Bottom Of The Ninth

 Baseball season. Now fully subsumed by professional and college football, and I hardly noticed. It has been a tough year in Oakland, home of the Athletics. So tough in fact that the question about how much longer Oakland will have its own major league team is up in the air. Having spent most of the 2022 season flirting with the worst record in baseball, the A's show absolutely none of the spark or grit that made them the subject of a book and film: Moneyball. 

The story of how this small-market team put together a group that somehow challenged every previous notion about how the game could be managed was a real feel-good Hollywood concoction. The reality of living through the 2002 win streak here in Oakland was truly magical. From the middle of August until the first week of September that year, the A's could not lose. And they were doing it with a payroll that was one third of the (hack, spit) New York Yankees. It was during this time that my son started to catch the fever. We were watching games on television. We were cheering. Even though his hometown team never made it to the World Series, he became a fan. So much so that for many years we began a tradition of trying to make it out to the ballpark for at least one game a year together. We liked to remind anyone who would listen that Oakland had never lost while we were in the stands. 

We weren't in the stand this season. Too many other th8ings conspired to keep us from buying out tickets and taking our seats. All the distractions were enabled by the complete failure by the team and its management to put up anything but the weakest effort. I understand that this reaction makes me nothing but a fair weather fan, but this feels more like climate change than a change in the weather. The rumors swirling around the relocation of the team to a city that would support them with a new stadium and all the attendant tax breaks that make owning a professional sports team worthwhile have become more realistic. Having just recently misplaced the Raiders and the Golden State Warriors, the city of Oakland seems to have different priorities. 

Which, I suppose, reflects my own world view. The attention that I have previously placed on Major League Baseball has drifted elsewhere. COVID-19. War in Ukraine. The aforementioned climate change. The relative fortunes of a baseball team have drifted down my importance ladder. I understand that I am in many ways playing right into the hands of the corporate manipulations behind moving a sports franchise. I saw Major League. Someday, I'll be pawing through my drawer and find that green and gold T-shirt, and I will smile. Remembering when baseball mattered. Not just to me, but to Oakland.