Athletics win final game in Oakland before sellout crowd - ESPN

OAKLAND, Calif. — Everybody said goodbye to Oakland Athletics baseball in their own way on Thursday afternoon.

After 57 seasons at the Coliseum — and decades of indecision and vitriol swirling around the team's future — the A's played their final game in Oakland before a massive crowd on a bright and gorgeous Bay Area afternoon.

The crowd was raucous, the mood festive and the fans engaged from the first pitch. The afternoon started early. The parking lot, scheduled to open at 8 a.m. — more than 4 1/2 hours before first pitch — instead opened at 7 a.m. after the line of cars waiting to get into the stadium backed up traffic on I-880.

The fans gathered in the lots to cook breakfast, drink beer and alternate chants between «Sell The Team» and «Let's Go Oakland.» A man who has made a side hustle of impersonating A's president Dave Kaval roamed the parking lot in a suit and tie, never breaking character. Fans, if they chose, could have purchased a margarita or psychedelic mushrooms from the small-business popups on the pedestrian bridge connecting BART to the Coliseum.

«People who have never been here will look at this scene and be surprised,» said longtime A's fan Jorge Leon, the president of the Oakland 68s, a community-based fan group. «To those of us who have been coming here since we were kids, this is just what it's always been before everybody got tired of being lied to.»

The A's announced a deal to move to Las Vegas in April 2023, and this past April they announced a three- to four-year stay in a minor-league stadium — Sutter Health Park — in West Sacramento, beginning next year. The team's lease at the Coliseum ended after the final out Thursday, and negotiations between the city and the A's on an extension fell