Grabbing Some Pine

Back in the late 80's, the left field bleachers at the Oakland Coliseum were old school.  Wooden benches with something resembling seat numbers stamped into them.  Bench edges and corners were worn.  Those benches were installed in the late 60's after all.  The lower half of the bleacher sections not next to the foul poles were portable and rectangular.  The bleachers formed the curve of the outfield fence, meaning that the sections could come together in a straight line across the outfield parallel to a football sideline.

The benches were for the most part made of hard wood.  No duh, but at that time, there were no alternatives like aluminum, or form-fitted plastic molded seat bottoms arranged in benches.  None of that.  Just wood.  Wood that split, wood that cracked, wood that, well, did whatever wood did.  One piece of wood out there, wood that formed our front row bleacher bench, had a knot in it.  And the wood around that knot deteriorated over time, causing a large split in the bench.  Soon, fans with pens and other objects started digging and gouging around that knot, making a small dent each homestand.  One day, the digging broke daylight through to the bottom of the bench.  And it continued over time so that not much was left holding that bench together.  Maybe the knot was the glue that kept the bench intact.

One fateful day, the Royals were in town, and we were there during batting practice.  Bo Jackson hit a big fly that eluded the faithful shaggers, and lo and behold, the ball hit that knot in the bench square...or as square as a falling fly can be square.  In the same action as the ball hitting the knot, the knot popped through and the piece of wood that was hanging by a single strand of wood fell to the bleacher floor.  It was about six inches wide by about 24 inches long.  Nevermind the Bo Jackson souvenir, I pounced upon the fragment of booty support I came to love all those years.  Yes, a hunk of wood was as good a souvenir as any ball.  The underside was kind of gross, and some kid I'm guessing was the one who stashed his wad of gum underneath it as if he were avoiding the wrath of ruler bearing school teachers.  I really need to post a photo of this hunk of history.

Hearing Yourself On The Radio

Back in the mid-80's in the A's bleachers, we discovered a fun little pastime. One day, one of the bleacher bums brought a walkman to listen to the game. One of us yelled, and the bum with the walkman said he could hear the voice over the radio. Each of us took a turn to listen. The distance from the bleachers to the crowd mike behind home plate used by the radio station was great enough to cause a delay in the sound. So, we could yell loud, then hear ourselves a second later on the radio.

The Worst Fans In Baseball - And Loving It!

The greatest satisfaction I could ever get from being a bleacher bum - or a heckler in the box seats for that matter - is the knowledge that our heckling has such a negative effect on the opposition as to give a home-field advantage to our team. In 1988 that knowledge was verified.

Authors Bruce Nash and Allan Zullo, who wrote the Baseball Hall of Shame series of books, came out with a book titled, Baseball Confidential, an inside scoop on almost every aspect of the game, in the players' own words. One of the regular bleacher bums, named Kevin, came running down the stairs one game and said, "Hey, everybody, you won't believe this new book! We're in it!" And right there on page 212, in a section that lists the worst fans in baseball, long-time heckling target Kirk Gibson is one of the players quoted as to how bad the A's bleacher bums really are. We were ranked as the third worst [behaving] fans, behind the Yankees and Mets, with the Giants (that's me again!) and Phillies as 4th and 5th. A small excerpt:

At the Oakland Coliseum, fans bombard visiting players with a constant barrage of verbal garbage. "You hear them no matter where you are on the field," says Mark Gubicza of the Royals... One of the players whom Athletics fans love to hate is Kirk Gibson of the Tigers. "They target not only me, but my mother, my wife, my grandmother, my city, my IQ. I think they pass a sheet of paper out at the beginning of the year so they can memorize 20 nasty things to say to ballplayers. You hear the same kind of thing every inning. One guy will stand up and shout, 'What's the matter with Gibson?' [none other than yours truly!] And then 50 people will stand up and yell, 'He's a bum!' It's all orchestrated. They know that we players hear them. I don't think they're the real career-oriented type of people out there because they're always there at night and during the day. I wonder what these people do for a living because they never seem to be working."

Thank you, Kirk, for the rave review. As to who these bleacher bums really are and what they really do for a living I'll discuss in the next few posts. I'm sure the answer would have shocked Kirk Gibson.

Bleacher Bum: The Tenth Man

The only thing I ever wanted to do for a living was to play Major League ball. Although I've got what some would consider a successful career, it's not my first choice. I think it was late in high school that I realized that I would never make it to the bigs. Even though I signed up for the college team (Univ. Calif. Berkeley) and attended the first team meeting, my afternoon lab classes for engineering prevented me from attending practice. So, barring the development of the world's most wicked knuckle ball by my late 30's, I was toast. Stick a fork in and find some other way to scratch for some green.

At 17, with a car and my playing days over (company softball excluded), I started regularly attending major league games in both SF and Oakland. Previously, my family made maybe one annual outing. Even though I loved being at the games, I wasn't content with being merely a spectator. My first game as an "adult" included fan participation along with the group I was with. Thanks, Ken, for the spark. We sat in the bleachers for an A's game in '81 (Billy Ball!) and heckled the other team's left fielder. It was great fun. I never looked back. If I couldn't affect the game by my playing in it, I discovered that I certainly could by interacting with the game from the stands. A life-long bleacher bum attitude was born. (Just last night, 24 years later, I heckled with my friend Mike, although somewhat weakly, the Astros bullpen pitchers while warming up from my 9th row Giants season tickets.)

Within only a few short years, I was attending a minimum of 60 games per year. Cat calls were common for me from the Candlestick box seats, but it was in the bleachers in Oakland that I excelled. From September of '85 to April of '88 I missed just one home A's game. I developed an enormously loud voice and learned to pace it over 9 innings every day for years. I've only heard two people my entire life that were louder. Every left and center fielder in the AL, whether starter or pine rider, knew me personally. But there were dozens of other like-minded bleacher bums in Oakland (in CF and RF too), and I was kinda the LF ring leader.

Some ballplayers took heckling with a grain of salt and interacted with me with a smile. These guys became friends of sorts. Others were visibly, and statistically, shaken. A few feared me as some kind of serial murderer. We all kept tabs on each visiting player's stats as well as juicy shortcomings in their personal lives. If a player were 0-for-his-last-15 coming into Oakland or caught being frisky with an under-aged girl (Luis Polonia), he was reminded all about it in the first inning. Once, I did a stats study and figured that visiting outfielders in Oakland had a larger drop in production than any other group of players or any other ballpark in the bigs. The A's consistently had one of the best home field advantages in baseball. We knew we were partly to blame, and we took tremendous pride in this.

Once, a rookie was so shaken by our heckling that he called time out, ran in to the 3rd base umpire, pointed out to us and complained. The ump gave him a brick of cheese to go with his whine by shrugging his shoulders as if to say, "welcome to the majors, rookie." Needless to say, the heckling got immediately worse. I've also had the pleasure to heckle one ballplayer, Phil Bradley, in five different ballparks around the majors. As a player with the M's, O's and Phils, I got his goat in Oakland, Milwaukee, Anaheim, Seattle and San Fran. Poor guy, he's the one that took it all the hardest. Also, in a just-so-happened night of drinking with George Brett, he confided that the Royals outfielders ranked the A's bleacher bums as the worst fans in the league, even worse than Yankee fans.

Last night at the Giants game Mike mentioned to me that if we yelled in today's yuppified ballpark atmosphere the same stuff we got away with in the 80's, we'd be hauled off to jail in no time. The 80's were so much fun. I just wished bleacher bums could be paid by the home team to rile the visitors. I woulda done it in a heartbeat. But it never happened, and now I'm an architect.

Bleacher Bummer

When the Raiders returned to Oakland in the mid 90's, the construction project that added permanent football seats to the Coliseum outfield, known as Mt. Davis after the Raider owner, not only added the most monstrous, hideous and obnoxious eye sore in any major league ballpark, and not only blocked a beautiful view of the East Bay hills, it did something far worse. It destroyed what were just about the best seats in all of baseball.

The Coliseum bleachers with their wood benches, steel floor for great foot stomping, great view of the game, good weather, very knowledgeable fans, sense of community, cool security guards, non-reserved seating, fans' involvement in the game, made for just about the best place to sit in the majors... with maybe, maybe the exception of the bleachers at Wrigley Field.

They were one of my baseball's homes. They are sorely missed. They were the only place I'd sit for an A's game, and as a result, I'm no longer a die hard A's fan. I catch maybe one game every year, and I still cheer for them, but the team is no longer as dear to my heart. Maybe they'll get a new ballpark some day with real bleachers again. I'm not holding my breath.