This experience gives Gordon a special take on the A’s season — full of keen insight and the fervor of a fan. He reflected on this with KQED’s Brian Watt.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
BRIAN WATT: What have fans been like this season?
HAL GORDON: It has been sometimes surreal, sometimes frustrating, but a lot of the times it's still been a lot of fun. I was looking at the A's attendance, [which] is down by 50% from 2019. It’s not surprising.
Why’s that?
The A's traded away all their best players. They went from competing, [from] winning close to 100 games a year for the last four years, to losing 100 games this year.
I look pretty hard at your Twitter feed and I can tell that you are trying to see all sides of the A's quest to get a new stadium. How are you seeing this now?
I don't know exactly what's going on. No one tells the hot dog vendor exactly what's going on. As someone who lives in the Bay Area, I think converting what is right now a parking lot for semi-trucks to 3,000 units of housing and a ballpark sounds good if the city can do it in a responsible manner.
But what it seems to be is that there's also going to be a lot of money required for [this] off-site infrastructure. And the city has been pretty clear to say that they won't use their general fund money for that off-site infrastructure. And I think that's reasonable. If you're the city, you're worried that you might end up getting sucked into something that ends up spending hundreds of millions of dollars in order to get a baseball stadium.
I have read that you are a vegetarian. So have you ever eaten a hot dog?
Oh, I remember what hot dogs taste like. And I think I probably inhale — just from the steam — at least a few hot dogs worth of hot dogs every season.