Feral cats, few fans and lewd acts: is the A’s era in Oakland over?

The first-place New York Yankees, a hit at any box office, invaded Oakland last weekend to face the last-place Athletics. The turnstiles at RingCentral Coliseum were given a rare spin, with 93,719 fans attending the four-game series, or 23,430 per game.

The A’s are still dead last in the major leagues in attendance, though, having drawn a little over 10,000 fans per game this season. That should tell you not just something about the Yankees’ drawing power, but about Oakland as a baseball wasteland.

The A’s are all but a minor-league team, with 56 different players on their roster this season. RingCentral Coliseum, the latest of many names for the stadium that opened in 1966 as the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, is a dump – forlorn, obsolete and riddled with critters. A website sells T-shirts calling the place “Baseball’s Last Dive Bar.”

Just days before the Yankees came to town, the Coliseum attracted the wrong kind of attention when a couple who appeared to be engaged in a sex act were photographed while sitting in the last row of an all-but-empty section during an A’s game. Authorities promised an investigation.

That game drew 9,314, and the three-game series against the Miami Marlins that followed lured a total of 10,559. The A’s, with a $47m payroll that is one-fifth the size of the Yankees’, could use better players, but Oakland really could use a better ballpark.

The A’s want a better ballpark, and so do their loyal fans, but building a replacement has not been that simple. A proposed waterfront site at Howard Terminal is preferred, but progress has been slow, with a $200m hurdle remaining over infrastructure funding.

“I think the fans are worn out,” Joan Riebli, the president of the Oakland Athletics Booster