Oakland-Alameda/
Network Associates
Coliseum
Major League Baseball Park #6 out of 39
|
Friday, August 27, 1993
Detroit Tigers 13, Oakland 4
W– Tom Bolton L – Todd Van Poppel
Attendance – 21,320 |
25 million
dollars to build the Coliseum -- and two other arenas (1966) -- and 200 million
dollars to ruin it (1996).
Before
Oakland sold its sports stadium soul to Raiders' owner Al Davis, Oakland-Alameda
Coliseum was a beautifully symmetrical, natural-grass, multi-purpose park and it
was the last stop on my first road trip.
By the time
we arrived in late August of 1993, the Athletics were only three seasons removed
from their last World Series appearance, but the only thing larger than all of
that foul-ball territory was the area covered by all those empty seats. Oakland
won championships in 1972, 1973, 1974, and 1989, but anyone who has followed
this franchise for any length of time would get the impression that the only way
to fill that place for a baseball game would be something like free beer night.
The A's didn't reach 1 million in attendance (an average of just over 12,300 a
game) until 1973 and they didn't get there again until 1981.
So there we
were on a Friday night in Oakland watching the Tigers pummel the home team and
having another go-round with a cool gadget from the Interactive Network. I
mentioned this black, lap-sized, wireless machine on my Candlestick page and I
was hoping the company would be able to expand this service beyond the Bay Area
and Chicago, but it was not to be. Brian won a fanny pack and my
batteries died during the 7th inning. I was way ahead of him by then, too.
We also had a
lot of fun scoreboard-watching. In all of these "visiting" parks, I like to follow the home
team and every park has their own way of showing the scores of the other games.
In Oakland, the out-of-town scoreboard is manually operated and the Mariners'
game that night (as I recall, anyway) started out bad (something like they were
down 6-0 early), but while the game in front of us was getting duller by the
minute, the Mariners staged a furious rally and pulled the game 8-7 (or
something like that). Another highlight for this evening as we dreaded returning
to the Kingdome for the rest of the 1993 season.