Photos: The End of Green-Collar Baseball at the Oakland Coliseum

It’s not until you’ve lived through the trenches of fandom that it hits you: Local sports teams are like extended family. And when you’ve lost one of your childhood homes, there’s nothing but grief left in its place.

The loss of the Oakland Athletics at the Coliseum is the saddest collective mourning I’ve ever known. The hole that it leaves is enormous. Both my wife and I grew up attending the outdated, mostly dilapidated stadium. Over the past two years, we’ve started to bring our toddler along, too.

Recently, and before the madness of the Thursday’s final game, the three of us went to a typical home game together to say goodbye. A sense of abandonment permeated the Coliseum, in stark contrast to the vibrancy of A’s games in decades past.

Walking across the BART bridge, through the gated entrances and around the barren gray concourse, we documented the stadium’s vacant ghostliness following the team’s announcement to leave Oakland after 57 years.