The Oakland A’s once ruled; what is the faded legacy of this team coming to Sacramento?

In mere days, the Athletics will play their final home game in Oakland after 56 years. Their next one after that will be on March 31 in West Sacramento against the Chicago Cubs, and that still seems hard to believe.

In the 1980s and 1990s, more than one Sacramento leader tried hard to bring Major League Baseball to the state capital and failed.

Now it’s happening via a rental agreement, a temporary arrangement, maligned by most everyone outside of the Sacramento region that inherits a decaying franchise. The A’s won four World Series Championships in Oakland during the 20th century but have faded to irrelevance in recent years as the Athletics owners and the city of Oakland ground toward a public divorce, years in the making.

The only reason the A’s are a big story now is that they are relocating to a minor league park in West Sac, on their way to a permanent home in Las Vegas that may or may not materialize. When that news broke in early April, a sports media that treated the A’s as a second-tier story suddenly looked in their direction.

The announcement created a sense of shock, even though Major League Baseball owners had voted unanimously to leave Oakland last year. On social media, fans of the A’s vented anger toward Sacramento even though this entire arrangement was forged between two private entities — John Fisher, owner of the A’s, and Vivek Ranadivé, owner of the Sacramento Kings.

Why would any community with no say or no public investment in the deal react to the news of an MLB team playing in their city for three seasons with anything but excitement?

Is Ranadivé, also owner of the minor league Sacramento River Cats, investing in Sutter Health Park upgrades in the hopes of landing the A’s if Las Vegas falls through — or as an audition for when MLB expands in the future? Why not?

His arrival as the leader of an ownership group of the Kings kept the franchise in Sacramento. That led to a new arena, development around it, local control of the land where the Kings previously played in Natomas and a thriving night spot at Golden 1 Center where a dead downtown mall used to be.

Ranadvivé effectively signaled he was in expansion mode in 2022 when he and a group he leads purchased the River Cats.

Next year the A’s will play at Sutter Health Park, on the West Sacramento side of the Sacramento River. But they will be connected to Sacramento’s urban core by the Tower Bridge. It’s really all one urban core and these communities need any boost they can get after a rough period caused by COVID-19.

Outside of the sports media bubble, people in Sacramento are excited about the A’s coming to town. That excitement will only grow once the A’s play their final game against the Texas Rangers in Oakland on Sept. 26 and next season’s home opener in West Sacramento draws closer.

‘A part of my soul is leaving’

What the A’s will be in West Sacramento remains to be seen. What the A’s are now, in their dying days in Oakland, is sad and mournful.

“It’s like a little part of my soul is leaving every time I walk in here, “ said Will MacNeil, 40, at a recent A’s game. He said he has been going to the Oakland Coliseum since he was 10 and has been attending most games each season for 20 years from “the same exact seat” in the right field bleachers.

“There is no reason for this” he said. “I hate the fact that we’re leaving.”

To MacNeil’s point, Sacramento is inheriting a broken franchise. This can only be understood by traveling to the Oakland Coliseum and living the opposite of what any baseball experience should be.

The stadium the A’s have occupied since 1968 has never looked worse. The bathrooms are disgusting, the stadium signage is frayed and weather-beaten.

This was once a beautiful, modern ballpark with a spectacular view of the Oakland Hills. That place was ruined in the mid-1990s when East Bay officials added a monstrous block of seats and cheap suites to the structure, blocking the perfect view simply to accommodate the Raiders of the NFL.

It was the beginning of the end for the A’s in Oakland. They were treated like second-class tenants to the Raiders until the Raiders bolted for Las Vegas in 2020.

The structure built for the Raiders may have the worst elevators in the history of elevators. At a recent game, some of us waiting in a long line simply to descend two flights we were told by security that the stairs were much faster.

So we walked down a level before realizing that these stairs led nowhere. There were no exit doors to leave the stairway. It didn’t appear that human beings had spent much time in the stairwell for years. Opening one door turned up what appeared to be the feces of a small animal.

At that juncture, some of us bolted back upstairs and found another way out, slightly unnerved by the experience.

Like a wake

This place is like an abandoned mansion where time has stood still. In the endless rows of unoccupied seats, you can almost feel the spirits of people living and dead who used to pack this place and make it jump.

“It’s been mismanagement and never doing anything with this until it deteriorated to what it’s become,” said Joe Evans, a long-time A’s fan from Sacramento.

“I went to a game a couple of weeks ago when the A’s played the Los Angeles Dodgers,” he said. “There were 35,000 people here and maybe 30,000 of them were Dodger fans.”

Despite all of this and more, A’s employees are still helpful, cheerful and as wonderful as they always have been. They have remained so, though they are losing their jobs in a matter of days.

The games in the build-up to the final farewell have each been like a wake. Facebook is filled with photos of people taking one last look at the faded elegance of what was, for a time, the most successful franchise in MLB.

Long-retired players and former managers who made the A’s great have traveled to the old ballpark to pay their last respects. On Aug. 17, the A’s invited some of their biggest names to enshrine a few more into the Oakland A’s Hall of Fame.

Regrets and celebration

Tony LaRussa, who is in the Baseball Hall of Fame as a manager, was a Bay Area icon in the late 1980s and early 1990s when he managed the A’s the last time they reached the World Series in 1990.

“From 1968 to 2024, I’ve been very familiar with what’s going on with this organization,” said LaRussa, now 79.

“There are two words that I think about a lot, about 1968 to 2024, and that is ‘regrets’ and ‘celebration.’

“We regret that this is our last season in this Coliseum. We ought to celebrate the great history of the A’s over those years...But I’m going to give you a regret. Our three World Series (1988, ’89 and ’90), I regret to the point of being haunted that we only won one time and whenever we get together, all the players agree that the manager screwed up 1988 and 1990.”

The A’s didn’t just lose championships they should have won, they were dominated by the Dodgers in 1988 and the Cincinnati Reds in 1990, both heavy underdogs who seemed like they wanted it more.

More than 20 years ago, I asked the late Dave Henderson — a member of those great A’s teams in the 1980s — why they didn’t win more than one title.

Henderson looked at me sternly and said, “Go ask Jose Canseco.”

For a few years in the late 1980s, Canseco was the best player in baseball — the first to hit 40 home runs and steal 40 bases in a season. He had speed and strength and was handsome and charismatic. He was a superstar but he had a destructive streak.

The feeling was that he was a disruptive force and a distraction. He became the poster boy for steroid use and Canseco was amazed and moved LaRussa inducted him into the A’s Hall of Fame last month.

“I never thought in a million years the A’s would give me this honor,” Canseco said. “LaRussa said something I’ve thought about for a long time. I have a lot of regrets...I’m an emotional train wreck right now. Thank you very much for this honor.”

Standing on the field of the Coliseum as Canseco spoke, it was striking to see so many empty seats despite the auspicious occasion. You felt for the inductees, who deserved a capacity crowd and a loud ovations.

It’s not that fans didn’t express their love. They did. But it was muted and distant in comparison to the slickly choreographed celebrations staged across the Bay by the San Francisco Giants.

‘The best day of my career’

As hard as it is to believe now, the A’s were the dominant baseball franchise in Northern California then. They had better owners, a better stadium and better players than their cross-Bay rivals.

In the first 30 seasons the A’s played in Oakland, they were the most successful franchise in all of baseball. The aforementioned World Series titles — won in 1972, ’72, ’74 and 1989 — were more than any other team won between 1968 and 1997.

But after their stadium was ruined because of the Raiders and the best owners the A’s ever had, the Haas family, sold the team after the 1995 season, the deterioration of the A’s began.

Their on-field excellence ended at the end of the 20th century. The closest they’ve come to a World Series since was in 2006 when they were swept 4-0 by the Detroit Tigers in the American League Championship Series.

Instead, the biggest thing to happen to the A’s in the 21st century was “Moneyball.” The Innovative player evaluation methods of former general manager Billy Beane became the basis for the best-selling Michael Lewis book, adapted into a 2011 film starring Brad Pitt. Beane used advanced metrics to find players who could generate runs and wins for far less money than richer teams, spending more on less productive players.

For the first five years or so of the 21st century, A’s fans bought in. The team cracked the top 10 in American League attendance until around 2006.

But the underside of “Moneyball” was soon revealed. The A’s got knocked out early in the playoffs and the A’s system dictated that players loved by fans didn’t stay.

Miguel Tejada, the 2002 American League Most Valuable Player departed Oakland after the 2003 season and left a void. He was a major talent, an All-Star game MVP, a big personality.

When he was inducted into the A’s Hall of Fame last month, he was greeted with love.

“This has to be the best day of my career,” Tejada said that day. “When I was young, I could never imagine this.”

The A’s as a baseball team lost a piece of its heart when Tejada left. He was soon followed by other fan favorites who departed to the frustration of fans: Yoenis Cespedes, Josh Reddick, Marcus Semien, Matt Chapman, and Josh Donaldson, to name just a few.

Tejada has expressed the hope of being an A’s coach, but when I asked him if he still thought it was possible, he shook his head. I know A’s fans who lost interest in the team when one too many favorites left. This started before Fisher bought the A’s in 2005.

Since the Haas family sold the team, the A’s stopped avidly promoting their history in Oakland. A wall of fame commemorating the A’s World Series triumphs of the 1970s is stashed away in a corridor behind the main concourse. The retired numbers of A’s greats are on faded tarps, way up in the section of seats built for the Raiders.

‘This is my goodbye’

Another bitter irony of all this is that, on the field, the A’s have bested the Giants in every way. They’ve won more titles, league championships and division championships than the Giants. They have made more playoff appearances than the Giants, and won more games against them head-to-head.

But the Giants secured a stadium that elevated their ability to generate revenue and the A’s haven’t. The relationship with Oakland reached a point of no return, the fans stayed away in droves, the old stadium deteriorated and now we are here.

Esperanza Uruena brought a drum to the mostly empty right field bleachers at a lightly attended A’s game in late August.

“This is my goodbye,” she said. “...There used to be about 15 drummers, but all the drummers are boycotting. They refuse to come.”

Sitting in the right field bleachers, you felt the sadness of the A’s departure from Oakland. The few people left at the end of the A’s erosion in Oakland aren’t sure where they will deposit their devotion next season and worry about how they will feel at the end.

“The last day is going to be the worst feeling in the world,” said MacNeil. “I’m going to be a crying mess the whole day.”