The Oakland A’s played their final game on September 26, 2024, defeating the Texas Rangers 3-2 in front of over 46,000 fans who had gathered to say goodbye to the team that had held a place in their heart since 1968.
I turned nine the year the A’s came to Oakland. From the beginning, this team and its at-the-time-considered garish green and gold uniforms atop white shoes, colors deemed sacrilegious by the staid, tradition-bound baseball world, enraptured me. I don’t remember if I read at the time the words uttered by Senator Stuart Symington (D-MO), who, upon the A’s leaving Kansas City for Oakland, commented, “Oakland is the luckiest city since Hiroshima.” Symington, who unlike California’s present-day feckless national politicians cared far more about his constituency than lining his pockets courtesy of insider information while jockeying for national prominence,…
