There was no getting around it. I had to be there. Flew in Wednesday and caught the last night game and the last home game. There was nothing really eventful about either game. Both teams didn't really have any star players that made any at bat feel any different than the other. Fans just kind of sat there and took in the moment, counting the innings, don't get me wrong, by taking in the moment they did what Oakland fans do, be loud. The drums banged, the horns blew, the 'Let's Go Oakland' chant rang loud every inning. It was Oakland A's baseball like only they can do.

Yet, it was truly a sad experience. I talked to as many older ushers and fans as I could. Most had been working or ticket holders for 40 plus years. With tears in their eyes they would tell me about the moments they remembered most. Ain't gonna lie, I shed many of tears during those two games. I got there three hours early both games. My son was with me. We stood 3 feet from Ricky Henderson and Dave Stewart, the pillars of my childhood fandom and lifelong Oakland residents. We watched the grounds crew ready the field for the last time, some needing to be consoled. We watched the video board where they repeated highlights over the last 60 years or so. From Rollie Fingers, to Billy Martin, Bash Brothers, Hatty's home run memorialized in Moneyball. I mean how can you not be emotional about Baseball? My own experiences in the coliseum, the 92 ALCS where I got in the car at 10PM in SLC and drove through the night pulling in to watch game 3 and then heading home right after. The experiences I had with my own son watching his heroes Matt Chapman and Matt Olson, make a run in their short Oakland prime.

The last game was pretty surreal. I can't speak to other MLB venues, but I've never seen 30K baseball tailgaters in Green and Gold. That was the scene at 10AM on Thursday morning. Blowing horns, waving flags before they even entered. What an atmosphere. The game was a sellout. I had seats second deck third base side. Nothing unusual happened until the 8th and 9th inning. Two fans ran on the field and were quickly removed. Two kelly green smoke bombs landed on the out field grass, and about 30 beer cans and water bottles. I've seen worse on an umpire bad call.

There was so much drama about these "angry bad fans" that would storm the field spread by Jon Fisher himself, the owner. He told the team to leave the field on the last out and never come back out for safety reasons. One of his many lies and false characterizations of the fanbase he knows nothing about. Good on the team, manager Mark Kotsay defied his requests and brought the team out and with a Mic addressed the crowd for 10 min. Not a dry eye in the coliseum. They took a team picture on the mound, started one last 'Let's Go Oakland' chant, then threw several buckets worth of balls into the stands, handed out what they could and it was over. The majority of fans walked out peacefully, a few random fans broke off cupholders from the seats, some tried to take seats, or section signage. I never once felt like things would get out of hand, it's a good fanbase.

In the end, why? I'm not going to really get into this other than to say it was never the fans. If you think it was low attendance, you haven't followed it closely and bought into what Jon Fisher wanted you to think. No other fanbase in the history of sports had been jerked along for two decades like the A's fans. Ownership was the worst in American sports, the city itself deserves a ton of blame, it's simply one of the worst run cities in America. Everything around the coliseum is closed or has military fencing around it. Those poor fans for two decades had to come to a crumbling park in the worst part of town, with nothing surrounding it but a broken down city. And Fisher doubled prices for that experience two years ago. Doubled. Effectively pricing out the fanbase who lived within a 10 mile radius. The Giants never helped either, anytime the A's had a viable option in nearby suburbs the Giants nixed it. MLB wanted no part of Oakland either. Manfred enabled every corrupt move Jon Fisher made to destroy the Oakland A's. As Rickey Henderson said yesterday, it was a perfect storm of ineptness. The city has now lost the Raiders, Warriors, A's in a span of a few years. The city's destruction coupled with Jon Fisher's greed was too much to overcome.

Lastly, let me just say this as a life long fan. This hurts. Really, you have to go back to the Brooklyn Dodgers to find an established team with this much success and character that lost its franchise. The A's were different. They were different from the very beginning. White shoes only, flashy bright colors, marketing gimmicks, mustaches, so many memorable characters in the fanbase and roster. As the East Bay changed over the years you started to see a melting pot fanbase like no other, the drums and horns became an iconic part of the Oakland A's, it was a different baseball experience and none of that is moving to Vegas. It's lost forever. You could hear 5 secs of an Oakland A's broadcast and know it was in Oakland just from the drums. We didn't just lose the Oakland A's, we lost a cultural experience like no other in baseball.

I'll never stop wearing the gear. It's all I have. But I'll never get back the experience of being a true Oakland A's fan. Whatever they build on the Vegas strip will be a different animal, it'll have nothing that I identify with. I have no interest in it.