A's Fans "Reverse Boycott" Shows There's Plenty of Fight in Oakland
The atmosphere outside of the Oakland Coliseum ahead of Tuesday night's "reverse boycott" gave the same vibes as a playoff game. Only for A's fans, the stakes are higher than October baseball. If this ends up in a losing battle, there will be no more Oakland A's.
That is why 27,759 fans showed up on Tuesday night.
People have made fun of the A's attendance for years, but Tuesday's reverse boycott was the fan's opportunity to change that narrative. The idea was to pick a game that typically wouldn't be well attended and landed on June 13 against the Tampa Bay Rays. Monday's game drew 4,848 fans, and there were more people than that in the parking lot three hours before Tuesday's game.
Fans outside talked about how big a part of their life the A's have been, and how difficult it would be if the team moved away. They turned their frustration into passion that was felt on the field. "If you want to use the word anger, it wasn't directed at the players" Mark Kotsay said after the game. "We felt the energy on the fan's side, supporting us passionately. You could feel them wanting us to win that game."
Win they did, 2-1, behind a career-best seven innings from Hogan Harris, who said he hadn't thrown that many frames since 2018 when he was in college. Harris gave up one run in the fifth.
In that fifth, A's fans staged a (mostly) silent protest for the first batter of the inning when the nearly 28,000 fans in attendance turned the volume all the way down. After Jose Siri laced a double down the left field line, the crowd burst back to life with chants of "sell the team! Sell the team!" directed at team owner John Fisher. "The double down the line in the complete silence was a little eerie. When [the fans] turned it back on, Hogan couldn't hear his pitch com."
Harris said that he'd never pitched in an atmosphere quite like the one the fans provided on Tuesday night. "Whenever I have the pitch com turned up to 20 and I can't hear it, I guess that tells you something. Then they did the whole 'shhh thing' and that's when I turned the pitch com back down, then they yelled again and it was like 'oh my god I don't know what's happening.' But it was absolutely wild."
The fans were just outstanding tonight. They wanted to prove a point, and they got the whole baseball world to watch as they not only beat the best team in baseball, but they chanted through people's television sets all game long.
I have been to a lot of baseball games at the Coliseum, and the crowd for the reverse boycott is one of the best ones I have ever witnessed. Not in terms of size, but in terms of volume. That includes playoff games.
Trevor May is one of the veterans on this club, and he got the final three outs to seal the win. Postgame he said "it felt like a playoff game. I've played in playoff games in both New York stadiums, and that's what it's like right there. It was a lot of fun."