At first, it was all love. They were some of the most visible and passionate fans in the Oakland Coliseum bleachers, and the Athletics wanted help keeping the energy up, as the team struggled through a down stretch.
The fan group — which called itself “Last Dive Bar” after an essay in The New York Times about the Coliseum — sold custom apparel and donated $250,000 in profits to the A’s charity and other groups. The fans worked with the team to give away tickets to fans in need. They organized a bingo night at the Coliseum. It was wholesome and fun-loving.
Then came the rupture. Last year, the A’s announced they were leaving Oakland for Las Vegas.
“I felt like I was betraying the team I grew up loving,” said Bryan Johansen, who founded Last Dive Bar with two friends, Paul Bailey and Carl Moren. “But I realized I can separate the executive front office from the organization as a whole.”
So, quickly, Last Dive Bar transformed itself from an A’s partner into the tip of the spear of one of the most organized and prominent protest movements in recent sports history.
Last Dive Bar and another fan group, the Oakland 68’s, distributed 10,000 free T-shirts to fans that had a simple message for the A’s owner: “SELL.” They hung banners with the same demand across the Coliseum. And they produced dozens of other shirts, signs, stickers and pins protesting the move to Vegas.
The two fan groups also organized a “fans fest” that attracted an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 fans and several former players; an Opening Day boycott that attracted more people to a protest in the parking lot than to the game inside the ballpark; and “reverse boycott” games that packed the Coliseum on usually empty nights, with fans who alternated between chants of “sell the team” and a moment of dead silence as a form of protest.
Those games drew widespread attention from the media and sports world — and from the players themselves.
Mark Kotsay, the manager of the A’s who also played for the team from 2004-7, was asked this week when he remembered the Coliseum at its loudest. “I’ll tell you, the most silent I’ve ever heard this stadium was the reverse boycott,” he said. “It was so silent it was scary.”
Last Dive Bar also tried to get under the skin of the A’s owner, John Fisher, and the team’s president, Dave Kaval.
The group had fans toss tomatoes at photos of the two men. It hired an actor to impersonate a bumbling version of Mr. Kaval for paid ads to promote events. Last Dive Bar made puppets of the two executives and brought them to the seats behind home plate to get them on television. The group applied for the trademark to “Las Vegas Athletics” — and bought billboards in Nevada to warn residents there that their lawmakers wanted to give Mr. Fisher taxpayer money to build a new stadium on the Las Vegas Strip.
Yet the deal moved ahead anyway. The league’s 29 other owners, along with Major League Baseball’s commissioner, Rob Manfred, approved the plans for the A’s to leave Oakland, and Nevada lawmakers gave Mr. Fisher $380 million in public subsidies.
So, what was the goal of the protests? Was it to force a change?
“Not the change that everybody wants in a physical sale of the team, but change as far as the narrative,” Mr. Johansen, 42, a Tesla engineer, said in the Coliseum stands on Tuesday. “It’s not the fans’ fault. It’s not the city of Oakland’s fault. It is the fault of John Fisher and 29 M.L.B. owners and Rob Manfred.”
Mr. Fisher put out a letter to fans this week saying he tried to stay in Oakland but couldn’t. “It was our mission, and we failed to achieve it,” he said. “And for that I am genuinely sorry.”
In recent weeks, the mood of the protest movement has shifted from anger to mourning. Robb Roberts, Last Dive Bar’s effective handyman, has created various props to protest the move, but now he said he was at work on the one thing he didn’t want to build: a tombstone. (It features a croaked possum, the unofficial mascot of A’s fans, representing the various wild possums that live at the Coliseum.)
After the A’s final game at the Coliseum on Thursday, Last Dive Bar will host a “wake” for the team’s 57 years in Oakland.
“This is like dealing with a death,” Mr. Johansen said, with tears in his eyes.
That is why his group has limited its calls on fans to protest in recent weeks. “Everyone has the right to process these last games however they see fit,” he said. “You wouldn’t go to a funeral and tell the widow or widower how to process the loss of their loved one.”
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