A eulogy for baseball’s mighty band of cartoon superheroes, the Oakland A’s

It was more than 50 years ago now. I was a little prepubescent mouth-breathing snot with hair in his eyes and a back pocket full of baseball cards.

The World Series that year was nicknamed “The Hairs Vs. the Squares.” The Squares in this case were the Cincinnati Reds, a collection of square-shouldered, clean-shaven, corn-fed ballplayers with Eisenhower-era haircuts and clunky black shoes.

But my rooting sympathies fell immediately on the other side. I was squarely with the Hairs. They were, of course, the Oakland A’s, often called in those days the “Swingin’ A’s,” though that salacious, 1970s-soaked double entendre was lost on me at the time. 

The A’s were wild, man. Shag cuts and facial hair, dressed in gecko green and beach-sun yellow. They had a swamp dog pitcher named Catfish, a phenom named Blue decked out in green. And, of course, they had the superstar Reggie Jackson who brought an unmistakable Muhammad Ali swagger to baseball in those days. My 9-year-old mind couldn’t quite comprehend that a human was actually named Rollie Fingers, which sounded like a cheap card trick, or something you’d call a dirty old man behind his back. 

The Swingin’ A’s beat the Reds that year for the World Series championship, and as a kid eager to run away from the stultifying traditionalism of my parents’ era and into the arms of the exciting free-for-all of the ’70s, I loaded all kinds of symbolic meaning onto the A’s win.

When Major League Baseball’s regular season ends Sunday, the Oakland A’s will officially be part of baseball’s past. For months now, the Bay Area sports media and the internet have been sizzling with laments over the injustice of billionaire owner John Fisher prying the A’s loose from Oakland for a bizarre, even sleazy scheme to drag the team through Sacramento on the way to Las Vegas. From the “SELL” T shirts to the social-media diatribes, every conceivable flavor of outrage and disgust has been expressed about the team’s relocation. 

But, much in the same way that a person’s life deserves a deeper assessment than the circumstances of their ugly demise, the A’s at this moment deserve something more than outrage and disgust.

I speak, of course, as if the team itself were folding, which is not the case. But I share the sentiment of many of the A’s fans that I know — the end of the Oakland A’s is the end of fandom, certainly of this particular franchise, maybe even baseball altogether. 

So, let’s raise a toast for, what is for many fans, a wake for the Oakland Athletics, a team that began, it should be noted, with another sordid relocation scheme by another greedy owner at the expense of another city. 

Unlike many A’s fans, I didn’t glom onto the team because they were my local team. I grew up three time zones away during the mustachioed era of the ’70s. I connected with them because they stood out. In the otherwise conservative world of baseball, they were the ones comfortable in letting their freak flags fly (of course, the Oakland Raiders in the NFL were singing from the same hymnal). To this day, most sports teams, college and professional, tend to embrace as a kind of metaphorical guiding principle the self-serious ethics of a military unit. The A’s were more like a Saturday morning cartoon than a team of Navy SEALs. There was a comic-book vividness to them. Reggie’s swagger was a superhero move. Vida Blue and Sal Bando sounded like names you might find in a Justice League comic. 

And they dominated on the field. The A’s are still the only team in MLB history not called the New York Yankees to have won three straight championships. As a kid in the Nixon era, I had no defenses against that kind of appeal.

Fast forward almost 20 years later. I had landed in Northern California, and the A’s were indeed my local team. Legendary radio announcers Bill King and Lon Simmons were my daily companions. I remember attending Fan Appreciation Day at the Oakland Coliseum in 1990, the year the A’s were the defending World Series champs. It’s the custom on that day for the home team to line up along the third-base line for the benefit of us, the fans. The Swingin’ A’s of the Charlie Finley era were long gone, but these A’s carried that same kind of larger-than-life, superhero vibe. Rickey Henderson seemed like the fastest human on the planet. Whenever he got to first base, the entire complexion of the game changed. Bash Brothers Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire seemed so absurdly brawny, they looked fake (turns out, they were). Pitcher Dave Stewart had a death stare that seemed like it could melt steel. And, with his long hair, mustache and chutzpah, Dennis Eckersley was the time traveler, dropping in from the Swingin’ A’s days. 

I saw all those guys, plus Carney and Hendu and all the other supporting players, lined up tipping their caps to the crowd, and I was convinced I would never see a better baseball team, or a more appealing one. Almost 35 years later, that still holds. 

The unacknowledged heroes of that era were the Haas family, which owned the team and, perhaps to the detriment of their bottom line, gave Oakland and the A’s diaspora exactly what they wanted and deserved. Since then, the team’s owners have generally been terrible, and the team has been perpetually playing catch-up in the pitiless capitalism that rules big-league baseball. But somehow, despite the relentless turnover of players, managers and owners, the A’s have maintained a kind of renegade fighting spirit, as if the green-and-gold held some kind of bewitching influence over those around it. 

Despised current owner John Fisher has already shown he is utterly deaf to the wishes of Oakland’s fan base. But, in fact, Fisher would be doing A’s fans an immense favor if, at this point, he just changed the team’s name and colors, so we could all mourn properly and not have to deal with some wax-museum simulacrum taking the field in a small-time Sacramento minor-league park and then in some grotesque show palace in Vegas. 

Give us this one dignity. Allow us to give the A’s a decent burial. Then you can call your team whatever best suits it … like, for instance, the Squares. 

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