SAN JOSE, Calif. — The A’s impending move to Las Vegas had left me sort of … well, unmoved. Aside from feeling badly for the faithful A’s fans, I’d mostly taken a pragmatic, almost apathetic view that comes from spending more than three decades as a journalist.
Until I remembered an 8-year-old boy from my childhood. I wondered how he’d be handling John Fisher’s decision to forever uproot the A’s from Oakland.
See, we grew up in a neighborhood about three miles from the Coliseum. When the A’s played at home back then, you listened for fireworks coming from the stadium because it meant the A’s had won. While we all played in our dimly lit court on those summer nights, the boy often seemed distracted, as if waiting for the loud, rhythmic blasts of validation.
