Take me out to the ballgame
One of the pieces of my days
Baseball is a piece of my life, and it was a huge piece of my life in 2018, when I began to write Gathering the Pieces of Days. To me, baseball is the most poetic of sports. I wrote this essay when the 2024 season was ending and the A’s were playing their last games in Oakland. Now we’re at the beginning of a new baseball season, the first without the Oakland A’s and those magical hours spent watching baseball at the Coliseum.
We started going to Oakland A’s game in 2012, the year I fell in love with baseball. This was the year Josh and I got together, the Oakland A’s won their division, and the San Francisco Giants won the World Series. It was a good year to fall in love.
Josh and I got together in late February 2012, moved in together in early May—a topic for another essay—and he liked to watch baseball. He was more of a Giants’ fan at the time. I had been to some Giants’ games over the years, but I didn’t understand baseball, so it just seemed long and kind of boring. But Josh liked to watch in the evenings, and the Giants were winning. It was the era of Buster Posey, Barry Zito, Matt Cain, Sergio Romo, Brandon Crawford, Angel Pagan, Marco Scutaro, and Tim Lincecum whom I loved and whom I got to see pitch a no-hitter against the Padres. And as we sat watching TV, our cats on opposite sides of the bed, he taught me the rules of the game. About double-plays and fly balls and doubles and home runs and when it’s an automatic double and not a home run. About strikes and balls. About fastballs, curve balls, and sliders and stealing bases and I discovered the poetry of the baseball. The heartbreak side by side with the elation of a walk-off win.
But it was expensive to go to Giants games, so we started going to A’s games, and I was already Oaklandish through and through and fell in love. These were the years of the Bringer of Rain, Josh Donaldson; Yoenis Céspedes; Coco Crisp; Josh Reddick; Grant Balfour; Sean Doolittle.
In 2012, the A’s won the division when Josh Hamilton of the Rangers dropped a routine fly ball in the last game of the season. We were at that game. The A’s met Detroit in the first round of the playoffs and would go to a game 5. Game 5s were heartbreaking for the A’s. And it always seemed to be Justin Verlander and Detroit who got in the way. There was a bit of justice in that the Giants would go on to sweep Detroit in the World Series.
In 2013 two rookies, Sonny Gray and Steven Vogt, were Game 2 heroes in the division series. Sonny matched Justin Verlander in a pitcher’s duel and a relatively new callup, Stephen Vogt, would hit the game-winning single in the bottom of the ninth. But the A’s lost another game 5 to Detroit. We were sitting in the third deck of the coliseum, just a few rows from the very top of the stadium, for that heartbreaking Game 5.
By 2014, we had become part of a season ticket group and were going to more than twenty games each year. Our shelves filled with bobbleheads. This was the year I had my first experience of the A’s trading your favorite players. At the trade deadline, the A’s traded Yoenis Céspedes for Jon Lester and Johnny Gomes. I couldn’t believe it. Billy Beane traded him the day of his t-shirt giveaway. The A’s were the best team in baseball for a while, but they ended up limping into the playoffs and suffered a Wild Card loss against the Kansas City Royals in extra innings. Again a bit of baseball justice. The Giants and Madison Bumgarner beat the Royals in the World Series.
I could have left the A’s that fall. I thought about it when I got an alert the day after Thanksgiving that they had traded Josh Donaldson, my favorite player, to the Toronto Blue Jays for a horrible third baseman. They broke up the team. That was my first team breakup. The next couple of years were horrific. It’s more fun to win. But we stuck with the team.
And in 2016, two players were called up in September that brought hope along with them from Triple A: Matt Olson and Matt Chapman, the Matts. Thus began four years of the best of the A’s. Marcus Semien, the shortstop, grew from being a player with the most errors in an MLB season to one of the best in the game. The infield was fierce. All those double plays from third to short to first or those throws from third to first, Matt Olson with his dreamy blue eyes reaching out beyond what seemed humanly possible, all while keeping his foot on the bag. In 2019 we attended the Wild Card game against the Tampa Bay Rays with 50,000+ other fans. The energy was electric. But we fell behind early and could never catch up. The next year, the shortened COVID year of baseball, they won the Wild Card only to lose to the Astros in the Division Series. They came close again in 2021 but no playoffs. They would break up the team again. This one hurt a lot. First Manager Bob Melvin went to the Padres, Matt Olson went to the Braves, Chappy to the Blue Jays, Chris Bassitt to the Mets. They would go on to trade Sean Manaea and Frankie Montas, two more starting pitchers gone.
But still we hung in with our season tickets. All this time, the A’s were on the verge of building a new ballpark. But like most things with the A’s it was mismanaged, and they announced in April 2023 that they would move to Vegas, just when they were on the verge of working it out with the City of Oakland. The A’s truly have the worst owner in baseball, but this is not a piece about him. The reverse boycott that year, on June 13, was magical. SELL shirts and chants; other fan bases even joined in throughout the season. You could hear the sell chants on TV when Brent Rooker came to the plate in the All Star game. But it didn’t change anything and that was our last year with the A’s as season ticket holders. We didn’t want to give John Fisher another penny.
Baseball brought us so much joy. The A’s games at the coliseum were friendly, green collar, supposedly rooted in Oakland. Folks were kind. Just regular people. You’d share snacks. You’d joke around, disparage the owner, manage the game from the stands, talk baseball, bemoan the loses and celebrate the wins. They’d let you go on the field for firework shows, and I danced with Stomper, the mascot. One year, the year of the Tampa Bay game, we got to go on the field and meet Chappy and Liam Hendriks and Jurickson Profar and Steven Piscotty. We had all the gear, all the giveaways. We have a Matt Chapman signed ball.
Baseball isn’t gone. There’s the Giants. And I like the Giants. But they don’t hold my heart the way the A’s did. Sure, we’ll go to some games. Take the ferry to the park. We’ll take in some Ballers games, the Pioneer League team that was formed to fill a bit of the hole the A’s have left. It won’t be the same. The A’s broke my heart. They broke so many people’s hearts, those who followed them and gave much more than I ever did. Those who had season tickets for decades, who can tell you about the Bash Brothers, Dennis Eckersley, Dave Stewart, Reggie Jackson, Rollie Fingers, Ricky Henderson, Joe Rudi, Catfish Hunter, Vida Blue. They saw the team win three World Series in a row, in ’72, ’73, and ’74. They were at the Bay Bridge Series when the Loma Prieta Earthquake interrupted Game 3 of the World Series. They witnessed the 20 Game Win Streak memorialized in the movie Moneyball.
The owner of the A’s chose to leave. They didn’t have to. They would have gotten their ballpark. Who knows if they will ever have a ballpark now, especially in Vegas. Maybe they will be the Sacramento A’s but they won’t be my A’s, not anymore.
***
Josh and I went to our final Oakland A’s baseball game on September 24, 2024. We elected not to go the very last game—a sellout—and opted for a somewhat less crowded game of 30,402 fans. We wanted to take it all in one more time, the Coliseum—the last dive bar—the team, the green and gold, the ushers who have been there for decades, the ticket takers, the grounds crew, Stomper, the Big Heads (Ricky Henderson, Dennis Eckersley, and Rollie Fingers) that race around the bases at the top of the 7th inning. It was bittersweet but there was joy too. The fans were raucous. Folks were hugging and high-fiving the ushers and workers. The A’s were ahead and then behind and tied and then won in perfect A’s fashion—in the bottom ninth, with a walk-off single by a rookie named Jacob Wilson, the first of his career. Zack Gelof scored the winning run, a slide into home plate. The players jumped all over Wilson, we cheered, Celebration played from the stadium’s scratchy speakers, and Stomper came out on the field waving an Oakland A’s flag. Josh and I held hands as we crossed the Bart Bridge to catch the train home.
****
The seagulls perch on the top of the third deck waiting for the game to end to pick at the detritus left by fans, peanut shells scattered in the aisles around the chairs, half-eaten hotdogs, scrunched-up napkins, empty cans of beer and cups of soda, discarded souvenir baseball hat nachos. If it takes too long, they swoop back and forth over the field as if they could hurry the game up. We only went to two games last year, but we watched quite a few games on TV; the team was better than most people thought they would be. We did catch part of a complete game shutout, the first pitched by an Oakland A in 500-odd games, the announcer said. We used to sit behind the A’s dugout in faded green seats. This past year most of the seats were empty. But I’m sure the seagulls still swarmed as the game ended. Perhaps there was more tussle over fewer crumbs. The seagulls will probably go join their friends at the Giants games.
I imagine the quiet of that Coliseum field when the stadium empties after the last game, when the players have left the field and the parking lot empties, when the field has been tended as a baseball field for the last time. No crowd cheering a hit, no drummers drumming their rhythms, no chants, no boos at bad calls. Not even the thwack of a bat hitting a ball.
If you’ve read this far, thank you. And if you are new to LeeAnn’s Punctuated Poetry, welcome. Next week I’ll be back with poetry.
For all you Bay Area folks,
and I will be reading with the Marin Poetry Center this coming Thursday, April 17, at 6:30 pm at the Mill Valley Public Library, located at 375 Throckmorton Ave, Mill Valley, California. I would love to see you there.
Cathy Shea and LeeAnn Pickrell: Marin Poetry Center Reading Series
Thursday, April 17, 2025 | 6:30- 8:00 pm | Location: Mill Valley Public Libary (Creekside Room) | 375 Throckmorton Ave, Mill Valley, CA 94941
The National Poetry Month party continues with readings from beloved Bay Area poets LeeAnn Pickrell and Cathryn Shea, with special guest Youth Poet Laureate Ambassador Clarisse Kim. Non-metaphorical nourishment will also be offered.
Registration Required (Click Text to Register)
https://millvalleylibrary.libcal.com/event/12197790
Speaking my language! So many games at the ugly old Coliseum, where the seagulls knew when it was the bottom of the eighth--time to start circling like vultures. And, wow, were they pissed if a game went into extra innings! I believe you become a real baseball fan on the day you can explain the infield fly rule and its reason for being.
This is lovely. And so familiar. We're a baseball family, too, firmly ensconced in Red Sox Nation. But our real love is the Double A team right in our hometown, the Portland Sea Dogs. We just went to our first home game on Friday, nearly froze solid and woke up to snow the next morning. But the grins on our faces at being back in the park were so pure.