The right-field bleachers on the Oakland Coliseum have at all times been a well-liked gathering place for fun and frolic, and have been considered one of the few constants within the nearly 60 years the A's have called Oakland home.
There, working-class hooligans gather behind banner-covered railings and transform themselves into drummers, flag-wavers and chant leaders.
This is where Baltimore Orioles Hall of Fame pitcher and underwear model Jim Palmer once spent a sunny July afternoon during a game to brighten up his non-pitcher day. First, Palmer managed to get an umpire to eject him initially of the sport, as he had promised his teammates he would. Then he sneaked into the right-field bleachers, stripped all the way down to his trunks, stretched, and managed to spend the remaining of the sport within the sun without anyone recognizing him.
And it was on this right field area that then-Angels first baseman JT Snow buried a memento nearly 30 years ago that he believed would remain there perpetually.
The beloved former San Francisco Giant remembers throwing balls in right field during early batting practice with the Angels while construction employees poured concrete to construct the constructing that became the eye-catching Mt. Davis in 1995. Some of those employees began yelling at Snow in unison.
“They said, 'Hey, throw us a ball,'” Snow recalled in a recent phone conversation. “So I said, 'OK, I'll give you a ball if you stick my bat in the concrete.'”
After giving the employees a number of balls, Snow handed over his bat and watched because the concrete pump buried his wood into the inspiration of Mount Davis.
“They were super cool guys. They put it on the sidewalk in the front rows. It's still out there,” Snow said. “Every time I came back to Oakland with the Angels or the Giants, I'd tell the guys, 'Hey, my bat's out there!'”
Snow also convinced several of his Angels teammates to sacrifice their bats that day as a part of a everlasting deal. Rex Hudler, who gave up considered one of his bats, was swayed by Snow's exuberance.
“He said, 'Hud, we can put our bats out there in the cement and they'll stay there forever!'”
Unfortunately, the “forever” time within the Colosseum is proscribed today.
Now that the A's are leaving Oakland behind and moving to Sacramento before heading to Las Vegas, the clock is officially ticking on the aging, gray monster and its buried treasures.
Snow, 56, could also be more focused on the inspiration he’s constructing for one more Oakland baseball team as coach of the Ballers across town, but he’s aware that the Coliseum and Mt. Davis will likely be demolished sooner or later.
“If it gets torn down, after it's cleaned up, someone will find a black Louisville Slugger with my name on it,” Snow said.
A 34-inch-tall, 2.2-ounce picket artifact encased in a makeshift time capsule may, over time, be considered one of the last tangible signs that baseball was once played here.
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If A's fans ever need a reminder of the crazy times away from 66th Avenue in Oakland, we're here for you. Here are 4 more odd, one-of-a-kind events on the Coliseum:
1. When a house run shouldn’t be a house run
Carlos May of the Chicago White Sox was a singular baseball player, if only because he’s the one player in major league history to have his birthday printed on the back of his jersey—May was born on May 17, 1948, and wore number 17 (hence “May 17”). He also played without his right thumb after losing it in a mortar accident while serving with the Marine Reserve at Camp Pendleton in the course of the 1969 season.
May is on our list of strange feats on the Coliseum because he committed baseball's cardinal sin: forgetting to the touch home plate.
This happened in 1971, within the second game of MLB's only regular season opener in over 75 years. May, whose devastating thumb injury robbed him of much of his strength, hit a three-run home run against A's starter Rollie Fingers — yes, the Hall of Fame relief pitcher was once a starter. As May rounded third base within the Coliseum, he noticed that he had left the dugout to assemble around home plate to greet him. In his excitement to have a good time with them, May in some way missed the plate.
May was within the dugout when A's catcher Gene Tenace grabbed a brand new ball from the house plate umpire, jogged to the dugout, found May and hit him. May was ruled out after an appeal.
According to Retrosheet.orgThere have been nearly 400 times in baseball history where a house run has been disallowed for one reason or one other – often resulting from weather, missed bases or misjudgments about where the ball actually landed. What's notable concerning the May incident is that it's the one documented case in MLB history where a player who hit a ball over the fence was ejected for not touching home plate.
2. The Oakland “Black Sox”?
When Rickey Henderson got here near setting the main league record for stolen bases in a season in 1982, A's manager Billy Martin was determined to have the Oakland speedster break the record on the Coliseum. Mission completed should you asked the Detroit Tigers, the A's opponent that late August afternoon.
Instead of witnessing history, the 17,098 spectators witnessed perhaps probably the most heinous moment on the sphere on the Coliseum. Some said Oakland had not been so disgraced on a field since former Oakland High star Chick Gandil led the White Sox players in the course of the infamous “Black Sox” scandal of 1919.
On the last day before leaving for a 10-game road trip, Henderson made his final at-bat in the underside half of the eighth inning, needing a stolen base to match Lou Brock's record of 118 steals. Henderson hit a single, but steals were out of the query because the slow Fred Stanley was now on second base after drawing a leadoff walk.
Stanley arranged this when he was finally “picked up” at second base to clear a path for Henderson to steal. After making the pickoff throw at second base, Alan Trammell immediately recognized what gave the impression to be a desperate ploy to assist Rickey when Stanley, who had an unusually large lead, walked as much as him and called for the Tigers' shortstop to select him up. However, Trammell stayed a number of steps away from Stanley and refused to select him up. Eventually, Stanley jogged to 3rd base and was finally picked up.
With nobody else on base except Henderson, Rickey ran to second base to steal the following pitch. It looked like he had stolen the bottom, but second base umpire Durwood Merrill called him out, perhaps on principle.
Afterward, Tigers manager Sparky Anderson said “the integrity of the game had been tainted” because he believed Stanley and plenty of others had been deliberately forced off the sphere. Exaggeration or not, Anderson said of the A's actions: “This was worse than the Black Sox scandal.”
Martin, Stanley and Anderson were all fined for “playing in a way that aroused public suspicion,” AL President Lee MacPhail said.
3. A World Series – for the primary time … and for the last time
In Game 5 of the 1972 World Series, Cincinnati Reds Hall of Fame second baseman Joe Morgan prevented the hometown A's from winning their first World Series title on the Coliseum. (They settled for winning the championship two days later in Cincinnati.)
Morgan, the previous Castlemont High star, made a standout play within the second half of the ninth inning: He bumped into foul territory to catch a pop fly, slipped on the grass after which hit a strike on the plate to throw out pinch-runner John “Blue Moon” Odom, who was attempting to rating the tying point.
Morgan's iconic play gave the Reds a 5-4 victory and marked the primary and only time within the 120-year history of the World Series that a game ended with a fly ball double play.
4. Additional runs in extra innings
On July 3, 1983, A's fans watched their team make one more comeback in Major League history.
Oakland fought back to tie the sport at 4-4 within the second half of the ninth inning, but lost 16-4 two hours later when the Rangers scored an MLB-record 12 runs within the fifteenth inning.
Texas sent 16 batters to the plate and managed eight hits and 4 walks, while the A's committed an error and a wild pitch within the fifteenth inning, causing the sport to last 5 hours and 19 minutes.
The 12 runs scored by Texas are still probably the most runs scored in an additional inning by a team in MLB history.
The Rangers' outburst surpassed a Ruthian effort by a mile – it was yet another run than The Babe and the remaining of the 1928 Yankees' lineup scored while setting the old extra-inning record with 11 runs in the highest of the twelfth inning in a 12-1 win over Detroit.
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