The 1979 Athletics Could Teach Us Something About Social Distancing
There’s a lot of talk these days about what baseball would be like if the sport were to start the 2020 season with no fans in the stands.
It’s all about social distancing in a time of COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.
The Oakland A’s have been there. It was the 1979 season, and the downtrodden A’s, saddled with the residue left behind after the first waves of free agency gutted the 1972-73-74 World Series champs, were terrible.
They lost two of every three games they played, finishing at 54-108.
Who would come to watch this team? It turns out, almost nobody could come up with a good reason. The A’s home attendance was 306,763. For 21 of those games, one-quarter of the home schedule, the attendance was under 2,000.
The absolute nadir of that was on this day 41 years ago when an April 17, 1979 game between the Seattle Mariners and the A’s drew 653 hardiest of the diehards.
That was social distancing. You want a section or three to call your own? No problem. Take your pick.
It was a breezy, cool evening in the East Bay, and no one was there. Well, almost no one. I was there, covering the game for Hayward-based The Daily Review. Armed with a press pass, I didn’t count against the announced total.
Almost no one did. The night before, nearly 3,000 had showed up to watch the A’s and the M’s, but then it was a half-price ticket night promotion.
I was there for that one, too, and the 2,938 sitting in the Coliseum on that Monday made it seem the Coliseum was on lockdown. So, when I showed up on Tuesday, it was pretty clear that we were going where no team had gone before.
That night turned out to be one of the first times I left the press box and went down into the stands, knowing that the story wasn’t on the field.
I don’t have a copy of the story I wrote that night, but I do remember that of the people I talked to in the first and second decks of the Coliseum were cold and couldn’t wait to get out of there. Leaving before the last pitch was socially acceptable.
I’m guessing the 653 total announced, which still stands as the modern-day record for lowest attendance, doubled the actual total of people in the stands. I talked to about a dozen people, and it seemed as if I’d talked to everybody in the place.
En route to a 6-5 win, A’s players took to trying to count the number of people – count them by hand, mind you. If players talked loudly enough, they could carry on a conversation with someone in the second deck. And they did.
A year later, owner Charlie Finley would hire Billy Martin and the attendance would rebound enough that the Walter A. Haas family would see fit to buy the franchise. On April 17, 1981, the A’s had opened the season with eight straight wins, and on Friday, April 17, 50,255 showed up.
They’d forgotten all about social distancing by that point.
Follow Athletics insider John Hickey on Twitter: @JHickey3
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