The Major League Baseball’s Athletics franchise has been the one that has moved the most across the United States over the years. They started in Philadelphia in 1901, moved to Kansas City in 1955, arrived in Oakland in 1968, and from 2028 their new home will be Las Vegas once the modern stadium that will be built on the old Hotel Tropicana is ready.
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As the contract with the city in the Bay Area expires this year, the A's will play for three seasons in Sacramento and this Thursday, September 26, they will play their last game at the Oakland Coliseum against the Texas Rangers.
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Thus, 57 years of history will come to a close, where the A's won four World Series in the city, the last of them in 1989, with an earthquake in between, against the team across the bay, the San Francisco Giants.
Why are the Athletics leaving Oakland?
Legions of Athletics fans consider the team to be the most treacherous in baseball, with their billionaire owner John Fisher, heir to the family that founded The Gap clothing stores, being blamed for the move to Las Vegas.
At the center of all the controversy is the old Coliseum, built in 1966 and considered inappropriate for the demands of major sporting events. Since the Athletics and Major League Baseball were unable to finalize any of the projects for the construction of a new stadium, and did not receive much support from city authorities, they decided to move the franchise to Nevada.
Oakland is left without teams in the main competitions in the United States.
The Athletics are the last team in the major sports leagues in the United States to leave Oakland.
The first to leave were the California Golden Seals, an NHL ice hockey team, that played in the Bay Area between 1967 and 1976. From there, they moved to Cleveland as the Barons for two years and then disappeared after merging with the Minnesota North Stars (now Dallas Stars).
The Raiders of American football were born in Oakland in 1960 as part of the AFL, then merged with the NFL and moved to Los Angeles in 1982. In 1994, they returned to Oakland until finally moving to...Las Vegas in 2019. For them, the issue was also the outdated Coliseum stadium.
The situation of the Golden State Warriors of the NBA is less dramatic, as in 2019 they played their last game at the Oracle Arena in Oakland (the team's home since 1971), they just moved to the other side of the Bay, to the Chase Center in San Francisco. The journey just got longer for the fans. Raiders and Athletics fans, on the other hand, had their beloved team taken away from them.