Oakland Grief: What It Really Feels Like to Lose Your Baseball Team

Talking to Oakland fans about identity, loss, and whether they will ever follow the A's again.

There is a particular kind of grief that attaches itself to sports fandom that people outside the experience tend not to understand. It is not the same as losing a person. It is not even close. But it is real, and it is specific, and when a city loses its baseball team, that grief maps onto a landscape: the streets you drove to get there, the parking lots where you tailgated, the view of the field when you walked through the turnstile for the first time.

Oakland's sports community has now experienced that loss three times in the span of roughly five years. The Warriors left in 2019 for the Chase Center in San Francisco. The Raiders left the same year for Las Vegas and their new stadium. The A's played their final game at the Coliseum in September 2024. Three teams, three departures, and in each case the city was left to process what it meant that the teams were gone.

To understand what that processing looks like for baseball specifically -- for the A's specifically -- it helps to talk to the people who actually showed up.

The Faithful Few

The common narrative about A's fans is that there weren't enough of them. That's partly true in a box-score sense. The A's averaged roughly 10,000 fans per game in their final Oakland seasons, one of the worst attendance figures in MLB. The team and ownership cited that attendance as evidence that Oakland could not support a franchise.

What that framing misses is the quality of what was there. Oakland A's fans were, by any measure, among the most passionate and knowledgeable baseball communities in the sport. The green-and-gold diaspora in the Bay Area runs deep. People who grew up in Oakland watching Rickey Henderson and Jose Canseco in the late 1980s passed that allegiance to their children. The team's Moneyball years in the early 2000s attracted a specific kind of intellectually engaged fan who appreciated the statistical revolution happening in front of them.

When I spoke with Marcus, a 42-year-old Oakland native who has attended A's games since his father took him as a child, he described what the final seasons felt like from the inside. "You knew it was coming," he said. "But knowing it's coming and actually experiencing it are completely different things. I cried during the last game. I'm not ashamed of that. I grew up going to that place."

Marcus said he will not follow the team to Las Vegas. "They left. That team left Oakland. Whatever they put on the field in Las Vegas is not my team. It might wear the same colors and use the same name, but the relationship is over."

The Identity Question

What Marcus is articulating is something urban sociologists have written about extensively in other contexts: the way sports franchises become tied to civic identity in ways that go far beyond entertainment. Oakland, specifically, has a complicated relationship with its own image. The city has been systematically undervalued and misrepresented for decades, a place that national media associated primarily with crime statistics even as it was producing some of the most significant cultural movements in American history.

The A's, in this context, were not just a baseball team. They were evidence that Oakland deserved major-league things. The Big Three of the early 1970s -- Catfish Hunter, Rollie Fingers, and company -- won three consecutive World Series. The Bash Brothers era won another one. The Moneyball A's went to the playoffs four consecutive years. These weren't just sports achievements; they were Oakland achievements, and Oakland claimed them as such.

Losing the team does not just mean losing the games. It means losing that particular form of civic affirmation.

Patricia, 58, taught elementary school in East Oakland for 25 years and took her students on field trips to A's games whenever she could arrange the funding. "I took kids who had never been to a major league game," she said. "Kids who didn't think places like that were for them. And they'd sit there and watch and understand that this was their city's team. That matters. That's real. You can't replace that with a drive to San Francisco."

The People Who Are Done

Not everyone in Oakland is processing this with equanimity. Some fans have moved past grief into something harder.

Carlos, 35, grew up in the Fruitvale neighborhood and has been an A's fan his entire life. He watched the relocation news with increasing fury. "They didn't leave because the fans weren't there," he said. "They left because the owner didn't want to spend money building a team that would bring fans in. And then they blamed us for not showing up to watch a bad team that the owner was intentionally keeping bad. It's insulting."

Carlos said he has transferred his baseball allegiance to the Giants, a choice that would have been unthinkable to him five years ago. "The Giants stayed. The Giants have a stadium. The Giants act like a real baseball franchise. I'm not going to spend the rest of my life mourning a team that didn't care about us."

This sentiment -- that the A's departure was a choice, not an inevitability -- runs through Oakland fan circles with significant force. The argument is not primarily about stadiums or economics. It is about respect. The feeling that the organization, under Fisher's ownership, treated Oakland's fan base as an obstacle rather than a constituency.

The Complicated Middle

Not all Oakland fans have reached Carlos's clarity. Many are somewhere in the middle, still processing a loss that doesn't fit neatly into any category.

Denise, 47, grew up in Berkeley and has been an A's fan since the early 1990s. She attended the final game at the Coliseum. She is still not sure what she thinks about the Sacramento situation or what her relationship to the franchise will be going forward.

"I watch Sacramento games sometimes," she said. "And there's this weird thing where I recognize the players, I know the stats, I care about whether they win. But there's also this layer of sadness over it because I know what it was, and I know it's gone. It's like being in a relationship that's technically over but you haven't fully left yet."

She said she will probably go to a Las Vegas game once the stadium opens. "Just to see. Just to know what it is. But I don't know if I'll feel anything. I don't know if it'll feel like mine anymore."

That uncertainty -- about what belonging to a team means once the physical and civic anchor is gone -- is at the core of what Oakland fans are working through. Sports fandom has always been partly about place. When the place changes, when the geography of the thing you love gets redrawn, the relationship itself becomes something different.

What that something different looks like in Oakland is still being determined. For some fans, it ends here. For others, it continues in some diminished or altered form. For all of them, the Coliseum is still there, technically, still standing at the corner of 66th Avenue and Hegenberger Road, though its future is uncertain. That physical fact matters to some people in ways that are hard to fully explain but easy to understand.

The building is still there. The team is not. And Oakland is left to figure out what it means to be a baseball city without a baseball team.

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