Game #87- Oakland Athletics

Oakland Athletics vs. Texas Rangers Overstock Coliseum April 7th, 2015 The stupid little perks of flying convinced me to head up to Oakland to close out the final CA team on my list…that is until the new LA soccer team takes over for the dismantled Chivas. In order to get A status on Southwest I needed to book 3 round trip flights in 3 months and so the $120 round trip would be worth it. Also, I haven’t visited my old college buddy Greg Kopotic in quite some time and it was perfect to catch up, check out the new digs, and visit his growing family. We headed to the game and I fully expected a completely full parking lot. This was opening week and only the second game of the year, but the A’s only pulled about 15k people. I thought that was crazy because they have had several decent teams over the past couple of years, but it worked out for us. 5th row, right off first base where we could heckle the Texas bullpen (they were warming up about 20 feet from us). With the small crowd the home team did little to bring any excitement to the game. In fact, most of the cheers went to big name Rangers like Price Fielder who slapped in two RBI’s, Adrian Beltre, and the taunting of Shin-Soo Choo. The only lone highlight of the game for the A’s was when Sam Fuld tripled in the 6th inning and scored the lone run on a groundout. Boring game, but fun overall as Greg and I shot the shit for several hours. By the way, Oakland lost 3-1… The one thing I didn’t do was walk around the stadium to find fan areas. Although this team was very popular in the 80’s and the franchise as a whole has won several championships, the Coloseum is a dump and has nothing to offer in terms of fan experience. I have to admit though, the “non bullpen” for the visiting team was fun. Every pitch was met with a “woooooop!”, every throw back to the mound a low “waaaaaaaa…” All the fans around us got into it. We even started shouting out the pitcher making him laugh, good times.