The A’s won’t start Mount Davis in the Coliseum’s last game.
The Oakland Athletics will not be opening Mount Davis for the team’s planned final game at the Oakland Coliseum on September 26 against the Texas Rangers. The last time that the monstrosity in center field was open to fans was back in 2019 for the AL Wild Card game against the Tampa Bay Rays, and the A’s drew 54.005 fans to the ballpark.
The team announced on Thursday that the final game is officially sold out, though that will not include the extra seating options on Mount Davis. The concessions area up there has been neglected for years, and staffing for Mount Davis is also a concern. The fan experience wasn’t the best this past Saturday with the Los Angeles Dodgers in town, and that crowd, while the largest of the year, was still just 35,207. Adding another 20,000 to that number wouldn’t be ideal from a staffing or a fan perspective, especially with the added emotion of this being the final game.
While the news is obviously not what fans were hoping for, at least attempting to make sure that the fans that are in attendance have a good experience at what is presumably their final A’s game at the Coliseum is probably the right call.
The decision is also very on brand for A’s owner John Fisher. With a little bit of upkeep of Mount Davis throughout the years, he could have opened up the extra 20,000 seats for this final game, and at $50 a pop, that’s an extra $1 million. They probably could have charged even more, given that third deck nosebleed seats, the final seats available to the game, were going for over $100 on the A’s official website.
A little upkeep to the Coliseum overall could have also netted the owner a little more goodwill with the fans, and more money over the years. As the Dodgers’ announcers pointed out over the weekend, Dodger Stadium is an older venue than the Coliseum, which shows what a little TLC can do to an older ballpark. Nobody mentions Dodger Stadium as old or rundown. Having gone to a few games there, it’s actually quite an enjoyable experience.
That same lack of attention to detail and resources from Fisher with his own ballpark was intentional as he looked for a money grab elsewhere, but at the same time, it’s costing him money on his way out of the Bay Area.
