The Minnesota Twins will make their final trip to the Oakland Coliseum for a three-game series with the Oakland Athletics this weekend. For Twins fans, there aren’t too many memories stuck in that stadium. However, for those who have made the trip to Oakland, it brings a familiar pain and a sense of what could have been a little over two decades ago.
I made the trip to the Coliseum in 2019. Going into the game, I felt like I knew what to expect.
The Twins had played in an outdated stadium for years, appropriately covered from the outside world as they endured a dark stretch after winning World Series titles in 1987 and 1991. My first memories of games at the Metrodome were a large, cavernous building that was more known for being the home of the Minnesota Vikings than anything else.
With this in mind, I thought the Coliseum was an outdoor version of the Metrodome. Somehow, my lowered bar wasn’t even close. There were barbed wire fences lining the outside of the Coliseum and a sign that read H ME OF CHAMPIONS. When we walked in, the seats faded from years of being in the sun and were a mile away from the action, but they were close enough to get impaled by a foul ball on the third baseline.
My friend’s seat was in particularly rough shape. Someone had ripped the armrest off – possibly to use it as a shank during a Raiders game – and pointed toward “Mount Davis,” a 20,000-seat addition used to lure the Raiders back to Oakland in 1995.
Sitting in that seat and looking around, it was like Mad Max had a baseball stadium. However, that was before we walked around the concourses. Wires hung throughout the concourse, and the path was filled with nothing but concrete.
We eventually settled into an era named the Bullit Tavern (or something like that), an attempt by the A’s to add a bar-like feature that most modern stadiums have. However, this bar didn’t have a view of the game and had three or four 40-inch flat screens to keep tabs on the action.
We stumbled into an A’s fan who was a retired police officer and spent the next hour getting drunk in what we thought was a modified broom closet. After telling us horror stories of what happens to opposing fans during Raiders games, the topic finally turned to the stadium.
We talked about the Howard Terminal project and some other stadium proposals that had fallen through in the past. After expressing optimism for the current proposal, he uttered a quote that still sticks with me.
“This place is a s***h***,” The fan said. “But this is our s***h***.”
We left the closet…I mean, bar…once they stopped serving in the seventh inning and watched the end of the game. We got an Uber back to San Francisco, and the next night, we checked out Oracle Park. Still, that trip brought my attention to what has happened in Oakland since that afternoon.
The A’s went on to win 97 games that season but lost to the Tampa Bay Rays in the AL Wild Card Game. Soon after, the front office dismantled the team, with Marcus Semien and Liam Hendriks leaving in free agency while they traded other players like Matt Chapman, Matt Olson, and Sean Murphy.
The losses piled up, and apathy began to grow. Last summer, the Howard Terminal project — which included a $12 billion waterfront ballpark site — fell through. In November 2023, MLB owners voted unanimously to move the Athletics to Las Vegas.
Tuning into a game at the Oakland Coliseum in recent years has been a somber experience. Even when the A’s are on the road, kelly green T-shirts with “SELL” written on them are fans’ way of protesting the events of the past five years. In some ways, the only Twins connection to the Athletics is their victory in Game 5 of the 2002 ALDS, but it runs deeper in some ways.
Before the Twins pulled off that upset, they were fighting off their own death sentence as owner Carl Pohlad volunteered the team for contraction. After spending the winter of 2001 on baseball’s version of Death Row, the Twins survived thanks to an injunction by Hennepin County Judge Harry Crump that mandated the Twins to play their final season under their lease in the Metrodome.
Jacque Jones hit a leadoff home run on Opening Day, and the Twins won their first division title since 2002. Interest spiked under a new cast of players, including Torii Hunter, A.J. Pierzynski, and Doug Mientkiewicz, and a deal to build Target Field was reached in 2006.
Today, the Twins play in one of the best ballparks in baseball while the A’s continue to be in one of the worst. It’s a tough sell for a franchise that has folded up its tent but unfair to a fanbase who filled that stadium anyway – especially when the Moneyball A’s made five playoff appearances in seven seasons from 2000-06 and three straight playoff appearances from 2012-14 and 2018-2020.
In some ways, Oakland fans should have gotten the same reprieve that the Twins received at the turn of the century. It makes for an interesting return to the bay and a final trip to a trashy but significant venue.
