Death of a Sports Town Part 5: The Curtain Closes on the Oakland A's (Encore)

ESPN Daily

ESPN

Sports

4.6 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 1 January 2025

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On September 26th, 2024, the Athletics played their final game ever in Oakland, the city they’ve called home for 57 years. As friend of the show Jeff Passan wrote, baseball in the East Bay was “killed by greed… John Fisher did not have to move this team… This was a choice. A wrong one. History will sneer.” For the conclusion of our Death of a Sports Town series, we trekked to the Oakland Coliseum and bore witness to the sights, sounds, and emotions of a city’s last gasp as a big time pro sports town. It was a poignant and passionate display from a vibrant and rich fanbase, defiant to the very end. Today, we share that experience with you. Check out the playlist, featuring our favorite stories of 2024. Death of a Sports Town Episodes: Apple Podcasts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, & Part 4 Spotify: All episodes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Happy New Year, everybody.
0:03.1	Michelle Steele here to kick off the final installment of our series Death of a Sports Town.
0:09.2	This is a really special episode as our dutiful host, Clinton Yates and series reporter Tim Kuhn
0:15.5	went to witness the final athletics game ever at the Oakland Coliseum.
0:26.1	This originally ran on October 1st and much like the whole series, it's a bittersweet episode, but I hope you enjoy it nonetheless.
0:32.2	I have to say before we start our trek, Clinton, I'm really not great with heights.
0:38.5	And I had a little moment at the top where I thought, you know,
0:42.0	completely unwarranted where I thought maybe.
0:44.4	Okay.
0:44.7	Where are we actually trying to go?
0:46.3	Let me take a moment to explain what you're hearing here.
0:49.5	This is the sound of our intrepid reporter Tim Kewen and myself
0:53.4	when we were sizing up a structure that we spent a lot of time discussing over the past several weeks.
0:59.1	I don't know if my fear is heights or like edges.
1:03.3	Yeah.
1:03.5	Yeah.
1:04.0	Those tend to come at the same time, though.
1:06.0	They are linked fears, I would say.
1:08.2	We were standing inside of the Oakland Coliseum on the front row of the structure that has come to be known as Mount Davis.
1:16.7	The giant grandstand built to lure the Raiders back to Oakland in 1995 and named for Al Davis, of course, the longtime owner of that football team.
1:29.5	And this would be the same grandstand whose construction cooked this city's finances for decades and hamstrung its ability to finance
1:35.4	new stadiums for both the raiders and the a's where i'm not going to the top okay i've refused to go
	...

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