For Oakland Fans Still Processing: A Guide to the Stages of Losing Your Team

The loss is real. Here is what other fans have experienced and what actually helps.

If you have been an Oakland A's fan for any significant amount of time and you are reading this, there is a reasonable chance that you are somewhere in a process of emotional adjustment that does not have a clear endpoint. The team left. The Coliseum is empty. The Sacramento games are on television sometimes, and you do not always know how you feel about watching them.

This is not a guide that will tell you how to feel or what to do next. The appropriate response to your team's departure is whatever is honest for you. What this is, instead, is an attempt to describe the landscape of what Oakland fans have reported experiencing -- to name the terrain so that navigating it feels less lonely.

The First Stage: Denial

For many long-term Oakland fans, the first stage was not a single moment of denial but a years-long rolling refusal to believe the departure was actually coming. Every round of Howard Terminal negotiations was evidence that a deal was possible. Every optimistic statement from the mayor's office was received as reassurance. Every time the A's said they preferred Oakland, the preference was taken seriously.

The denial served a function. It made it possible to keep going to games, to keep engaging with the franchise, to keep investing emotionally without the constant low-grade grief that would have accompanied a clear-eyed assessment of where things were headed.

The denial typically ended at a specific moment: for some fans, when the Las Vegas land purchase was announced. For others, when Fisher's September 2023 statement made the departure explicit. For others still, during the last game at the Coliseum.

If you are only now reaching the end of your denial -- if you held on through Sacramento and are only now accepting that this is permanent -- that is not unusual. Grief processes are not linear and do not follow a schedule.

The Anger

The anger that follows the denial is, in Oakland, generally well-founded. This was not a team that left because the economics of the market made it impossible to stay. It was a team that left because the owner chose to leave. The anger at Fisher, at the city's failures, at MLB's indifference -- all of it has legitimate targets.

What several psychologists who work with grief, and several Oakland fans who have moved through this process, report is that the anger needs expression but that staying in it indefinitely is corrosive. The anger is information. It tells you that something important was violated, that you were not treated with the respect your investment deserved. Acknowledging what the anger means -- holding it, understanding it -- is different from being consumed by it.

Some fans have channeled the anger into action: supporting Oakland's bid for an expansion team, volunteering with youth baseball programs in the city, organizing community events that use A's fandom as a way of sustaining relationships and community in Oakland. These are not substitutes for having the team back, but they are constructive uses of what the anger is pointing toward.

The Depression

The depression that can follow is quiet and specific. It is showing up to the place where you used to go and finding it changed or gone. It is not having anything to watch on game days. It is the loss of a social context -- the friends you went to games with, the coworkers you talked baseball with, the family members who shared the fandom -- when the shared object of that context has been removed.

Sports fandom is a social institution in ways that people who are not deeply embedded in it can miss. It structures time. It provides regular occasions for connection. It creates a shared language and reference set with other fans. When a team leaves, all of that goes with it.

The depression does not require a clinical intervention, though for some fans the loss genuinely compounds other difficulties in ways that might benefit from professional support. What helps most, according to the fans who describe having moved through this stage, is maintaining the social connections that the team anchored -- seeing the same people, having the conversations, without necessarily centering the conversations on A's baseball.

The Bargaining That Never Pays Off

Bargaining, in the context of team loss, tends to look like finding reasons to believe the team might come back. Oakland expansion rumors. John Fisher selling the team to a new owner who might return. Legal challenges to the relocation.

The honest assessment is that none of these outcomes is likely in the near term. MLB franchises do not reverse relocations. Fisher has shown no indication of selling. The relocation was legally clean and MLB-approved. The bargaining, while understandable, points toward outcomes that are not realistic.

This is not a reason to stop advocating for Oakland baseball. But it is worth being clear-eyed about what is being advocated for. The A's are gone. What Oakland might get back is different -- an expansion franchise, eventually, if the city makes the right moves and MLB decides to expand into the Northern California market. That is a different ask than getting the relocated A's back.

Finding a Relationship to Baseball That Works

The final stage, which not every fan reaches and which does not look the same for everyone who does, is arriving at a functional relationship with baseball that acknowledges the loss without being defined by it.

For some fans, this means following the Giants or the A's in Sacramento with clear eyes about what those relationships are and are not. For others, it means baseball is simply gone for the foreseeable future -- not as punishment or protest, but because the thing that made it meaningful was Oakland-specific and that thing is no longer available.

For others still, it means following the Las Vegas team when it opens, perhaps with a kind of detachment that feels different from the old fandom, perhaps with a gradual reengagement that surprises them.

None of these is the right answer in an abstract sense. The right answer is the one that is honest about what you feel and sustainable over time.

What Oakland fans deserve, in all of this, is permission to grieve. The loss is real. The decades of investment -- in money, in time, in emotional energy -- were real. The relationships and memories and experiences that happened in and around the Coliseum were real. None of that disappears because the franchise did.

The A's left Oakland. Oakland is still Oakland. The things that happened there -- those fifty-seven years of baseball and everything that surrounded it -- still happened, still matter, still belong to the people who were there for them. That cannot be taken away, even if the franchise can.

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