The first game I ever worked as a fully credentialed member of the media was in Oakland. It was the A’s home opener in 2012. I didn’t have a seat.
It was my fault. I didn’t understand the proper protocols, didn’t check the right boxes, didn’t know who to call and when. So I was told to find some space in the radio side of the press box, where it was louder and more boisterous and there weren’t any nameplates. It took me five years before I asked for my own seat with the writers.
There were lots of reasons for me not to feel at home in a press box at first. I was writing for a blog among newspaper people. I didn’t come every day. I didn’t cover the Oakland A’s. I asked questions about nerd stuff and didn’t usually care about the most recent controversy in the sport. I was two years into even being a full-time baseball writer.
Over the next 12 years covering baseball at The Coliseum, though, I settled in as a writer and found my voice. But on Thursday, we’re headed toward a final game in Oakland. There will probably be more people at the final game than the 35,000 I saw in April 2012. Even back then, you could see that this was a place where seats were offered to players who hadn’t fit in elsewhere.
The park itself was just short of a blight after the addition of Mt. Davis, the large outfield structure that blocked views of the hills. All that concrete, and yet some players like Blake Treinen called Oakland’s stadium “pound for pound one of the loudest in the league.” The sewage problems, the possums, the broken elevator that annoyed staff — that was all part of a sort of charm. When The New Pornographers sang, “It came out magical, out from blown speakers,” they might have been talking about this park. Probably not, but it was a haven for baseball, still.
In that 2012 home opener, the A’s high-priced veteran signing was Coco Crisp, back in town and hitting second on a two-year, $14 million contract. Their trade acquisition was Josh Reddick, who ended up being more than the fourth outfielder he seemed like he was for Boston before the trade. Their starter that day, Brandon McCarthy, signed with the A’s in 2011 after being released by the Rangers.
Sean Doolittle also made his debut that season, as a reliever after washing out as a first baseman in the minors. I was a regular at his locker, intrigued by his long fruitless efforts to add a good changeup. As I pestered him about his pitch grips one day, he pointed me down the row of lockers.
“Oh, if you’re about grips, you’ve got to talk to Dan Straily. He’s got a story for you. Ask him about his changeup grips,” Doolittle said with a smile to a fellow rookie in the clubhouse.
Straily showed me all 17 of the changeup grips he’d tried on the way to the majors, and I was hooked.
Later that season, the A’s called up Brandon Moss — about a week before an opt-out clause that he might have used to go home to Georgia and work as a firefighter. A year later, Moss hit a homer to end the longest game in Athletics history, a 19-inning game that was started by Straily. Maybe because he was showing the best power of his career, or because he felt at home in this rag-tag group, or because I asked different sorts of questions than he was used to — for whatever reason, Moss was open about his history and his struggles in a way that opened my eyes and let the readers into the mind of a slumping hitter.
“That’s a big weakness. I know that though,” he told me in 2014 about fastballs up in the zone in a long-ranging interview. “I know that up in the zone is a big hole in my swing because I have an uppercut swing. So up in the zone is going to be a problem. But in this little bit of a slump … I’ve been chasing it a lot.”
Adam Dunn, in town and in his last season, interjected (hilariously) in that interview, to the point where an editor thought it might be fun to publish the audio. I had to get clearance from Dunn that it was OK since I hadn’t really been interviewing him.
“Oh yeah,” Dunn said. “I’m done with baseball at the end of the season. Burn it down.”
Even though we talked about the tougher side of baseball, and maybe even the flaws that led to the end of his career, Moss was an enthusiastic interview to the end. And maybe there was more to it than just good rapport. Moss, and many other players who came through the post-Moneyball A’s, often felt that they were getting one big (or last) chance to squeeze the most they could out of their talent. They often had to be their own coaches and do their own analysis in order to stick — think Trevor May running the numbers on his (and his teammates’) whoop bands to optimize his rest and recovery in his last year in the big leagues.
As a writer-slash-analyst myself, these Oakland players spoke my language and helped me gain my footing.
The work is lost now, but Sam Fuld — who signed with the A’s, was released by the A’s, and then acquired in trade by the A’s in the space of five months in 2014 — asked me questions like, “What if the left fielder and right fielder platooned defensively based on the batter at the plate?” and, “Is fouling balls off a repeatable skill?” and, “Are longer games contributing to more injuries?” It turns out that Fuld’s best seat is in the general manager’s chair, but that was a little bit obvious, even when he was Superman in the outfield.
Josh Donaldson was a first-round pick, once, but that was before five up-and-down seasons in the minors and a trade from the Cubs to the A’s. He was comfortable talking about the mechanics of hitting in a way that not many were, letting us into the “fly ball revolution” under his motto — “I’m trying to do damage.” Could he have become that poster boy for that movement without repeated chances in Oakland? “Nothing has ever come easy for me, especially the first time around,” he once told me.
He was only in Oakland for a couple of years in between trades, but John Jaso and I would talk about music, life, and bigger things — but also Yordano Ventura’s “easy cheese.” After a concussion, Jaso detailed how difficult it was to come back through the fog created in the wake of brain injury. The most eye-opening revelation was that sometimes he couldn’t see the ball while catching, and that was why he eventually reached out to the team for help instead of trying to soldier through.
Marcus Semien, attainable in trade because he wasn’t going to be a shortstop, showed me all the hard work he put in to become one. He was destined to age well and post daily with that sort of attitude. The clubhouse was a major source of support for him: “I tried not to listen to outside voices and rely on the support within the clubhouse,” he said of working through the criticism last year. “I love the group we have here.” And he passed that love along — Matt Olson credited his adjustment against four-seamers to advice he got from Semien.
Yonder Alonso came around in 2016 and watched me talk to Stephen Vogt and Rich Hill and Sean Manaea on the regular. After a season in which he struggled to hit for power, Alonso ended up reaching out to me in the offseason. His ask was simple: You know the numbers. How would you improve my game if you could? After our conversation, Alonso put in the hard work and had the best season of his career. It created a bond between us, a bond born of just a season and a half as an Athletic that lasts to this day.
After repeated engagements with the A’s — where he always seemed to play better than he did in his other stops — Jed Lowrie shared an inquisitiveness about the sport. We talked about the variance in bat specs, about the relationship between lifting the ball and strikeouts and about the newest technology in baseball benefiting run prevention more than run scoring. He reminded me of Fuld and someday could make a similar impact in a front office. Brent Rooker, a waiver claim for the A’s, has a similar mind for baseball.
I made mistakes! Some fun, like the time I covered my first clinching clubhouse, didn’t know I should wear a jacket, and Victor Martinez and Miguel Cabrera gleefully covered me in champagne. Some not so fun, like the time a Google image search led me astray and I mistook one player for another. I took feedback (Joey Votto critiqued my clubhouse manner, telling me among other things that my voice was too loud). I’ve (mostly) stopped talking to today’s starter by accident — though Paul Blackburn never seemed to mind. I improved.
By the time Justin Verlander called me over to tell the Tigers hitters about all the research suggesting the ball was juiced in 2019, I was at home enough to recite the work without missing a beat. That visitors’ clubhouse was the territory of visiting clubhouse manager Mikey Thalblum (to the point that he lived there during the season and enjoyed “having the biggest backyard in the bay and my own World Gym”) and probably also Reba’s (the good dog waiting by the kitchen patiently), but I was welcome enough in it.
Sonny Gray is a first-rounder, but as a shorter right-hander with a wicked breaking ball who went toe-to-toe with some of the greats in the game, he still represented this Oakland ethos well. Because on Oct. 5, 2013, he had 48,000 A’s fans rocking, believing that they had the best pitcher on the planet pitching for them. The vuvuzelas were on full blast, the drums drowned out by the roars, and a single chant coalesced as Gray threw the hardest pitches he’d thrown all year, high and tight to Torii Hunter in the third inning: “SONNY! SONNY! SONNY!”
I left my seat that day to run and get audio of all those fans being so loud that it was shaking the concrete. I took the elevator that would normally take me down to Angelos in front of the clubhouse, or Sue in the dining hall. I stepped out to the concourse to run to the section Leora handled. Hers was the one where Mike and Yvette’s tickets were, and she’d let me run down the stairs and take the audio I wanted. It’s also the section I would take my children to, years later, to say goodbye to the stadium.
Saying goodbye with the kids pic.twitter.com/SJ8nwseUtZ
— Eno Sarris (@enosarris) September 7, 2024
Those memories, places, and people all intertwine in ways that make them hard to separate and appreciate all on their own, but there’s a stark truth approaching this week: the final game in Oakland. I will probably cry in that stadium, as “Moneyball” draftee John Baker did as a high school graduate and again after his playing career ended in 2015. This has been a special place and this is just my story, among the many you’ll hear over the next week. Thursday, I won’t be alone. There will be a whole community of fans, players and staff who will be watching and shedding tears for this place that welcomed us for so long and made us feel comfortable.
“You’ll always have a seat with us,” said A’s PR director Mark Ling after hearing of my first day more than 12 years ago. Yeah, but that seat won’t be at the Coliseum. And it won’t be part of that same fragile and often magical interaction between the city, fans, staff and players that once existed in Oakland, California.
(Top photo of the Oakland Coliseum before the 2012 home opener: Thearon W. Henderson / Getty Images)
