Does the Way Lead to San Jose?

“I started at the bottom in this business,” said actor Art Carney, Ed Norton in television’s seminal The Honeymooners, “and worked my way right into the sewer.” By contrast, the 1970s Athletics worked their way from baseball’s top to its bottom. The 1972-74 A’s won three World Series. The 1977 club made the American League West cellar. “What is it with the A’s?” said Joe Rudi, who that year joined the Angels. “Connie Mack breaks ’em up [in the 1910s and ’30s], now this.” Oakland lost 108 games in 1979. Attendance plunged to 306,763, one game drawing 653. Oilman Marvin Davis attempted to move the A’s to Denver, but the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Board blocked the sale. Stadium toilets and the scoreboard went on the fritz. They seemed a metaphor for the team.

In 1980 the Haas family of San Francisco bought the A’s for $12.7 million, hoping that the franchise would regain its early-’70s sheen. A 1981 players strike caused the split season, each division having a first- and second-half titlist. The A’s won the Western Division’s first half, beat the second-half Royals, but lost to the Yankees in the League Championship Series. That year eight straight A’s singled to start one game. ”Crazy George” Henderson hatched the wave. In 1982 another Henderson, Rickey (no relation), stole 130 bases to break Lou Brock’s mark of 118, “Billy [Martin] Ball” wowed an A’s record single-season 1,735,489, and Raiders pro football president Al Davis took his team to Los Angeles. All of them helped A’s caps and jerseys for the first time top Giants’ merchandise in the Bay. 

“I came over here [from San Francisco] in 1981,” said A’s announcer Lon Simmons. “The Raiders’ leaving for LA changed everything, made the Coliseum a baseball place.” Three billboards rose behind the bleachers. Left field’s promoted events and future series; right’s, line scores; Diamond Vision, highlights, crowd shots, and the highlight show This Week in Baseball. Cartoons showed the A’s hitting other teams. Outside, the A’s Swingers band dressed in green and gold. Inside, baseball’s best high-tech stereo had people dancing in the aisles.

”With football gone, we can do anything we want,” Tony La Russa said on being named A’s manager in 1986. What La Russa wanted was to rebuild his team. The A’s farm system bore Jose Canseco, Mark McGwire, and Walt Weiss – 1986-87-88 Rookies of the Year. Dave Stewart won 20 games in four straight years. Pinch-runner Gene Nelson became the first AL pitcher to steal a base since Blue Moon Odom. In 1987 the Coliseum hosted its first All-Star Game: NL, 2-0, in 13 innings. Next year’s firsts included 14 straight wins and 2 million in single-season attendance. Another late 1980s first was A’s play-by-play on the field. 

At the Coliseum, an empty space behind the backstop and runway led to each clubhouse. Spanish-speaking station KNTA put announcers in this space and a canopy above them to ward off foul balls. “Fans talk about feeling like you’re on the field,” said Hispanic radio voice Amaury Pi-Gonzalez. “We were, often sitting with pitchers who charted pitches.” The mood was intimate, but vision bad: “liners over first and third got lost in the corner.” The experiment ended because rival scouts thought A’s broadcasters were stealing signs. They couldn’t – couldn’t see well enough! “On the other hand,” said Ken Korach, A’s post-1995 radio announcer, “their equipment never got wet.”

The 1988 A’s swept Boston in the LCS, showing how far rebuilding had come. “Another three-year pennant streak began [matching 1929-31 and 1972-74],” said veteran Oakland voice Monte Moore. Game One swung the Series, Dennis Eckersley yielding Kirk Gibson’s ninth-inning thunderbolt redolent of The Natural. “That home run was good for baseball,” said Eck, “but not for me.” A year later Stewart, Mike Moore, and Storm Davis went 59-27, Oakland licked Toronto in the playoff, and the 1989 Series against San Francisco crushed fire (earthquake) and ice (A’s sweep). In 1990 Oakland itself brooked a sweep by Cincinnati, despite La Russa’s belief that “this may have been our best team.” Jerome Holtzman, baseball’s official historian, agreed: “Considering that they were defending champions, and how heavily they were favored, it’s among the most stunning upsets since [Mays/Rhodes Giants versus Cleveland in] 1954.” Loving history, La Russa could have skipped that chapter.

In 1990 Henderson was voted the franchise’s eighth Most Valuable Player. On May 1, 1991, his 939th career steal topped Lou Brock’s record. That night Nolan Ryan pitched no-hitter number seven. “The Express” accepted kudos with Gary Cooper modesty. As usual, Henderson acted like a braggart after his record swipe, telling the crowd, “Brock was a great basestealer, but today I’m the greatest of all time.” The A’s time was ending, though few knew so then. Oakland fell to fourth in 1991. In 1992, it won the West but lost the LCS to Toronto. “First to worst!” cried the ’93 A’s, placing seventh in a seven-team division. The Haas family sold the team to businessmen Steve Schott and Ken Kofmann. McGwire bashed 52 homers in 1995. Alas, his new Coliseum oozed sterility. “How bad is the makeover?” read the Oakland Tribune. “It makes the old Mausoleum look good.”

You could not find a worse villain in any Western than Al Davis, garbed in black, plotting his Raiders’ 1995 return to the Oakland that he had exploited as team president. Appallingly, he now pressured it to add six outfield tiers – aka “Mt. Davis,” named for the Raiders boss – that blocked the Athletics’ view of the East Bay Hills and ruined the park’s baseball sensibility. “Since then, the A’s have tried to leave,” said their Voice, Amaury Pi-Gonzalez. “Why wouldn’t they? Only a new park in the Bay Area will now save the A’s. Thank you, Mr. Davis.” To return, Davis demanded 22,000 new seats, including luxury boxes. The city caved: “They showed no loyalty to the A’s,” said Ken Korach. “They screwed ’em – anything to get football back.” The hash turned surreal. Construction proceeded while the A’s played their schedule. “Jackhammers were going off,” said 1996-2002 manager Art Howe. “Outfielders couldn’t hear how hard the ball was hit.”

The facelift made Oakland open 1996 at Las Vegas’s 9,353-seat Cashman Field. A 20-to-22-foot fence trimmed the outfield. Fifty-six billboards, including Caesar’s Palace, broke a big-league record. Usherettes danced the polka between innings. Arriving home, Schott found that “We couldn’t sell the extra seats, so we covered most of the upper deck,” cutting 1991’s 47,450 revised capacity to 35,067, the tarps a daily tickler of the seats’ impracticality. The pre-Mt. Davis Coliseum hadn’t been as tall as many other of the new postwar parks. The twofold effect was 1) The middle and upper decks, as Joe Mock of BaseballParks.com wrote, weren’t overly steep; and 2) The unenclosed park showcased the scenery behind Oakland. Mt. Davis wrecked that view. Power alleys rose 18 feet to abut the bleachers. “To each side it’s eight feet,” said a writer. “It looks like an elephant in heat.”

In 2000 Oakland bopped 239 homers, won the final-day AL West, and nearly beat the Yankees in the Division Series. Mt. Davis’s sole consolation was a lesser wind, boosting offense, but at the price of warping a park. Since then, the team has sought mightily to find a new home. Five times the 2000 A’s were outdrawn the same day by their Triple-A affiliate, the Sacramento River Cats. “They’d worked so hard, climbed so far from the ’70s,” said Lon Simmons, “only to fall back into the hole.”

In June 2000 the A’s asked Commissioner Bud Selig for tentative assent to move to Silicon Valley. “If they receive it,” wrote the Contra Costra Times, “they’ll talk further with a group wanting to build a private stadium” in Santa Clara. The A’s hoped to soon leave the Coliseum, only to still be marooned there a decade and a half later.  New owner Lew Wolff tried to build a park in downtown Oakland or a high-tech park in nearby Fremont. Foiled, he turned to the South Bay market of San Jose. The Giants, selling out every game at downtown San Francisco’s AT&T Park, claimed that they owned San Jose’s territorial rights – a monopoly. Wolff said poppycock, or words to that effect.

In response, Selig formed a major-league committee in 2009 to rule on whether the A’s could build an intimate baseball-only park in the San Jose market, 48 miles from Baghdad on the Bay. Unbelievably, five years later the committee had been unable to render even a tentative conclusion. “I just wish they’d reach a decision,” said Wolff. “Can we build, or not?” The A’s filed a lawsuit against baseball saying no club owned territorial rights. Meanwhile, the California state controller spurned San Jose’s back-door attempt to sell the A’s land belonging to the city’s redevelopment agency, which was dissolved in 2011. In 2013 the club extended its lease on the Coliseum.

T.S. Eliot famously called April “the cruelest month.” In a sense, each month has been cruel playing at what Selig curtly calls “a pit.” In 2012, despite almost winning the pennant, the Athletics averaged 20,728 fans per game, 27th among 30 big-league teams. A year later, the still-swinging A’s took the AL West despite drawing just 1.8 million, in the bottom-dwelling vicinity of the White Sox and Mariners.

“There is something wrong here,” Wolff said of one line of empty seat after another, disinterest a greater threat than its won-loss record to the future of the franchise. Ironically, in the last decade the A’s have lured a postseason cult – aka the ”crazies” – to supplement their regular base, spur officials to take tarps off the upper deck, and convert the Coliseum into baseball’s version of a madding crowd.  

In 2013, for instance, the A’s twice drew more than 48,000 in the Division Series against Detroit. “The trick is to bottle our postseason atmosphere for the regular season,” Korach explained. “Drums beating, people standing, a celebration of the game. Rival players find it hard to think. Our players love every minute. It’s the ultimate home-field advantage.” The A’s need it before October, not simply in that month alone.

In 2013 an extra problem also surfaced, giving new connotation to the ancient term baseball garbage. Out of the blue, sewage from the Coliseum’s plumbing system appeared in the team clubhouses, the Athletics dugout, and their coaches’ dressing room. To the A’s it must have seemed as if it weren’t one crisis, it was another.

Crosby, Stills, and Nash sang, “Our house is a very, very, very fine house.” If the Giants would merely cooperate, yielding what Wolff calls nonexistent territorial rights, a new A’s house in San Jose would be very fine. It might even combine a Beaux Arts tower, a light tower in play, and a hill beyond the center-field wall – the best of the A’s parks that came before in Philadelphia, Kansas City, and Oakland, respectively. 

In December 2013, the San Jose Mercury News reported that a letter from Selig to the A’s had surfaced in a federal court as part of San Jose’s antitrust lawsuit against baseball. Belying Selig’s neutrality, it told the A’s that the team’s bid for San Jose had been denied. What next? Relocation to Las Vegas? Wait until Selig left office in January 2015, then reapply? Wolff didn’t say, not knowing. To those remembering, Shibe Park’s splendor in the grass must seem a century and a continent away. To those hoping for a park worthy of the franchise, Diane Warwick’s “Do You Know the Way to San Jose?” must seem as much a prayer as a song. Wherever the team finds a home, it is sure to make room to honor the Swinging A’s of 1972-74.

 

Sources

Virtually all material, including quotes, is derived from Curt Smith’s books Voices of The Game, Storied Stadiums, Voices of Summer, The Voice, Pull Up a Chair, A Talk in the Park, and Mercy! A Celebration of Fenway Park’s Centennial Told Through Red Sox Radio and TV (published, in order: Simon & Schuster 1992; Carroll & Graf 2001 and 2005, respectively; the Lyons Press, 2007: and Potomac Books 2009, 2010, and 2012, respectively.)

Silverman, Matthew, Swinging ’73: Baseball’s Wildest Season (Guilford, Connecticut: The Lyons Press, 2013).