Bleeding Green and Gold

I started following Major League Baseball at the age of 10, shortly after the A’s moved from Kansas City to Oakland in 1968, and it didnt bring me very enthusiasm at all to symbol out that baseball was, at .

Bleeding Green and Gold

I started successive Major League Baseball at the age of 10, shortly after the A’s moved from Kansas City to Oakland in 1968, and it didnt bear me extraordinary want at all to digit out that baseball was, at least for me, the greatest amusement in the history of the macrocosm (nothing else has ever come close).I regularly begged my parents to bear me to A’s games as a youngster, but it never happened often enough for my fondness (Oakland was a long, strenuous 90 minute drive away from our home in the central valley). Nonetheless, I always treasured every moment of the games I did attendI fast became attached to the A’s in a tall way, and followed their every manoeuvre as if my keep life hung in the balance. I remember being quite crushed when they were swept by the Baltimore Orioles in the blessing and (at the time) only round of playoffs in 1971.. and then thrilled beyond my wildest imagination only a year later.In those early years I watched the A’s revise from a party of mediocrity to one of greatness Since then, I have experimental them morph a amount of times from terrible to adept and back again Of revolution I dormant feel disappointment when they fade to clinch a playoff berth, or evade a series in the doorjamb season (as they fair perfect doing), but promote to earn over it much fresh swiftly than I did as a kid.When I moved abroad in 1981, and in the many years away from home that followed (nearly 25), I discovered that my passion for baseball and the A’s did not diminish at all if anything, it may keep grown even stronger.I quiescent tried to attend games when forging trips home to visit friends and spawn In fact, I made a speck of scheduling several vacations approaching the end of the season so I’d be able to vigil the bunting races wind down, and then snare the peak circle of playoffs (by the way, after movement back to northern California last year, I find that a 90 minute drive to Oakland takes totally no juncture at all!)Through the years I own been auspicious enough to attend a few post-season games, though never during a World Series (wasn’t persuasive enough to natter my parents into that). And although I posses never been there to see them clinch any sort of championship in comrade (not that they didnt have the opportunity), I do retain a handful of special baseball memories to look back onIn postscript to all the sizeable players and games I’ve empirical at the Coliseum, I was furthermore propitious enough to observer George Hendrick’s boon vocation home run (a walkoff with 2 outs in the 10th inning), Sal Bando’s grand slam on the 4th of July, watched Bert Campinaris fling his bat over the captain of Tigers carafe Lerrin LaGrow after being hit by a toss in halting two of the ’72 Division Series and, on the final day of the typical season in 1975, proverb the quartet of Vida Blue, Glenn Abbott, Paul Lindblad and Rollie Fingers merge on a no-hitter to strike the Angels (I was also there to see Jeter’s miracle-flip to Posada in disabled three of the 2001 Division Series, but as an A’s kernel its awfully heavy to degree that as a highlight).My allegiance to the A’s has positively been tested a occasion or two in my partly 40 year job as a fan, most notably when lapsed host Charles O. Finley aphorism many of my favorite players heading for the exits in the mid-seventies, and courteously stood there holding the door perceptive for them (heck, he even gave a span of them a nudge) I threatened to inception successive another bastinado at the time, but could never actually carry myself to do it

The Oakland A’s own always been my one and only team, and the actuality that they always consign be should come as a confound to no one.