Oakland Athletics

Previously known as Philadelphia Athletics (1901-1954), Kansas City Athletics (1955-1967) Franchise Record: (1901-2023) 9,260-9,766-87 (.487) (1968-2023) 4,545-4,294-1 (.514) Post Season Record: (1905-2020) 85-82 (.509) (1968-2020) 61-63 (.492) World Series Titles: 9 (1910, 1911, 1913, 1929, 1930, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1989) American League Pennants: 15 (1902, 1905, 1910, 1911, 1913, 1914, 1929, 1930, 1931, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1988, 1989, 1990) Postseasons: 29 (1905, 1910, 1911, 1913, 1914, 1929, 1930, 1931, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1981, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1992, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2006, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2018, 2019, 2020) Franchise Players: Home Run Baker, Sal Bando, Charles Bender, Max Bishop, Bert Campaneris, Eric Chavez, Mickey Cochrane, Eddie Collins, Harry Davis, Jimmie Foxx, Lefty Grove, Rickey Henderson, Reggie Jackson, Bob Johnson, Mark McGwire, Dan Murphy, Eddie Plank, Eddie Rommel, Al Simmons, Rube Waddell Retired Numbers: 9 - Reggie Jackson; 24 - Rickey Henderson; 27 - Catfish Hunter; 34 Rollie Fingers and Dave Stewart; 42 - Jackie Robinson (retired throughout Major League Baseball); 43 - Dennis Eckersley Ballparks: Oakland Coliseum (April 17, 1968-September 26, 2024) (48,219)

Oakland Athletics logo

Team History

The Oakland Athletics were the third incarnation of the American League franchise that started in 1900 as the Philadelphia Athletics before the AL had attained major league status. After winning numerous titles in its first four decades, the franchise fell on hard times during the Great depression and never really recovered. They lost the battle with the Philadelphia Phillies for supremacy in the City of Brotherly Love and in 1954 relocated to Kansas City, MO. They never had a winning season during their stint as the Kansas City Athletics and their final few years were dominated by stories of where mercurial owner Charles O. Finley would move the team next, after antagonizing just about everyone in Missouri and Kansas in less than a decade. Their next destination was Oakland, CA, where they settled down in 1968.

In Oakland, the Athletics, who were generally called the A's in their first few seasons, found a measure of stability as the Bay Area was growing fast, they had a new ballpark, the Oakland Coliseum, to call their own, and their rivals across the bay, the San Francisco Giants, were far from a model franchise. The Athletics quickly shed the losing image they had obtained in Kansas City by winning a first division title in 1971, and then by winning three consecutive World Series titles from 1972 to 1974. They were the coolest team in the majors at that time, wearing colorful uniforms that alternated the team's three primary colors - green, yellow and white - encouraging their players to wear mustaches and take on colorful nicknames, and sporting a number of genuine superstars in their rank such as Catfish Hunter, Vida Blue, Rollie Fingers and Reggie Jackson, and all-around stars like Sal Bando, Joe Rudi, Gene Tenace, Ken Holtzman and Bill North. They also did unusual things like always carrying one or two dedicated pinch-runners on the roster and changing managers every couple of years - even while they were winning. And if it had only been up to Finley, there would have been more innovation, as he was an early proponent of the designated hitter, wanted to introduce a pitch clock, and experimented with using colored baseballs before being stopped by the league.

This heyday came to a crashing end when Finley's penurious ways came to the fore, as he refused to pay his star players what they were worth. He lost Hunter to free agency when he failed to pay a performance bonus that had been included in his contract, and then lost a slew of other players before the 1977 season because he refused to pay them properly. He tried to get around this by trading some players, including Reggie Jackson and Vida Blue, before their contracts expired, and by selling others, the latter move being blocked by Commissioner Bowie Kuhn. He almost moved the team to Denver, CO but was stopped by other AL owners, after which he sulked, running the team on a shoestring budget in 1979, causing a major embarrassment to MLB as attendance was almost non-existent and the team's broadcasting deal was with a low-powered college station that could barely be heard even in Oakland itself.

The agony ended when Finley sold the team to local businessman Walter Haas in 1980, a year that corresponded to a rebirth of sort as the A's suddenly became competitive again under the guidance of manager Billy Martin and his version of "Billy Ball". They won a division title in the strike-shortened 1981 season, but their success was largely based on running starting pitchers Mike Norris, Rick Langford, Matt Keough and Steve McCatty into the ground, and it all came crashing down within a couple of years. They re-emerged as a power at the end of the 1980s during the days of the "Bash Brothers", Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire, winning three straight AL pennants under manager Tony LaRussa from 1988 to 1990. All three times, they were overwhelming favorites to win the World Series, but were upset twice, by the Los Angeles Dodgers and a limping Kirk Gibson in 1988 and by a Cincinnati Reds team that came out of nowhere (and soon returned there) in 1990. They did win a championship in 1989, defeating their cross-Bay rivals the Giants in a World series marred by the Loma Prieta Earthquake which forced a ten-day pause and made the four-game sweep anticlimactic. In addition to Canseco and McGwire, other stars on that team included Rickey Henderson, Dave Stewart and Dennis Eckersley as well as a number of strong supporting players like Walt Weiss, Mike Moore, Rick Honeycutt, Carney Lansford, Dave Henderson and Terry Steinbach. A division title in 1992 marked the last hurrah of that team.

A period of doldrums followed as the A's teams in the late 1990s were uninspiring and the Coliseum began to decay, with the only improvements made by the City of Oakland, which owned the facility, being done to suit the NFL's Oakland Raiders, and those ended up defacing what had previously been a pleasant-enough venue. While the Bay Area was booming in those years, thanks to the development of Silicon Valley, Oakland itself was left behind. As a result, the Giants became a big draw after leaving Candlestick Park for what was originally called Pacific Bell Park in 2000. The A's were jealous of their neighbor's beautiful new digs and began to decry their own inadequate facilities. They would have liked to move to nearby San Jose, CA, which was booming economically, but it was in the Giants' protected territory, and options to find a site appropriate for a ballpark in the east Bay area all proved futile. As a result, making a virtue out of necessity, the A's operated on a small budget, and developed Moneyball under the guidance of innovative General Manager Billy Beane, finding undervalued players to build a winning team. They targeted players who were not overly athletic (belying their name) but who could hit for power and had strong on-base percentages. The approach was controversial, but it worked for a while - at least in terms of getting the team into the postseason - but once there, the magic seemed to evaporate, as they lost a number of postseason series to the New York Yankees, who were not hampered by the need to clip coupons and spend wisely. Iconic players in that era were Jason Giambi and Miguel Tejada and a group of starring pitchers collectively known as the "Big Three" - Barry Zito, Mark Mulder and Tim Hudson - who did not fit the "take and rake" Moneyball narrative. A lot of the team's methods, such as the use of analytics, were adopted by other teams, and their lack of postseason success also put a taint on their methods, so that by the end of the 2000s, they were no longer viewed as a model organization.

But the A's managed to remain competitive for some periods, including at the end of the 2010s, even if they were still operating on a small budget and their ballpark situation was growing worse every year, with every ambitious plan to use the construction of a new ballpark as an opportunity to revive some part of downtown Oakland being turned down for one reason or another, with plans to settle down at Laney College or Jack London Square all coming to naught. The A's made the postseason a few times in that period, but would invariably make a quick exit, except for the anomalous COVID-19 season of 2020, when they did manage to win a first series before falling to the Houston Astros in the Division Series. There were some good players on those teams, including Matt Olson and Matt Chapman, but both were traded away for packages of prospects when they became too expensive. By 2023, the team was in last place, playing terribly, and drawing flies at the Coliseum. That's when ownership threw in the towel, announcing a plan to move the team to Las Vegas, NV. After a last-place finish, the proposed move received unanimous approval from MLB owners on November 16th that year, with the target date for relocation being 2028. Complicating matters was the issue of a stadium. The A's lease in Oakland was set to expire at the end of the 2024 season. Athletics officials toured ballparks in Sacramento, CA and Salt Lake City, UT in mid-January 2024 preparing for a temporary bridge location from 2025 to 2027 . Using Las Vegas' AAA ballpark was also among the options considered, since staying two more years in Oakland as a lame-duck team seemed unlikely. Owner John Fisher eventually settled on moving the team temporarily to Sacramento after the season, while plans for a new ballpark in Vegas had hit some bumps, making some wonder if the move would ever work out and what the longer-term solution would be. The A's played their last home game in Oakland on September 26th, defeating the Texas Rangers, 3-2, in front of a huge crowd of almost 47,000, and then headed into uncertainty.

Many diehard A's fans in Oakland as well as baseball fans in general blamed John Fisher for "ruining" the team and believed the team would have been perfectly fine staying in Oakland had Fisher just sold it to a new owner. This led to a terrible drop in attendance in the A's final years in Oakland. In 2024, they had a yearly attendance under 1 million. Fans boycotted games and the few who did show up were often heard on TV chanting "Sell the team" and holding up signs with the same message. ESPN insider Jeff Passan wrote on Twitter that "The Oakland A’s were killed by greed," and that "John Fisher did not have to move this team. Major League Baseball and its owners did not need to be complicit in it. This was a choice. A wrong one." Perhaps the most vocal of any fans was Billie Joe Armstrong, the lead singer of the punk-rock band Green Day, who had made various profanity-laced statements about Fisher and called Las Vegas the "worst s***hole in America," leading to multiple Las Vegas radio stations banning the band's music from being played on their networks.

Awards

• American League MVP:
  • Eddie Collins - 1914
  • Mickey Cochrane - 1928
  • Lefty Grove - 1931
  • Jimmie Foxx - 1932 & 1933
  • Bobby Shantz - 1952
  • Vida Blue - 1971
  • Reggie Jackson - 1973
  • Jose Canseco - 1988
  • Rickey Henderson - 1990
  • Dennis Eckersley - 1992
  • Jason Giambi - 2000
  • Miguel Tejada - 2002

• American League Cy Young Award:
  • Vida Blue - 1971
  • Catfish Hunter - 1974
  • Bob Welch - 1990
  • Dennis Eckersley - 1992
  • Barry Zito - 2002

• American League Rookie of the Year Award:
  • Harry Byrd - 1952
  • Jose Canseco - 1986
  • Mark McGwire - 1987
  • Walt Weiss - 1988
  • Ben Grieve - 1998
  • Bobby Crosby - 2004
  • Huston Street - 2005
  • Andrew Bailey - 2009

• American League Manager of the Year Award:
  • Billy Martin - 1981 (Major League)
  • Tony LaRussa - 1988 & 1992
  • Bob Melvin - 2012 & 2018

Famous Feats

• Perfect game:
  • Catfish Hunter: May 8, 1968
  • Dallas Braden: May 9, 2010

• No-hitter:
  • Weldon Henley: July 22, 1905
  • Chief Bender: May 12, 1910
  • Joe Bush: August 26, 1916
  • Dick Fowler: September 9, 1945
  • Bill McCahan: September 3, 1947
  • Catfish Hunter: May 8, 1968
  • Vida Blue: September 21, 1970
  • Vida Blue, Glenn Abbott, Paul Lindblad and Rollie Fingers: September 28, 1975
  • Mike Warren: September 29, 1983
  • Dave Stewart: June 29, 1990
  • Dallas Braden: May 9, 2010
  • Sean Manaea: April 21, 2018
  • Mike Fiers: May 7, 2019

• Unassisted Triple Play:
  • Randy Velarde: May 29, 2000

• Four home runs in one game:
  • none

• Two home runs in one inning:
  • Mark McGwire: September 22, 1996
  • Brent Rooker: May 4, 2024

• Hitting for the Cycle:
  • Harry Davis: July 10, 1901 (first in American League history)
  • Nap Lajoie: July 30, 1901
  • Danny Murphy: August 25, 1910
  • Frank Baker: July 3, 1911
  • Mickey Cochrane: July 22, 1932
  • Mickey Cochrane: August 2, 1933
  • Pinky Higgins: August 6, 1933
  • Jimmie Foxx: August 14, 1933
  • Doc Cramer: June 10, 1934
  • Sam Chapman: May 5, 1939
  • Elmer Valo: August 2, 1950
  • Tony Phillips: May 16, 1986
  • Mike Blowers: May 18, 1998
  • Eric Chavez: June 21, 2000
  • Miguel Tejada: September 29, 2001
  • Eric Byrnes: June 29, 2003
  • Mark Ellis: June 4, 2007

Further Reading

• Mike Axisa: "A's stadium proposal moves forward with City Council vote, but team's future in Oakland remains uncertain", cbssports.com, July 20, 2021. [1]
• Mark Feinsand: "Owners' vote approves A's relocation to Las Vegas for 2028", mlb.com, November 16, 2023. [2]
• Nancy Finley: Finley Ball: How two outsiders turned the Oakland A's into a dynasty and changed the game forever, Regnery History, Washington, DC, 2016. ISBN 978-1-62157-477-4
• Martín Gallegos: "A's to explore relocation amid stadium push", mlb.com, May 11, 2021. [3]
• Martín Gallegos: "A's ballpark plan takes 'giant leap forward' after city council vote", mlb.com, February 18, 2022. [4]
• Martín Gallegos: "A’s purchase land in Las Vegas for new ballpark", mlb.com, April 20, 2023. [5]
• Martín Gallegos: "'Will stick with me forever': After 57 years, A's say farewell with heartfelt win", mlb.com, September 26, 2024. [6]
• Chip Greene, ed.: Mustaches and Mayhem, Charlie O's Three-Time Champions: The Oakland Athletics 1972-74, SABR, Phoenix, AZ, 2015. ISBN 978-1-943816-07-1
• David M. Jordan: The A's: A Baseball History, McFarland, Jefferson, NC, 2014. ISBN 978-0-7864-7781-4
• Jane Lee: "A's plan to build ballpark at Howard Terminal", mlb.com, November 28, 2018. [7]
• Michael Lewis: Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, NY, 2003. ISBN 978-0393057652
• Michael Liedtke (The Associated Press): "As an era ends, the city that was home to the Oakland A's comes to grips with their departure", Yahoo! Sports, September 25, 2024. [8]
• Bruce Markusen: Baseball's Last Dynasty: Charlie Finley's Oakland A's, Masters Press, Dallas, TX, 1998.
• Jorge L. Ortiz: "How the Raiders' L.A. limbo impacts the Oakland Athletics", USA Today Sports, January 13, 2016. [9]
• Liz Roscher: "Oakland A's agree to purchase land for $1.5B Las Vegas ballpark", Yahoo! Sports, April 20, 2023. [10]* Dale Tafoya: Billy Ball: Billy Martin and the Resurrection of the Oakland A's, Lyons Press, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD, 2020. ISBN 978-1493043620
• Jason Turbow: Dynastic, Bombastic, Fantastic: Reggie, Rollie, Catfish, and Charlie Finley’s Swingin’ A’s, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston, MA, 2017. ISBN 9780544303171

Sources:

• Peter Filichia: Green Cathedrals: The Ultimate Celebrations of All 273 Major League and Negro League Ballparks Past and Present, Addison Wesley Publishing Company, March 1993
• John Thorn: Total Baseball, Total Sports Publishing, 1989, 1995.
• http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/money/51706640-79/overstock-coliseum-oakland-naming.html.csp