Jerry McDonald has been with the Bay Area News Group for more than 30 years, with a heavy concentration of NFL football since the Raiders returned to Oakland in 1995. His all-time favorite athlete is a right-handed pitcher at Division III Linfield College in Oregon.
The Athletics have decided to leave the outdated Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum in favor of Sacramento until a ballpark in Las Vegas is built.OAKLAND — Attendance will be sparse Friday night when the Athletics return home for the first time since owner John Fisher took part in a press conference touting the move of his franchise to a Triple-A ballpark in Sacramento.
It’s got a spacious, comfortable clubhouse the A’s took over after the Raiders left. Plenty of room for 26 players given that it used to hold twice that for football. Fisher’s sweetheart deal with Sacramento, rather than have his rent increase dramatically in Oakland for the next three years, will have the players sharing a home with the River Cats and taking a step back in terms of facilities at Triple-A Sutter Health Park.
It certainly didn’t matter in the Charles O. Finley years, which included three World Series championships from 1972 through 1974 and only once broke 1 million fans — and that was by a scant 764 in 1973. In those days, even winning wasn’t enough to bring the fans out. Win, and fans will come. Maybe not to the extent they would at a shiny new stadium, but it’s worth noting that of the dozen times the A’s have broken 2 million fans since they arrived in 1968, they averaged 94 wins in those seasons and had a losing season exactly once. That happened in 1993, Tony La Russa’s final year as manager.
The Coliseum wasn’t special, but you take any facility and include announcers such as Bill King, Lon Simmons and Ken Korach and its appeal is enhanced dramatically. Same goes for clubhouse manager Steve Vucinich and others behind the scenes dealing with pending layoff notices who helped give the last of the cookie cutter stadiums some personality that had nothing to do with the stadium itself.
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