From Tom Hanks to Dame Lillard, mourning the Oakland A’s: ‘It’s pretty heartbreaking’

By Cody Stavenhagen, Sam Blum and Stephen J. Nesbitt

Before he was one of the most famed actors of a generation, Tom Hanks was a boy in the Bay Area. He could see the lights of the Oakland Coliseum from his family’s home in the Lower Hills.

The A’s moved to Oakland when Hanks was 12. When he looks back now on 56 years of fandom, Hanks’ mind goes to Game 3 of the 1972 World Series, Oakland’s first time hosting a World Series game.

“When the A’s were in the World Series, the world came to Oakland,” Hanks wrote in an email to The Athletic. “Not San Francisco. Oakland.”

Hanks watched the TV broadcast and peered out the window as storm clouds rolled in. “A freak storm that featured the stub of a funnel cloud, like a tornado forming,” he recalled. First pitch was delayed as the Coliseum and the Hanks house were soaked with rain and pelted with sleet. That the game was postponed only extended Oakland’s moment at the center of the baseball universe.

​​The A’s won three World Series while Hanks was in high school. He went to “Hot Pants Day.” He witnessed Willie Mays’ final at-bat. He served as a Coliseum vendor, selling popcorn in the stands and sweating profusely on Opening Day when Vida Blue dazzled (“phee-nom”). Those A’s and the memories they gave him remain imprinted in Hanks’ memory. “Vida Blue. Joe Rudi. Mudcat Grant,” he wrote. “Campy Campaneris. Sal Bando. Ray Fosse. The original Reggie Jackson. Thank you, boys!”

Now the team Hanks loves is leaving Oakland. They’ll play their final game at the Coliseum on Thursday afternoon, then head to Sacramento and, sometime down the road, Las Vegas. The sense of finality has hit the same for so many A’s fans, from the diehards in the right-field bleachers to Hanks himself.

In the last days of the Oakland A’s, The Athletic contacted former A’s and notable fans — athletes, actors, musicians and politicians — to hear their favorite A’s memories and what it’s like saying goodbye.

Those short on time sent short missives. Milwaukee Bucks star Damian Lillard, who wears No. 0 in part to represent Oakland, replied, “It’s devastating for Oakland. Another sports team gone, another loss for the entire Oakland/Alameda (East Bay) communities. It’s sad to see the entire Coliseum complex empty.”

Los Angeles Chargers coach Jim Harbaugh lived his boyhood baseball dream coaching first base for the A’s in spring training. “That’s one of my most cherished memories, no doubt,” he said.

Others elaborated in conversations that went down memory lane and often alternated between therapy session and anger management. For so long, Oakland at least had the A’s. Now there will be nothing left.

“How in the world,” Hanks wrote, “does Major League Baseball turn inside-out one of the most storied franchises in the history of the game? The Oakland A’s — not the East Bay Athletics or the California Golden A’s — the Oakland A’s could have/should have been the Northern California version of the the Cubs in Wrigley, the BoSox in Fenway, Pittsburgh’s Buccos on the Allegheny, Cleveland’s Guardians on the shores of Erie — beloved ball-teams with eternal hope every Opening Day until the millennium comes.

“I don’t blame that loss on the city managers of Oakland, nor the taxpayers of Alameda County. The owners and baseball blew the lead.”

Before Tony La Russa was a Hall of Fame manager, he was a light-hitting 23-year-old infielder who made the A’s Opening Day roster in 1968. He appeared in the first major league game at the Coliseum, with 50,164 filling the stadium, and roped a pinch-hit single to left field in the ninth inning.

“Coming to Oakland,” La Russa recalled, “they came in with a lot of (hope for the) future. And you’d put their history against anybody’s during that period. I think everyone that’s been a part of this is a combination of sad and angry.”

That’s a common refrain from former A’s.

Dennis Eckersley, the Hall of Fame closer who had 320 saves and won a World Series win with the A’s, moved back to the Bay Area a few years ago. If he hadn’t, Eckersley said, “it wouldn’t hurt so much. But the closer we get, where we’re (living), it’s gotten uglier inside. I’ve taken it on. Like, you can’t throw it all away. Whatever happened happened, memories and that sort of thing.

“But still, it hurts. I used to think, ‘Oh, no big deal. They’re leaving.’ But, oh my God, it’s the end! It sure does feel ugly inside.”

Rickey Henderson grew up in Oakland and became one of the most celebrated players in franchise history. Dave Stewart was a dominant postseason presence, winning World Series MVP in 1989. Both lamented the departure to the San Francisco Chronicle in March, though they placed more emphasis on the city’s role rather than on A’s owner John Fisher.

“It’s disappointing to see the A’s leaving,” Henderson, a special assistant to the A’s president, said. “But we’ve gone through so much with all the teams. The city, there’s something they’re not seeing. When you have a city that had three big-name professional sports teams, and you can’t keep any of them, something’s wrong.”

Eckersley took his 5-year-old twin grandchildren to the Coliseum last weekend. They got a kick out of the big-head mascot race between innings. It dawned on Eckersley that they, and so many young fans like them, will never have a chance to build their own memories at the old ballpark where he spent so many great seasons. He’ll tell the twins, “Remember when we went that one night?” And he’ll hope they do.

“Sometimes it helps people to be mad,” added Eckersley, who said he’s especially sad for the stadium workers he’s seen there for decades. “I’ve got that tendency where I get pissed off and just don’t want to deal. But it is what it is, and it’s sad. And I’m going to feel it. And I do.”

For La Russa, Thursday’s finale will bring him back to standing there for the home opener in 1968. He was there when it all began. Now he’s forced to watch it end.

“It’s hard to get through,” La Russa said. “The franchise had a great history and deserved a better fate.”

Last week at Oracle Park — home of the San Francisco Giants — Green Day stepped onto the stage. Lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong paced up and down holding a microphone close to his face. He touted the band’s East Bay roots, its eternal connection to the Bay Area. And then …

“We don’t take no s— from people like John f—— Fisher, who sold out the Oakland A’s to Las f—— Vegas,” Armstrong said. “I f—— hate Las Vegas. It’s the worst s—hole in America.”

Armstrong was born in Oakland and raised in Rodeo. He attended last season’s “reverse boycott” at the Oakland Coliseum. He is an investor in the independent Oakland Ballers, and earlier this year during a show at Toronto’s Rogers Centre, he posted a video of himself spray-painting over the A’s logo inside a stadium tunnel. He painted a “B” over the “A” and crossed out the word “Athletics.”

Armstrong declined an interview request. “Nothing more to add,” his publicist wrote in an email. (A few days later, at Oracle Park, Armstrong evidently had more to add.)

A long list of musicians with Oakland roots have stayed loyal to the team’s last remaining major pro sports franchise. MC Hammer (real name: Stanley Burrell) grew up dancing, singing and performing outside the Coliseum. He caught the eye of then-owner Charlie Finley, who hired the young Burrell to work as a bat boy. Legend has it Jackson first gave Burrell his “Hammer” nickname because he resembled Hammerin’ Henry Aaron. Years later, per a Rolling Stone cover story at the peak of Hammer’s fame, A’s players Dwayne Murphy and Mike Davis gave Burrell a loan as he worked toward releasing his first album.

The Bay Area rapper Too $hort (real name: Todd Shaw) often posts photos of himself in A’s gear on X, and recently posted on the site that he grew up selling sodas at the Coliseum. “Day one fan over here,” he wrote, “no bandwagon!

Adam Duritz, lead singer of Counting Crows, moved to California as a child. His father had been a fan of the Philadelphia A’s. The franchise was in the midst of its 1970s golden era, and Duritz was hooked. He cut school, took BART to the Coliseum and sat in the bleachers with a $2.50 ticket. (He learned recently that Counting Crows drummer Jim Bogios did the same.) By the late 1980s, Duritz was going to 50 games a year. He saw Henderson break the stolen base record and watched Nolan Ryan twirl his sixth no-hitter. Duritz identified with the underdog A’s in the Moneyball era and cherished every minute.

Now living a much different life, Duritz still gets nostalgic any time he walks out of a tunnel and into an open stadium. Green grass. Green seats. The sense of awe. “It reminds me of the Coliseum when I was a kid,” he told The Athletic last week, “and you could look up before they built Mount Davis, you could see the hills behind it.”

A few weeks ago, Counting Crows was on tour with Santana. Karl Perazzo, Santana’s percussionist, walked into Duritz’s dressing room one day and said, “Hey, I’ve got someone for you to talk to.” La Russa was on the phone. “It was just very cool for me as a huge fan,” Duritz said, “to talk to him for a little while about those days.”

Duritz, who followed the team’s elongated stadium saga, briefly hoped the A’s could complete their plan to build a ballpark at Howard Terminal. More than anything, he felt as powerless as any other A’s fan.

“It’s completely outside your purview as a fan,” he said. “You do feel that distance too, because, like, one day it’s gonna be fine, and then it’s not, and then they have a plan, and they don’t, and I’m kind of used to that with sports in the Bay Area.”

Duritz says he will still love the A’s even when they are gone. But there are parts of him that loathe Las Vegas, and parts that miss the A’s colorful characters from bygone years, and parts that wish time could be frozen when he was a kid sitting in the bleachers at the Coliseum.

“Well,” he said, “it’s pretty heartbreaking.”

Over the past five decades, A’s fandom has reached far and wide, even to the highest level of public office in the United States. President Barack Obama is an outspoken Chicago White Sox fan, for which Theo Epstein offered a “midnight pardon” when the World Series champion Chicago Cubs visited the White House in 2017, but long before he ever supported the South Siders Obama had another favorite team.

“I didn’t become a Sox fan until I moved to Chicago,” Obama once said on a Washington Nationals broadcast. “I was growing up in Hawaii, so I ended up actually being an Oakland A’s fan.”

Obama was 11 when the A’s won Oakland’s first World Series in 1972.

Two thousand miles away from Obama in Honolulu, and not far from Hanks in the Lower Hills, two girl friends from Mills College were in the back of a convertible as it cruised along Grove Street in Oakland that night.

“We just rolled down the streets honking horns,” Representative Barbara Lee, from Oakland, recalled. “Yelling, screaming, applauding and congratulating the A’s.”

The celebration continued as the A’s captured back-to-back-to-back World Series titles. The A’s became a source of booming public pride. As Oakland emerged as a center of Black culture, its baseball team was led by Black stars such as Jackson, Henderson, Stewart, Blue Moon Odom, Bill North, Claudell Washington and Blue, who Lee came to know through activism work.

“In many ways, Oakland is a city that has always exemplified Black excellence,” Lee said. “Black culture. Black power. Leadership. The A’s were a part of that milieu. It was our team. There were so many African-Americans who saw these players like I did — as icons and heroes — and were proud.”

U.S. Rep Barbara Lee represents Oakland, and is a longtime fan of the A’s. (Courtesy of Barbara Lee)

Last year, as Lee ran against former 10-time MLB All-Star Steve Garvey in a U.S. Senate special election primary, she was endorsed by Henderson, Stewart, Dusty Baker, Shooty Babitt and Tye Waller, all of whom played or coached for the A’s.

As the A’s and the City of Oakland haggled over stadium deals for years, Lee occasionally welcomed A’s executives to her office in Washington D.C. for conversations about how to keep the A’s in Oakland. “It was a long process,” she said. “It was a grueling process.” And, in the end, a hopeless one.

After the A’s announced their intentions to relocate to Las Vegas, Lee introduced a bill, the “Moneyball Act,” requiring that the owners of a relocating club compensate the city they left. But the Oakland A’s could not be saved.

“It still hasn’t settled in,” Lee said. “That’s just how difficult it’s been for me and for a lot of people in Oakland. The Oakland A’s are us, and we are them. You feel in many respects abandoned.”

Lee recited the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression …

“I don’t know if I’ll ever get to the fifth,” she said.

Acceptance.

When Hanks was in Los Angeles last year to promote his novel, a former A’s employee in the audience at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre asked Hanks if he would buy the A’s to keep them in Oakland.

“I haven’t done that well, guys,” Hanks joked.

That didn’t stop him from airing his frustration.

“We’ve lost the Raiders. The Warriors moved to San Francisco. Now they’re going to take the A’s out of Oakland,” Hanks said. “Damn them all to hell.”

That sentiment is shared by fellow actor Blake Anderson, star of the show “Workaholics.” Anderson grew up in Concord, in the East Bay. He shrugged off so many rumors of the A’s relocating that he eventually became numb to them. A’s fans were “strung along and teased” for so many years, Anderson said, and all that false hope led to a feeling that they’d lost the A’s long before they left.

“With Oakland fandom,” he said, “you just know what it’s like for teams to evacuate.”

There are two reasons Anderson became an A’s fan.

The first is Henderson. As a kid, warring factions within Anderson’s family would try to sway him toward the Giants or the A’s. Then Henderson came back and won MVP.

“Nobody was cooler than Rickey Henderson, man,” Anderson said. “That sold it for me. I was such a young, impressionable kid, and there was so much more swagger on that side of the bay.”

The second reason was Will Clark. But not that Will Clark. Anderson had a youth baseball teammate with the same name as the Giants first baseman. Anderson was not a strong hitter, and he remembers stepping to the plate and hearing his teammate say, “Here comes another strikeout.”

“It was f—ing Will Clark, dude,” Anderson said.

Needless to say, he was all in on the A’s. In high school, he and his friends waited at the exit of the players parking lot at the Coliseum. His favorite player, Terrence Long, autographed the bill of Anderson’s black A’s cap. Then came Jason Giambi, whose walk-up music was the nWo Wolfpac theme song.

“We’re like, if we yell, ‘nWo for life,’ he’s going to stop the car,” Anderson recalled. Giambi hit the brakes and signed.

Anderson was 5 when the A’s won the 1989 World Series. He doesn’t claim that one.

“I don’t feel like as an A’s fan I got my championship,” Anderson said. “That was going to be my crowning achievement as a fan, living through one of those. That’s where I get super bummed out. I was always imagining being like those Cubs fans who waited 100 years and were like, finally, we can hoist the trophy.”

Only one emotion has surprised Anderson throughout this A’s saga: He still cares. He told himself he’d stop following, but he couldn’t. He’s grown to love the newest cast of A’s — Brent Rooker, J.P. Sears, Lawrence Butler, Mason Miller. He likes that they didn’t throw this season away. “I felt pride for the team again,” he said. As the team heads to Sacramento, he’s sworn to invest in the A’s at least until these guys disperse.

Anderson drove from Los Angeles to Oakland to watch Wednesday’s game with his mother, step-father, brother and a high-school buddy.

“I’ve got to go before it’s gone,” he said beforehand.

Anderson didn’t get tickets for the final game Thursday, but since he’d already be in town, he said, “maybe I’ll just BART in and kick it in the parking lot.” Those lots were where he made some of his best memories, where he met friends, where they shotgunned beers, where they reveled and toasted the green and gold.

Anderson wondered how he’d feel on the A’s last day in Oakland. He’d felt almost every emotion at the Coliseum before. He was there when Jason Isringhausen clinched the AL West in 2000. (“Nothing matched that kind of joy.”) He was there when Derek Jeter’s flip turned the 2001 ALDS. (“That was our year.”) But this would be different. Not euphoria or anguish. Just emptiness. Anderson figured he’d take a few laps around the old place, remember the good times, then give the filthy cement floor a kiss goodbye.

— The Athletic’s Evan Drellich, Chad Jennings and Eric Nehm contributed to this report.

(Illustration by Meech Robinson, The Athletic; Photos: Michael Zagaris / Oakland Athletics / Getty Images; Andrew D. Bernstein / NBAE via Getty Images; Lachlan Cunningham / Getty Images)