Goodbye, Coliseum

The Oakland Coliseum, where the Athletics played baseball for 57 years until last Thursday, is beautiful to me, in the subjective way that anything you have loved for a long time is beautiful. But the stadium is not, factually speaking, nice to look at. It is mostly concrete, with exposed rebar tracing the ceilings and water stains mottling the floor, and so dark in places that I’ve had to use a flashlight to see the ground in front of me. Because it was dug out from nearly 30 feet beneath the surrounding dirt, much of it sits damply below sea level, and because it was built to be shared with a football team, the Raiders, its field is rounder and has more foul territory than any other stadium in Major League Baseball.

The Coliseum’s best feature—a wide, almost decadent view of the golden Oakland hills—was intentionally blocked in the 1990s after the Raiders’ owner, Al Davis, demanded that the city build more seats in exchange for the team’s moving back from Los Angeles. (The government did, for half a billion dollars. In 2020, the Raiders moved to Las Vegas, shortly after the Golden State Warriors basketball team’s move from Oakland to San Francisco. Mount Davis—the monstrous slab of seats named, unofficially, after Al—remains.) The Coliseum regularly lands at the bottom of ballpark rankings and is often compared to a toilet bowl, even by people who like it. I have been watching the A’s play there my whole life, and it is one of my favorite places on Earth.