Tag: Oakland Athletics

A’s security made almost no effort to stop a fan from running around the field before a game

What’s worse? The A’s or their stadium security?

As an organization, the Oakland Athletics are a complete mess. Ownership has alienated the fanbase and appears set to relocate to Las Vegas. In turn, attendance has been awful, so we can’t really blame security at Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum for not caring. After all, nobody associated with the team seems to care either.

But this was still wild to see.

Ahead of Sunday’s game between the Athletics and Astros, a fan ran onto the field from the left-field stands, ran towards second base, rounded first base, stomped on home plate and returned to the section without any member of stadium security posing much resistance.

The best effort was made by some member of the groundscrew who tried to trip him around third base. But for the most part, he was allowed to run around the field freely.

This wasn’t the first time A’s security had failed to stop a fan from running on the field and escaping either. It happened back in 2019 with a fan climbing over the right-field wall.

Yet, this lap around the field seemed different. Security had no interest in intervening at all.

No wonder fans had jokes about that pregame scene.

WATCH: Najee Harris has fun throwing first pitch for Oakland Athletics

Former Alabama football star Najee Harris has a lot of fun throwing out the first pitch for the Oakland Athletics on Friday night!

Throwing out the first pitch at a baseball game has become quite the tradition across the great United States of America. From presidents, gold medalists, actors, singers, and all other sorts of celebrities, the first pitch has become synonymous with America’s pastime.

On Friday night, a former Alabama football star was able to participate in the throwing of the first pitch, and I am not sure anyone has ever enjoyed their time on the mound as much as [autotag]Najee Harris[/autotag] did in Oakland.

In the video below you can see the Pittsburgh Steelers starting running back soak in the spotlight as he delivered a strike in front of his hometown crowd.

Take a look!

Harris’ infectious personality led to him being a fan-favorite in Tuscaloosa and that has certainly carried over into his NFL career!

Roll Tide Wire will continue to monitor Najee and all of the former Alabama football stars now in the NFL. 

Contact/Follow us @RollTideWire on Twitter, and like our page on Facebook to follow ongoing coverage of Alabama news, notes, and opinion. You can also follow Stacey Blackwood on Twitter @Blackwood89.

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MLB fans crushed A’s ownership after attendance dropped to 2,500 in the saddest scene at Oakland Coliseum

Oakland deserves so much better.

Five years ago, the city of Oakland was the home for three major professional sports teams. And it’s becoming increasingly certain that the number will drop to zero in the near future.

After word that the Oakland Athletics and chairman John Fisher reached a binding agreement with Las Vegas to build a new MLB stadium, the long-suffering A’s fans had largely seen enough. While there have been calls to show up and protest in the stadium, most of the fanbase has seemingly opted to boycott games at the awful Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum instead.

That’s what brought us the scene for Tuesday night’s game between the A’s and Mariners. While A’s pitcher Mason Miller threw seven hitless innings, he did so in front of a listed attendance of 2,583.

Again, it’s important to note that these sad scenes aren’t the fault of the A’s fanbase. They’ve had to deal with the stingiest ownership, a torn-down roster and by far the worst stadium in baseball. Fisher has done nothing to deserve decent attendance, and his move to abandon Oakland was a breaking point for many.

A’s fans deserve better, and MLB Twitter certainly agreed.

Bryan Reynolds’ Pirates extension leaves just 3 MLB teams to never sign a player for $100M

The Pirates have broken the nine-figure seal, and only these squads remain.

On Tuesday, the Pittsburgh Pirates made it official.

According to ESPN’s Jeff Passan, they extended former 2021 All-Star Bryan Reynolds to an eight-year, $106.75 million contract extension. The deal should ideally keep the 28-year-old in Pittsburgh until the 2030s.

But the prospects of Reynolds’ extension had the Pirates finally making some franchise history. He will be their first-ever player to sign a contract worth at least $100 million.

After Pittsburgh broke this new ground, that leaves just three squads who have never rostered a player of at least $100 million. Three squads who may have made the occasional offer but couldn’t quite seal the deal and who otherwise have perhaps never put themselves out there long enough.

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The Chicago White Sox, Oakland Athletics, and Kansas City Royals.

While I’d like to say it’s wholly unrelated, it might not be unrelated that the White Sox, Athletics, and Royals own three of the four worst records in all of baseball right now. From this respect, Kansas City and Oakland are more understandable — they have two of the lowest total payrolls in the MLB.

The White Sox, however, are in 14th, despite not having a player with a minimum $100 million contract.

Who’s going to break the $100 million seal next? Maybe it’s about the franchise that will first have a player actually worth that kind of money. On that note: Let’s not hold our breath.

The A’s are so bad that the Rangers unexpectedly needed to let a relief pitcher hit for himself

He got heckled by his own teammates.

The entire concept of pitchers hitting for themselves (aside from Shohei Ohtani) was supposed to end when Major League Baseball instituted the universal DH last season. But the Oakland Athletics are just so bad that the Rangers felt the need to briefly bring back pitchers hitting.

It’s been a rough week — and season, really — for the A’s. We learned this week that the A’s are set to relocate to Las Vegas, and on the field, they’re looking like one of the worst teams in MLB history.

Saturday’s game against the Rangers was especially sad with Oakland needing just three innings to trail by nine runs. That score eventually ballooned to 18-3 in the eighth inning. Now, the Rangers didn’t expect to keep scoring when they subbed for Nathaniel Lowe with DH Brad Miller — thus losing the DH. But the A’s were simply helpless out there with position player Jace Peterson on the mound.

That gave Josh Sborz the most unexpected at-bat of his career.

When Sborz stepped to the plate in the eighth inning, it was clear that he had zero intention of swinging. Now, this probably would have been more intimidating for Sborz had he needed to face an actual pitcher, but Peterson is a position player. Sborz saw four pitches — all under 60 mph — and struck out looking.

The best part had to be the bullpen’s reaction. They were so unimpressed and heckled him the whole time.

MLB fans also had thoughts about the whole scene. As funny as it was from the Rangers’ perspective, it had to be so embarrassing for the A’s.

Fans ripped Raiders owner Mark Davis for criticizing Athletics’ potential move to Las Vegas

Who knows where the A’s could have gotten that idea?

For nearly 40 years, the Oakland Athletics and now Las Vegas Raiders were tenants of the same venue — the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum.

However, both spent quite a bit of time and effort in recent decades trying to leave the aging and out-of-date stadium. For the Raiders, that culminated in a move to Las Vegas and a brand-new, state-of-the-art facility, Allegiant Stadium, in 2019.

Now, it seems those franchises could reside in the same city, once again. The Athletics announced earlier this week that they purchased land on the Las Vegas Strip to build a new stadium of their own, which is expected to be completed by 2027.

It’s worth noting that the current lease at the Coliseum expires in 2024, so it’s unclear what the team plans to do in the meantime.

Still, with the move to Sin City seeming inevitable, one would think Las Vegas sports fans would be thrilled to land a Major League Baseball team, which would become the city’s third professional franchise.

One Vegas resident, however, was not: Raiders owner Mark Davis.

Davis is not happy that the Athletics are leaving Oakland without a deal after, as he put it, making it “impossible” for the Raiders to build a stadium on the Coliseum site. He didn’t mince words when criticizing the team’s approach in an interview with the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

“I won’t forget what they did to us in Oakland,” he said. “They squatted on a lease for 10 years and made it impossible for us to build on that stadium. They were looking for a stadium. We were looking for a stadium. They didn’t want to build a stadium, and then went ahead and signed a 10-year lease with the city of Oakland and said, ‘We’re the base team.’

“They marketed the team as ‘Rooted in Oakland.’ That’s been their mantra through the whole thing. The slogans they’ve been using have been a slap to the face of the Raiders, and they were trying to win over that type of mentality in the Bay Area. Well all they did was (expletive) the Bay Area. For them to leave Oakland without anything is pretty screwed up because that site that the stadium was on was a good site. We ended up in Las Vegas, which is absolutely fantastic and couldn’t be better, but the A’s never gave us a real good chance to stay up in Oakland.”

While Davis may have some valid points about the A’s making it difficult for the Raiders to remain in the Bay Area, the apparent hypocrisy of a man who moved his team from Oakland to Las Vegas criticizing another franchise for doing the same was not lost on baseball fans.

Oakland unbelievably lost all three of its pro sports teams in just 5 years

This city and these fanbases deserved so much better.

News of the Oakland Athletics officially finalizing plans for a new stadium in Las Vegas will hit one place harder than most.

The loyal professional sports fans that actually reside in the city of Oakland.

When the Athletics leave for Nevada, their departure will mark Oakland losing its third and final pro sports team in the last four years. The Golden State Warriors, while still in the Bay Area, actually play their home games in San Francisco now and have since 2019. Meanwhile, the Raiders made their move to Las Vegas official in 2020.

Now, after years of the Athletics hurting their fans by not investing much in the on-field product, they, too, will leave for Las Vegas. It’s a sad story for a city that undoubtedly had so much love for the Athletics, Warriors, and Raiders. These respective fanbases deserved better. They deserved someone to cheer for.

Sports fans reacted similarly to Oakland’s latest huge pro sports team loss on Twitter.

Oakland A’s new Las Vegas stadium: Everything we know about MLB team’s possible desert move

It looks like the move to Las Vegas could be starting for the Oakland Athletics.

We knew this was coming, perhaps for years: The Oakland A’s appear to be starting a relocation to Las Vegas.

The franchise that’s struggled after years of thriving in the “Moneyball” era with a low payroll has another, bigger problem: The Athletics desperately need a new stadium beyond the dump that is the Oakland-Alameda Coliseum — ranked last in our 2023 stadium rankings and rightfully so — but proposals and negotiations with Oakland fizzled.

Now? There’s a move that could signal the beginning of the end of professional baseball in Oakland and a new ballpark in Las Vegas. Let’s break down what we know as of Thursday morning:

MLB fans debated where to put a new team amid expansion talk and they’re all wrong

There are A LOT of interesting possibilities on the table.

At the moment, the MLB stands at a nice and even 30 teams throughout the whole league. That could stand to change to at least 31 squads in the coming years.

According to a report from ESPN’s Jeff Passan, former Utah Jazz owner Gail Miller is heading up a group to bring an expansion MLB franchise to Salt Lake City. Miller’s group’s bid joins Nashville and Portland in lobbying efforts to get the league to add a new team into its pantheon.

The same report states there do not appear to be any immediate plans for expansion until the respective futures of the Oakland Athletics and Tampa Bay Rays are settled. Both organizations have struggled with attendance while seeking new stadiums. However, commissioner Rob Manfred has previously made it known he’d like to eventually reach 32 MLB franchises.

This expansion talk raised an interesting question for fans: Where do you want the league to bring professional baseball?

While there were a lot of intriguing proposals here, they’re all wrong. All of them!

Salt Lake City? Pass.

Las Vegas? Been there, done that. (Plus, the Athletics might go there.)

Nashville? Sorry, wrong Tennessee city!

The MLB should consider adding a new expansion team first in New Orleans. I know it’s downright hot and muggy there through most of the summer months — but how is that any different from other warm-weather teams and cities?

The city already has established a passionate following for the New Orleans Saints and New Orleans Pelicans. Adding baseball to the summer schedule for one of the best towns in the United States is a no-brainer. Imagine being able to go to a baseball game in New Orleans before chilling out in the French Quarter at night.

Talk about a sports night in heaven. Make it happen, MLB!