They played the last major league baseball game ever in Oakland Thursday. The A’s plan to move to Sacramento for three years as they await a stadium – which isn’t even in the planning stages yet – to be built.
How City of Oakland and the A’s ownership got into this mess doesn’t affect me one way or another, though I do give the team a hat tip for wearing those classic green-and-gold uniforms for the final home game.
The A’s beat the Texas Rangers 3-2 and afterward, the sellout crowd stayed and … celebrated? Mourned?
It’s one of those sports moments when nobody really knows what to do.
It’s also one of the saddest sports moments, when a team and/or a city and/or a stadium are to be no more.
Particularly in baseball, where nostalgia runs deep and sentiment is always in the on-deck circle. (Yes, even in Oakland.)
I watched the final out — and subsequent whatever-that-was that followed — and thought of Mansfield native Vida Blue and Catfish Hunter and Rollie Fingers’ mustache and Barry Zito’s curveball and Rickey Henderson stealing third base and proclaiming “today I am the greatest” after breaking Lou Brock’s record.
And I couldn’t help but think about baseball stadiums in Shreveport.
SPAR Stadium and Fair Grounds Field – two dramatically different structures with two wildly different histories. Both are still standing (insert your own joke here) but both are empty as far as professional baseball is concerned.
I was at the last game ever played at SPAR Stadium because I desperately wanted to be. I wasn’t at the last game played at Fair Grounds Field because I was determined not to be.
A crowd of 1,539 came out on the last day of August, 1985, to watch the final game at SPAR Stadium, a facility that had long outlived its usefulness. Future MLB players Robby Thompson and Matt Nokes were in the starting lineup for the Captains, who won 9-3.
That part was meaningless to me and it wasn’t as if the Captains were going away. (They moved a few miles away to Fair Grounds Field for the 1986 season).
But SPAR Stadium was the first baseball facility I had ever seen. I saw two major league exhibitions played there. I played there during American Legion summer baseball. I got Joe DiMaggio’s autograph there. I saw Darryl Strawberry get mercilessly heckled there. I saw Denny McLain pitch there, just five years after he had posted one of the greatest individual seasons in the history of baseball.
And I still remembered that thrilling feeling I’d get when my father would tell us to load up get in the car because we were going to see a game.
Fresh out of college, I cut my sports writer teeth by covering the Captains night after night at SPAR Stadium.
So on that final night, yeah, I shed a tear or two as I drove away, knowing that no more memories would be made at SPAR Stadium.
When the end came for Fair Grounds Field, however, it was a different story. In that case, minor league baseball was going away to a different city in a different state and though independent league baseball would try to take its place, that never worked.
That Captains had been sold and became the Swamp Dragons, which pretty much summed it all up – going from a traditional nickname to a goofy, let’s-do-something-different nickname. The locally-owned team was sold to a corporation and run by a general manager who lasted about a week after the higher-ups saw how Shreveport wasn’t buying what they were selling.
After two years (2001-02), it was obvious that the end was coming fast so I decided to make that one last visit to Fair Grounds Field, where I had joyously been a part of a baseball renaissance in the late 1980s and early ‘90s.
It wasn’t the final night at FGF, but it was close to the end of the season. And it was sad in so many ways that were completely different than what it had been like that final night at SPAR Stadium.
I left in the fifth inning because it was time to go. Not just for me, but for minor league baseball.
Stadiums come and go. Franchises come and go.
But memories don’t.
Contact JJ at johnjamesmarshall@yahoo.com