Oakland Fans Have 'One of the Saddest Days'

Four times, the Oakland A's won the World Series, per the Wall Street Journal. The team included some of the biggest stars and most colorful personalities—especially in those uniforms—in baseball, including Rickey Henderson, Reggie Jackson, Mark McGwire, Dennis Eckersley, and Jose Canseco. The A's have announced they're moving to Las Vegas, and fans said Thursday they're going to miss that team. "This really is one of the saddest days," said Jason Bressler, 40, who kept going to games even after moving to Los Angeles, per the AP. “Some of my best childhood memories were in Section 216 of the Coliseum with my friends and family."

The stadium has been mostly empty for a long time; early this month, the announced crowd for a game was 3,035. "You can hear every sound here, every voice, every word, yeah, you can hear it," manager Mark Kotsay said. Mark Canha, who's with the Mets after playing for Oakland, said he's always taking the field at the Coliseum, regardless of the size of the crowd, because he enjoyed interacting with the fans who did turn out. "It was the guys in right field, there's little things," he said. "The people that sit behind this dugout always made it good enough for me."

Average attendance this season is running about 10,000, lowest in Major League Baseball, per the Los Angeles Times. A fans organization is planning a reverse boycott for June 13, hoping to fill the Coliseum "to put a halt to the narrative that the A's must leave Oakland and move to Las Vegas because there are no fans left in Oakland," per Yahoo Sports. One group displayed a banner at Sunday's game in Oakland reading, "Stop blaming us." The fans were asked to take it down. (More Oakland A's stories.)