’s to Las Vegas.

Mind you, the complex financing is incomplete. It involves Clark County bonds, state transferable tax credits, and City of Las Vegas-supplied local infrastructure. The $3.5 billion price tag still awaits the Nevada State Legislature forking over $380 million to Fisher. The new state-of-the-art indoor stadium will not be ready for four years. Meanwhile, Fisher has pulled the A’s out of Oakland. The A’s, no longer called the Oakland A’s, will play the next four seasons in Sacramento, at a 14,000-seat minor league stadium.

To me, as a partial season-ticket holder for the A’s, nothing was better than a hot dog on a warm 72-degree afternoon at the Oakland Coliseum. I didn’t need the carefully curated food choices that new ballparks offer. Artisan beers don't do it for me.

Baseball is a game that should be played on grass. The A’s games in Sacramento’s stadium will be played on artificial turf. Baseball should be played outdoors. Las Vegas plans an indoor stadium with a roof in the style of the Sydney Opera House.

I remember the story of that little boy with a tear in his eye in the midst of the 1919 game-fixing scandal, who said,“Say it ain’t so, Joe” to Shoeless Joe Jackson. I say to John Fisher and all the Major League owners who are fascinated with all the glitz and glamour of Las Vegas, “Say it ain’t so.”

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