In recent years, Oakland has had the dubious distinction of losing three: basketball’s Warriors, baseball’s Athletics and football’s Raiders, who left town twice.
“Goodbye, Oakland: Winning, Wanderlust and a Sport’s Town Fight for Survival” (Triumph Books, 256 pages, $18.98, April 22, 2025) by Andy Dolich and Dave Newhouse covers what happened.
Dolich and Newhouse both had front row seats on the flight of the pro teams. Dolich, 78, is a marketing executive who worked for the A’s in the 1980s when the Haas family owned the team. Newhouse, 86, a longtime journalist and sportswriter and columnist for the Oakland Tribune, retired in 2011.
First published in 2023, this year’s updated new paperback edition includes the A’s decision to leave Oakland last season for West Sacramento, and ultimately to a new ballpark in Las Vegas. The Raiders moved to Las Vegas in 2020, while the Warriors relocated across the bay to San Francisco’s Chase Center in 2019.
The book’s 23 chapters detail the ups and downs of being a sports fan in Oakland. Maybe the A’s were cursed from the start. They arrived in 1968 after moving from Kansas City, Missouri, which didn’t go over well in the Midwest. The book quotes Missouri Sen. Stuart Symington, who at the time called Oakland “the luckiest city since Hiroshima.”
But the Oakland A’s, like the Warriors and Raiders, brought happiness and pride to the city and the Bay Area with numerous national championships through the years.
One hot streak was during the 1970s, when the A’s won World Series in 1972, 1973 and 1974. The Warriors were NBA champions in 1975, and the Raiders won the Super Bowl in 1976.
“This is a five-year period where one American city won five national titles in three sports in a five-year span,” the authors write.
And the wins continued. The Warriors held championship parades in Oakland as recently as 2018.
But Newhouse doesn’t think professional teams will return to Oakland, even though he and Dolich believe fans will turn out for games. It’s up to team owners to want to be there.
“Oakland has no chance of expansion because people look down on Oakland,” Newhouse said in a recent interview from his home.
Dolich writes how he helped the Haas family, who owned the A’s during the 1980s, increase attendance by reaching out to the local community and coming up with memorable advertising campaigns.
“No baseball franchise was as imaginative, or fan-friendly, as ours,” Dolich writes.
In 1990, the team drew 2.9 million fans. That number dropped to 701,000 in 2021 when the Fisher family owned the team, although the book concedes that COVID protocols may have affected the turnout.
The book also focuses on the Raiders and Warriors, with chapters devoted to players and owners including Rick Barry, Al Davis and Joe Lacob; it also devotes pages to A’s managers Tony La Russa and Billy Martin.
Newhouse says that billionaire owners of professional sports teams will continue to relocate when they want a new facility.
“If you don’t build them a new stadium every 20 or 30 years, they leave,” he says.
The post Updated ‘Goodbye, Oakland’ covers the demise of pro sports the East Bay city appeared first on Local News Matters.