Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, the fifth-oldest stadium in Major League Baseball and the home of the A’s since 1968, has been called baseball’s last dive bar. A brutalist concrete doughnut short on grandeur and long on character, seated next to a Bart station at the center of an industrial waste land, no one could ever mistake it for the sport’s revered old cathedrals such as Boston’s Fenway Park, Chicago’s Wrigley Field or Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles.
When I paid the princely sum of $2 for a ticket to a recent Wednesday afternoon game against the Cubs, the stadium was just as cavernous, threadbare, outdated and unfashionable as advertised, managing to combine all the regrettable features of the dozen-plus cookie-cutter multipurpose stadiums that popped up throughout the US in the 1960s and 70s. Schoolkids in loosely assembled groups scampered excitedly through the aisles and about the large swathes of empty outfield seats. The trough-style urinals in the men’s rooms were leaky and rusted and the stained-concrete concourses stank of stale beer. All in all, the last place you’d take someone you were trying to impress. Naturally, I loved it.
