What in the Wide, Wide World of Sports is a-Goin' on Around Here?!

I heard on ESPN radio this AM that the Twins-A's game, at Oakland yesterday afternoon, played host to 20,000 empty seats in Network Associates Colliseum. It turns out that 20,000 is something of an exaggeration, as the paid attendance was listed at 32,146 and the capacity listed on ESPN.com is 43,662, but on a scale of 1-to-10, eleven thousand five hundred is a hell of a lot of unpurchased tickets. Where was everybody?

Oakland A's fans may assert that there were two other major sporting events in the Bay Area that day. This is true, but hardly an excuse. One of them was the 49ers game in San Francisco, which drew about 68,000 people, a sellout. The other was the Braves-Giants game, also across the Bay, which more than sold out, with 43,000+ paid ticket holders in a stadium that nominally seats 40,800. And this wasn't even the last game of the series, unless the Giants lost, which they did not.

Shame on Oakland and the Athletics' supposed supporters. A team that wins 103 regular season games and is facing elimination in the playoffs should be able to fill a stadium, especially one that only seats 44,000. There were plenty of people to come see the Giants stave off elimination and plenty more to watch the 49ers demolish the suddenly inept Rams, but only moderate interest in the best team in northern California? When were they planning on coming out? How much more impoortant or potentially dramatic does a baseball game have to be to induce these long-haired, pot-smoking, sandal-wearing, buncha tree-huggin-hippie-crap Oaklanders to come? Billy Beane works too hard and is too good at his job to have to deal with this kind of response to the mordern miracle he has engineered in Oakland for the last several years. I hope that some other team comes along, sweeps him off his feet, and allows him to work his magic for a city that might actually give a crap.

As long as it isn't Philadelphia.