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Tim Keown, ESPN Senior Writer
OAKLAND, Calif. — Thousands of Athletics fans gathered in the south parking lot before Thursday night’s Opening Day game against the Cleveland Guardians to try out a new way of displaying their displeasure with the team’s ownership: showing up but staying away.
In what might be the beginning of the team’s final season in Oakland, fans waved hundreds of SELL flags, ate free tacos and listened to live music. What most of them didn’t do was enter the stadium to watch the game, choosing to continue the party through the night by watching the game on a blowup projection screen. The announced crowd for the game — 13,522.
“This will be the first time since 2006 that I’ve missed Opening Day,” said Jorge Leon, the president of the Oakland 68s, an influential fan group. “Opening Day used to be a holiday for all of us; we’d take the day off and celebrate from 11 a.m. to the first pitch. This is hard.”
The fans partied on the cracked asphalt of the Coliseum parking lot, in the shadows of the crumbling bleachers once rolled into the stadium for Raiders games. The longest line was for the tent manned by members of Schools Over Stadiums, a political action committee of the Nevada State Education Association, which is attempting to get a referendum on the ballot to stop the allocation of $380 million in public funding to help A’s owner John Fisher pay for a new ballpark on the Las Vegas Strip.
Nick Danoff, an Oakland resident volunteering for Schools Over Stadiums, worked the crowd, handing out cards showing fans how to donate to the effort to put the issue in front of Nevada voters. An anonymous donor agreed to a one-day match of up to $100,000.
“This is the one thing John Fisher doesn’t want you to do today,” Danoff said.
Major League Baseball owners voted unanimously to approve the team’s move to Las Vegas, and A’s ownership is targeting a 2028 opening for a new stadium in the parking lot of the soon-to-be demolished Tropicana Resort and Casino. The team has yet to determine where it will play in the three-year interim; Salt Lake City and Sacramento are options if the team can’t reach an agreement with the city of Oakland to extend its lease beyond this season.
Led by the Oakland 68s and Last Dive Bar, another fan group, two “Reverse Boycott” games were held last season, where fans filled the Coliseum to show their support. With the move to Las Vegas approved, they adopted a different — but still nontraditional — boycott method to start this season.
One fan who bucked the trend, grudgingly, was Will MacNeil — known as “Right Field Will” — who attended the parking lot party pregame but sat in his usual spot in the right-field bleachers to show his support for new Guardians manager Stephen Vogt, a longtime favorite of A’s fans for his time in Oakland.
“We texted, and he was hoping I could be there for his debut,” MacNeil said. “That’s the only reason I’m going in.”