Rise and Fall: The Oakland Coliseum and What It Became

From one of baseball's finest venues to its worst. How a stadium's decline mirrored a franchise's decline.

The Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum opened on September 18, 1966, and it was, by the standards of its era, a genuinely fine baseball facility. The original design, by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, seated approximately 50,000 and featured an open-air outfield with views of the East Bay hills beyond the bleachers. The sightlines were good. The concourses were wide. The foul territory was large by modern standards but appropriate for the era, and the dimensions were fair and sensible.

The early reviews were positive. Oakland was getting major league baseball for the first time, the venue was modern and functional, and the park sat in a reasonably accessible location near the BART station that would eventually make it one of the most transit-accessible ballparks in the country.

What happened over the next fifty-eight years is a story of incremental deterioration that tracks almost precisely with the deterioration of the franchise's relationship with its home city.

The Mount Davis Transformation

The singular catastrophe for the Coliseum as a baseball facility was the construction of the Mount Davis expansion in 1995. When the Oakland Raiders returned from their Los Angeles sojourn, the city and county reached an agreement with the team to expand the stadium to accommodate NFL attendance. The expansion added approximately 22,000 seats in a section that rose over the outfield, blocking the original views of the hills that had been among the park's distinguishing features.

The Mount Davis section created the tarped-off black hole of uncovered seats that became one of the most recognizable images in baseball -- the yawning empty expanse of seats covered in tarps in center field, visible on every broadcast, representing both the stadium's oversized NFL configuration and the A's chronically poor attendance. When the team drew poorly, the tarped sections made the park look post-apocalyptic. When the team drew well, the sections remained tarped because there was no system for opening them dynamically.

By any objective aesthetic measure, the post-Mount Davis Coliseum was one of the worst baseball venues in the sport. Architecture critics, baseball writers, and the baseball public ranked it at or near the bottom of major-league parks consistently from the late 1990s onward. ESPN, The Athletic, and various baseball ranking publications placed it last or second-to-last in quality assessments throughout the 2000s and 2010s.

The Infrastructure Problem

The aesthetic problems might have been survivable if the infrastructure had been maintained. It was not.

The Coliseum has been plagued for decades by sewage backup issues that became notorious. On multiple occasions, including several that received national media coverage, the sewer system backed up and flooded the clubhouses with raw sewage. Players, staff, and visiting teams dealt with conditions that would be unacceptable in any commercial building. The repeated nature of the problem, and the inability or unwillingness of the relevant parties to permanently resolve it, became a symbol of the facility's decline.

Beyond the sewage issues, the Coliseum suffered from the full range of problems associated with aging infrastructure: electrical failures, water damage in the dugouts, inadequate HVAC systems, outdated broadcast infrastructure, and concourse facilities that were built for a 1960s expectation of what a ballpark experience should be. The concession options were limited. The technology was dated. The suites and premium spaces that generate significant revenue for modern franchises were inadequate.

By the final years of the A's tenancy, the Coliseum was a facility that required constant emergency maintenance to function at a minimum standard while being structurally unsuited for the investment needed to genuinely renovate it. The physical plant was not merely old; it had been fundamentally compromised by the Raiders accommodation in ways that could not be undone without essentially demolishing and rebuilding the facility.

The Political Failure

The Coliseum's physical deterioration did not happen in a vacuum. It happened in the context of a decades-long political failure to produce a new facility.

The relevant parties for this failure are multiple. The city of Oakland, facing chronic budget challenges and competing priorities, could not commit to the level of public investment that a new stadium would require. Alameda County, which co-owns the Coliseum, had its own institutional inertia. MLB was not providing meaningful assistance despite its stated interest in keeping the team in Oakland. And the A's ownership group, under Fisher, was not willing to self-fund a new stadium in the way that several other ownership groups have done in comparable cities.

The result was a situation where everyone agreed that the Coliseum was inadequate and no one with the power to change it actually changed it. Stadium task forces convened and issued reports. Proposals were announced and then quietly shelved. Howard Terminal became a decade-long conversation that never became construction.

The building itself absorbed the consequences of this political failure. Every year that a new stadium was not built was another year of deferred maintenance on the existing one, another year in which the gap between what the Coliseum was and what a major-league facility needed to be grew wider.

The Final Years

The A's last years at the Coliseum were characterized by a conscious effort by the franchise to distance itself from its home. The team stopped making significant capital investments in the building. Maintenance was reduced to minimum standards. The broadcast imagery of the venue was carefully managed to avoid showing the most deteriorated areas.

The final game, on September 26, 2024, was treated with genuine emotional weight by the fans in attendance and by much of the baseball media. The crowd was enormous by recent A's standards -- the announced figure was 46,889, though independent counts suggested the actual number was lower, possibly reflecting the paper-ticket sales common at emotional final games. The ceremony was minimal; the A's did not organize a formal farewell event, which was itself noted as characteristic of the franchise's approach to its Oakland relationships.

What was left after that game was a vacant structure with uncertain future. The Coliseum Authority, which operates the facility, has explored conversion options including a soccer stadium for Oakland's NWSL team and a mixed-use development that would include housing and commercial space. The BART station adjacent to the site makes it genuinely valuable as transit-oriented development.

But the building itself, as a baseball facility, is done. It played its role -- hosting the franchise for fifty-seven years, witnessing three World Series dynasties, being the place where the Moneyball revolution was most fully expressed on the field -- and then declined into something that nobody with a choice would voluntarily use.

A building's life can mirror the life of what inhabits it. The Coliseum and the Athletics declined together, fed each other's deterioration, and came to represent to outside observers the mutual failure of a franchise and a city to do the things that might have saved their relationship. The building still stands. Whether that is a memorial or simply an inconvenience is a question Oakland will eventually have to answer.

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