The Oakland Coliseum is often described as the worst ballpark in the United States. People usually bring up the resident possums and the feral cats. Or the plague of moths. Talking about sewage bubbling up in locker rooms is cliché at this point—there’s even a Twitter handle in honor of it.
This essay was adapted from the Alta newsletter, delivered every Thursday.
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But these are cosmetic problems. As is the fact that the stadium’s very name, with its grace and fearsome dignity, gets saddled with the branding of whatever entity buys the rights. Lately, it’s RingCentral Coliseum. A few years ago, it was the O.co Coliseum. Whatever you call it, it remains one of the great venues left in professional sports, plumbing and pest control aside.
If there’s a rotten smell at the Coliseum, it’s coming from Oakland Athletics owner John Fisher. The man made his money the old-fashioned way, by inheriting it from parents who started the Gap. Despite his wealth, he’s strangled the A’s with a shoestring budget for years, seemingly more interested in broadcast rights than building a winning product. The team’s total payroll this season matches much of what stars on other teams make all by themselves, and Fisher has now extracted a government handout from Nevada, where the team is expected to move in the next few years. I find myself thinking of the banner one fan unfurled in right field during a recent A’s home game: “VEGAS BEWARE.”
As for the Coliseum itself, I see a rare austerity to its unpainted concrete brutalism. Light gray, composed of giant square pillars, angular, it has the self-possession of a monument. The place opened in 1966, and it’s housed the Oakland Athletics since 1968. Inside, three tiers of green seats rise into the cloudless summer skies, or into the layer of fog that rides an evening breeze. Seagulls line the top edge. A single band of box seats sits between the second and third tiers. You can get a pretty good Polish sausage and choose between a few classic beers. Compared with other stadiums these days, the menus tend to be simple.
Beyond the center field fence, there’s a towering rack of seats known to locals as Mount Davis, named for the owner of the Raiders, who insisted it be built when the team stormed back to the Bay Area from Los Angeles in 1995. The Raiders then left Oakland for Las Vegas in 2020, leaving Mount Davis permanently closed, draped in huge green tarps. The elegance and clarity that define the Coliseum’s original design are now offset by this reminder of owner intransigence, obscuring the sun-kissed pastoral backdrop of the East Bay hills that once was visible from the stands.
Despite this unfortunate revision to its shape, the stadium remains unusually focused architecturally, and psychologically, too. The ballpark that some say is the best in the country, Oracle Park, where the Giants play across the Bay, was at the forefront of the trend in recent decades toward sports venues doubling as amusement parks. At Oracle, the ball game is only the most obvious attraction: you can also pass the time at playgrounds and elaborate bars and arcade seating and fancy restaurants. In some Major League Baseball stadiums, there are wildlife exhibits, pools, spas, malls, and mini golf, as if the executives don’t think baseball itself is enough. Packing the place with distractions, of course, is a good way to make sure that’s true.
At the Coliseum, by contrast, you can still watch a game, and the experience isn’t overproduced—or overshadowed—by the stadium itself. The structure’s inherent asceticism is tempered by a few sentimental charms, too, like an out-of-town scoreboard that is still manually operated. The stadium’s unfussiness makes it feel less like a carnival and more like an old cathedral. The Coliseum is a dump the way Notre-Dame is a dump.
The Coliseum’s refusal to get with the times is also an act of defiance: in a moment when every house, college, and roadway in the Bay Area is getting flipped or given a face-lift, this is a building that stands firm. (Not for nothing did it survive the 1989 earthquake in better shape than the Bay Bridge.)
In fact, the Coliseum reaches beyond the Bay Area to an essential American ideal: that this country’s bounty ought to be available to all of its people. The Coliseum is among the last pro-sports arenas located in a low-income neighborhood, one of the last located in a historically Black city. The field is named for Rickey Henderson, a star who grew up poor playing ball 10 miles away at Bushrod Park in Oakland. And the stadium is one of the last multipurpose, multisport complexes still standing in this country. Up until recently, it was home to two kinds of sports teams and was a stop for various entertainers, from Ike and Tina Turner to Pink Floyd, Green Day, Paul McCartney, and Bad Bunny.
Like its brutalist architecture, a style of design that has come to signify the public commons thanks to its prominence in government-supported developments such as universities or housing, the Oakland Coliseum looks like a figment of a civic-minded dream. Brutalism, sometimes called heroic style, grew out of an expansive post-World War II mindset that saw society building big, useful things for the masses. The beauty of that unpainted concrete is its faith and its function.
From the perspective of an average—let’s say middle-class—fan, the Coliseum is a dream in other ways. Tickets are cheap. You can still get seats not far from home plate for less than $100. There are still decent seats for $25. The lines are never long, for beer or the bathroom.
Which brings me to the elephant in the room, no pun on the A’s mascot intended: What does it mean that attendance at the Coliseum routinely sets records for the lowest in American sports?
The reason all those seats are empty is that Fisher refuses to spend what it takes to keep players rooted in Oakland, let alone field a contending team. The public notices this and responds by not showing up. That nonattendance, in turn, feeds the narrative that the Oakland Coliseum is a dump. Which is the story Fisher and Major League Baseball are selling, because it’s a story that justifies their plans to turn a bigger profit by stripping Oakland of its legendary baseball team.
It’s time for someone to buy this civic asset from John Fisher. Blaming the site itself for the A’s problems is easy, but the Coliseum is really just a historic public building—like Fenway Park or Wrigley Field—in need of some TLC. It’s the ownership that needs to be replaced.•
Jesse Nathan’s first book, a collection of poems called Eggtooth, will be published September 2023.
