Oakland Fans Want to Help Open Mount Davis for A’s Coliseum Finale. The Team Isn’t Budging

For fans of the Oakland A’s, watching the team get ready to pack up and leave town for the last time has been one long, bitter episode.

As the date for the Athletics’ final game approaches, things aren’t getting any easier for die-hards who feel the team’s management continues to pile indignity atop insult atop injury. The latest source of outrage is the team’s refusal to open all of the stadium’s available seats for its last home game on Sept. 26.

To recap: The A’s are abandoning Oakland after 57 seasons. They’ll play at least the next three years at a minor league park in West Sacramento as they plan to build a ballpark on the Las Vegas Strip.

But before any of that happens, the A’s still have a handful of games left at the Oakland Coliseum.

The team announced a few weeks ago that the final game, a Thursday afternoon contest against the Texas Rangers, was sold out. But the sellout isn’t all it appears to be, as the team chose not to open the Coliseum’s so-called Mount Davis with its 8,100 seats.

The apparent reason is that Mount Davis, erected in the mid-1990s to accommodate the Oakland Raiders’ return from Los Angeles and colloquially named for late Raiders’ owner Al Davis, has been closed since before the pandemic and reportedly requires a significant cleanup to be fit for fans. We say “apparent” and “reportedly” because the A’s have declined to comment on the record about their decision to keep the section closed.

The team’s public silence hasn’t stopped a group of superfans from launching a campaign to persuade A’s ownership to change its mind and throw Mount Davis open for one last game.

Fans Bryan Johansen, Steven Leighton and Gabriel Cullen issued an open letter with a proposal for A’s ownership: If the team agreed to open Mount Davis for the Sept. 26 game, they’d help prepare the stands.

“We composed an email and sent it to them and said, ‘OK, we’re going to offer you entirely free labor to clean it up before the game, after the game, and all you got to do is open it,” Johansen said.

Johansen, co-founder of a Coliseum-themed apparel brand called Last Dive Bar and someone who is relentlessly critical of A’s owner John Fisher and president Dave Kaval, said at least 50 people have volunteered for the job.

“There’s stuff that’s been just put up there like storage or trash,” Johansen said. “That stuff just needs to be moved out of the way, do a simple power washing and that’s it.”

Johansen concedes opening Mount Davis won’t be quite that simple. The team would need to provide ushers and security, for instance. But as an organizer of last year’s reverse boycott and other A’s fan events, he said he doesn’t feel that would be a heavy lift.

“One thing that’s been clear the entire time we started the whole movement and the protests and the boycotts, there’s not been one single recorded police incident ever, not a single incident of violence or vandalism,” he said. “So you don’t need many people to police the fans.”

Johansen also acknowledges that Mount Davis wouldn’t offer the ideal fan experience. It’s likely that concession stands and even restrooms would be closed, meaning ticket holders would have to take a hike to other parts of the ballpark for their hot dogs and beer and bio-relief. It’s also impossible to see the entire ballfield from the soaring grandstand.

But he said that won’t matter for those hoping to say goodbye to a team they’ve loved and supported.

“The whole point is for as many fans as possible to see the final and last game at the Oakland Coliseum,” Johansen said.

He said the A’s haven’t responded to the volunteer offer.