As of Sept. 26, 2024, the Oakland Athletics are dead.

The team still has a series on the road before it becomes the “Athletics” with no city, playing in a scorching hot Sacramento minor league stadium on its way to a Las Vegas stadium that doesn’t have any funding and won’t fit on the plot of land that’s supposed to hold it. But this past Thursday was, barring a pratfall by despicably incompetent owner John Fisher in the other direction, the last game in Oakland.

For me, the final game was extremely sad. Far more emotionally devastating than I was prepared for. I had been an A’s fan as long as I can remember. One of my first memories was the 1989 World Series—not the huge, catastrophic earthquake that shook plates out of the kitchen cabinets of my house; I don’t remember that—but I do remember all four games. Rickey’s leadoff homer in Game 4 is seared permanently into my brain. I went to games at the Coliseum as a kid. I was a season ticket holder for most of the 2010s. I made good friends in the bleachers. A lot of my best memories happened in that building, and now it’s over.

The team leaving stings enough, but the worst part is that it’s apparently out of spite. Fisher had an offer on the table to build a new stadium in Oakland with $500 million in public money, with attached residential and commercial development, and he would own it in the end. He walked away from that to take a deal in Las Vegas for $300 million in public money, a requirement that he finds or contributes $1.2 billion in private investment, with no development of any kind attached, and in the end it will be publicly owned. He left $200 million cash and potentially over a billion dollars more in real estate just to take away something I loved.

There are few times in history someone gave up so much just to be cruel.

That said, the Coliseum is still there. The Oakland Roots and Oakland Soul, two soccer clubs that I co-own (along with several thousand others), will play there in 2025. There’s talk of holding more concerts because stadium shows are all the rage, and the Coliseum can, with the right configuration, hold nearly as many people as Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara. It won’t be the same—when the A’s were playing there, it felt like home—but the building stands.

So rather than honor the Athletics, something John Fisher absolutely does not deserve, let’s honor the venerable Oakland Coliseum, a stadium that doesn’t get nearly the respect it deserves.

The Beach Boys — “Catch a Wave”

I wasn’t sure if I should write about the last A’s game. It’s a big deal for me, but this is supposed to be a music column, and there’s not really a musical hook. That changed when our illustrious editor Roman Gokhman mentioned that he just now learned that Krazy George Henderson invented the Wave at the Coliseum, and I saw my opportunity to talk about history.

Krazy George, who’s still around and attended Thursday’s game, was a cheerleader. Not in the modern “Bring it On” sense where they throw people in the air and whatnot, but in the literal sense of leading cheers. And he was excellent at what he did. When he led cheers for the original San Jose Earthquakes in 1974, opposing teams complained that the crowd noise he generated was unfair. In 1980, when he was with the Houston Oilers, the Minnesota Vikings complained to the league that they couldn’t get plays onto the field, which led to the NFL creating a rule banning “noise making specialists” targeted specifically at him.

But we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about his biggest contribution to the American cultural lexicon.

On Oct. 15, 1981, the Oakland Athletics were playing the New York Yankees in Game 3 of the American League Championship Series. Krazy George says that at an NHL game in Colorado, he accidentally started the first-ever wave when two sections he told to stand didn’t do it at the same time, and the next section over stood after the later one to tease them. But for the nationally televised playoff game, it was intentional: He got it going, and it made it all the way around.

A wave got started at the last A’s game there as well. Made it all the way around the stadium twice. I’m glad Krazy George got to see it.

Led Zeppelin — “Stairway to Heaven”

This is supposed to be a music column, mostly… sometimes… so I should probably move on to musical stuff.

It’s well-known that the very last Beatles concert was a 33-minute set at Candlestick Park, but not as many people know that the Oakland Coliseum hosted the last two Led Zeppelin concerts in North America.

Nearly every year from 1973 to 1992, the Coliseum hosted Day on the Green, a one-stage music festival. These shows were huge. Pretty much everyone who played one of the shows could be a headliner at something like Outside Lands or BottleRock if those festivals were going on back then.

Days 6 and 7 of the 1977 edition—Day on the Green happened over multiple days; just go with it—featured Led Zeppelin, Judas Priest and Rick Derringer. They had seven dates left on their North American tour, but Robert Plant’s 5-year-old son died, and they cut it short. They stopped touring for a couple years and only played a few shows in Europe before drummer John Bonham’s death ended the band.

Tracy Chapman — “Fast Car”

In 1988, Amnesty International had possibly the best promotional idea anyone has ever had. To build awareness of the work it does and to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the group put on “Human Rights Now!” It was a concert tour of 20 cities around the world. The tour had three stops in the United States: JFK Stadium in Philadelphia, Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and Oakland Coliseum.

And the lineup for these benefit shows? Bruce Springsteen, Peter Gabriel, Sting, Tracy Chapman and Youssou N’Dour. And if you don’t recognize that last one, remember that it was a global tour. N’Dour is one of the most famous singers in Africa who even spent a couple years as the Senegalese minister of tourism.

Every country did get its own local opening acts, though. Which means the openers in Oakland—the openers—were Joan Baez and Roy Orbison.

Metallica — “Creeping Death”

This one isn’t so much history as the first show I would go see if I had a time machine.

In 1992, Metallica and Guns N’ Roses played a 26-show co-headlining tour across North America. It was the one where a faulty pyrotechnic set James Hetfield on fire, forcing Metal Church guitarist and former Kirk Hammett’s guitar tech John Marshall to fill in on guitar while Hetfield sang.

The two headliners are enough, but the real kicker is the opening act. Axl Rose originally wanted this up-and-coming Seattle band called Nirvana to open for them, but Kurt Cobain, in true Cobain style, said no. Instead, they signed Faith No More in one of the most serious downgrades you could make. Faith No More didn’t play in Oakland, though; they were kicked off the tour because lead singer Mike Patton peed on Rose’s teleprompter. Filling in was Ice-T’s legendary metal band, Body Count.

Green Day — “Good Riddance”

There’s a lot more Coliseum history I could include. Day on the Green alone could fill a month of columns. I could talk about how the Coliseum stood in as the Angels Stadium in the movie “Angels in the Outfield,” while BC Place in Vancouver stood in for the Oakland Coliseum in the 2015 “Godzilla” movie. (It also had fake BART logos, which seemed unnecessary.) I could make some jokes about Mount Davis. I could link you to the “baseball’s last dive bar” column that inspired Last Dive Bar, a fan group and local business.

Instead, I just want to take one last opportunity to memorialize the place.

After I got home from the game, before I even took off my hat and Rickey jersey, I opened up the settings in my MLB and ESPN apps and removed the A’s from my favorite teams. I don’t want news stories or game notifications. They’re gone. And since I can’t just switch to being a Giants fan or find some out of town team to adopt, my relationship with Major League Baseball goes with it.

In an era where a weeknight NFL preseason game gets more viewers than Game 7 of the World Series, MLB shouldn’t need to drive people away. But here they are, in the 10th largest media market in America, going out of its way to alienate fans who still came to memorialize the team that was losing money just to get out. Sure, the stands were empty when the team refused to retain any players; we wouldn’t spend money on a product that made no effort to be any good, but we were there. Whenever the team did start winning, we came back. But rather than keep the team good, or make any effort, John Fisher decided he’d rather have no city at all.

Good luck, Sacramento. I know you’re hoping this will solidify your case for an expansion team, but everything John Fisher touches dies. It may even lose you the minor league team you already have. Good luck, Vegas. You have endless demands that amount to nothing ahead of you. And good luck to Portland or Salt Lake City, the places most likely to try to entice that utter failure of an owner when Vegas officially falls through in a few years. They’re your problem now.

Follow publisher Daniel J. Willis and send column ideas to him at @bayareadata.press on BlueSky.