Former Oakland Athletic and the late Mitchell Page who passed away in 2011 in is sleep was the star player for the A’s in 1979 as the A’s were selling off players during that period (file photo Major League Baseball Hall of Fame)

2022 A’s Redux of 1979?

That’s Amaury News and Commentary

By Amaury Pi-González

For longtime local Oakland A’s fans of age, it is impossible for this season not to go back to the memory of the 1979 season. In 1979 the team ended with a 54-108 record finishing seventh in the American League West Division.

The total home attendance after the regular season-81 games was 306,763 paying customers. There are many similarities at this time to the 2022 season with one-third of the season completed. Team owner Charlie Finley nearly sold the team to owners who would have moved them to New Orleans.

Finley had sold most of the team marquee players, Finley also fired most of his front office people and at one point there were six to eight people (at most) working in the front office.

However, Oakland got lucky when Finley sold the team to Walter Haas family (Levi Strauss Co) who kept them in Oakland and ushered a new era for the team, a winning culture ensued with league championships as well as three consecutive World Series, winning it all in 1989.

Roy Eisenhardt, Wally Haas, Andy Dolich, Sandy Alderson and all the people running the team had a great run, one of success, because they did things correctly, marketing the team to the community, developing a good product on the field. They made Oakland and their fans proud to be a major league city.

That new era of baseball under Walter Haas included the debut of Rickey Henderson, who would play for over two decades (with the A’s in four different stints) and also with other teams. But Rickey was always an Oakland A’s at heart, as he is currently enshrined in the Hall of Fame with the A’s uniform.

1979 was the night were only 250 fans showed up for a game at the Coliseum, to be exact April 17, 1979, when they played the Seattle Mariners. I remember 1979 well, when Stanley Burrell, a teenager would bring us coffee to the Spanish broadcast booth No.19.

He was one of those Finley “employees”; he then became famous when he changed his name to MC Hammer. His dream was to be a baseball player, but later scored his biggest hit U Can’t Touch This, a number one song as a hip-hop, pop and rap beat. Mr. Finley discovered Burrell listening to a radio “a boom box” at the Oakland Coliseum parking lot and brought him along.

As the team is now playing on the road, the A’s have played a total of 30 games at the Coliseum, with a record of 7 won and 23 lost (worst home record in MLB) their attendance is also the lowest, with a total of 248,501, an average of 8,283 per game, also lowest in baseball.

Just by numbers; the Oakland/Bay Area population is larger today than in 1979, so they should draw more than the 306,763 in 1979. But similarities remain remarkably from 2022 to 1979, 43 years later.

In 1980 Charlie O Finley agreed to see to local buyers Walter A. Haas, Jr, president of Levi Strauss & Co, a historic business born in San Francisco in 1853, where the blue jeans were born. In August 1980 the new owners paid Finley $12.7 million for the team, as the deal was finalized before the 1981 season.

The final story of the current Oakland A’s still to be decided on the field and votes by city representatives and baseball owners and planners, commissions, and so on. Although nobody can predict what will develop during the second half of this season. One thing is for sure, 2022 reminds us very much of 1979.

Amaury Pi Gonzalez is the Oakland A’s Spanish lead play by play voice on flagship station Le Grande 1010 KIQI San Francisco and does News and Commentary at http://www.sportsradioservice.com