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The Beauty of America’s Ugliest Ballpark

What does baseball lose if the Oakland A’s leave the Coliseum?

The Athletics are forging ahead on an exit plan to leave Oakland Coliseum for a new stadium.Credit...Jason Henry for The New York Times

OAKLAND, Calif. — When the Oakland Coliseum opened in 1966, it was hailed as a Brutalist gem that could house two sports in an elegantly simple, circular design.

A half-century later, it is perhaps America’s most hated sports stadium. Players and coaches deride it. The Oakland Raiders are fleeing it. The lights are breaking, mice are dying in the soda machines, and the sewage that sometimes floods the dugouts has its own Twitter account.

Even these pages have called it “a bland, charmless concrete monstrosity” that “isn’t worthy of preservation.”

Now, after more than a decade of searching, the Oakland Athletics are forging ahead on an exit plan to escape to a gleaming new waterfront ballpark, complete with a gondola to ferry fans to and from the nearby transit station. The stadium would be the latest in a 30-year wave of major league ballparks that saw 24 of the league’s 30 teams move into new homes. Most have been intimate, downtown stadiums that mix retro aesthetics with modern comforts, like leather recliners, beer gardens and a swimming pool.

But does baseball need another retro-modern downtown ballpark? What does the sport and Oakland lose by demolishing the Coliseum?

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The Coliseum was constructed as part of a wave of multipurpose stadiums designed to house both football and baseball teams. Credit...Oakland Tribune, via Getty Images

Yes, the Coliseum is ugly, but it is cheap, gritty and fun. The spacious confines allow fans to roam around, spread out and enjoy a comprehensive view of the game. And the park’s dinginess fosters a freewheeling atmosphere, where bleacher die-hards bang drums and heckle outfielders, while upper-deck denizens pack picnics and pass joints.

It all adds up to a baseball experience that stands out in the increasingly homogeneous ballpark landscape. If Marlins Park is the flashy new nightclub, and Fenway Park and Wrigley Field are the historic pubs, the Coliseum is baseball’s last dive bar.

The Coliseum, which will host the American League wild card game on Wednesday, is among baseball’s most storied backdrops, the last active relic of a string of multipurpose stadiums built during the mid-20th Century. The rising popularity of pro football in the era led teams and cities to build a series of vast, transformable “concrete donuts,” including Shea Stadium in Queens, Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia, Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh and Busch Memorial Stadium in St. Louis. All have since been remade, abandoned or reduced to rubble — other than the Coliseum, now tied as the fourth-oldest ballpark in the majors.

Those multipurpose stadiums weren’t exactly pretty; they were utilitarian. Yet their design had a downside: Football teams needed space for their outsize crowds, while baseball spectators wanted to be close. The dual-sport approach was abandoned by 1990, and the vast majority of new ballparks have since emulated Fenway Park in Boston and Wrigley Field in Chicago — intimate, so-called jewel boxes from the 1910s.

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The Oakland Raiders are playing their final season in the Coliseum before moving to Las Vegas. Credit...Daniel Shirey/Getty Images

Like most baseball fans, I have cheered that trend. I grew up rooting for the Red Sox, with a poster of Fenway labeled “The Cathedral” hanging above my bed. My college dorm was down the street from Fenway and, after graduation, I moved to Chicago, within walking distance of Wrigley.

So when I relocated to Oakland four years ago, it came as a surprise that I fell in love with the Coliseum.

The streets around Fenway and Wrigley are lined with lively bars and restaurants hawking overpriced beers and gourmet sausages. At the Coliseum, fans stream through a caged walkway over an industrial site where vendors sell bacon-wrapped hot dogs and cans of beer for a few bucks. (Prices are negotiable.)

While Fenway and Wrigley are cramped and packed, the Coliseum is cavernous and half empty on a good day. Have a large group, or need to take a private phone call? Take a section of the upper deck to yourself. (Smaller crowds also increase your shot at a Jumbotron appearance, which is important for an aggressive mid-inning dancer like me.)

The field itself is roomy, too. The Coliseum has the most foul territory in the majors, about as much as Fenway and Wrigley combined. That pushes fans farther from the action, but it also enables some terrific defensive plays.

All of this comes at a bargain. I paid $384 for a season pass that provided entry to every game and half off all concessions — including beer — as part of a new strategy that has helped boost attendance. With the pass, the Coliseum becomes one of Oakland’s cheapest bars: a hot dog and a beer cost $7.

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The Coliseum has the most foul territory in the majors, about as much as Fenway Park and Wrigley Field combined.Credit...Ezra Shaw/Getty Images

The view became much less scenic in 1996, when the Coliseum completed a towering upper deck over the outfield intended to attract football’s Raiders back to Oakland from Los Angeles. Everyone, including A’s executives, call it Mount Davis, after Al Davis, the Raiders owner who died in 2011. It is an unsightly heap of concrete that blocks the view of the Oakland hills, and the A’s have mostly laid a tarp over its roughly 8,000 seats since 2006. But on Wednesday, when the A’s host the first playoff game at the Coliseum in six years, the tarp is coming off, expanding the stadium’s capacity by 17 percent to 55,000 fans, nearly the most in the majors.

Joey Mellows, a 34-year-old teacher from Portsmouth, England, who quit his job to visit all 30 M.L.B. ballparks this summer, said that while he was wowed by the classic parks, nothing could match the Coliseum’s atmosphere. “It’s grungy and it’s grimy and it’s got many quite obvious imperfections,” he said. “But personally I find that gives it an authenticity and a character that sometimes is lacking in the more sheeny, shiny, brand-new ballparks.”

Dave Kaval, the A’s president who has staked his job on finding the team a new home in Oakland, said that, character aside, the A’s can’t survive in the Coliseum. He is well-versed in the history of ballparks — he wrote a book on his own 30-park tour in 1998 — and argues that while multipurpose stadiums away from urban cores made sense during the 1960s suburb boom, they are now outdated. Although the Coliseum connects to public transportation, that isn’t enough. People are now clustering in urban centers, he said, and teams need to meet them there to succeed.

“There is an urban renaissance, especially among younger millennials,” said Kaval, reclined in his box during a recent weeknight game. “So that’s one reason we’ve been focused on the downtown waterfront location. When you look across baseball and sports, that’s a winning formula, especially as baseball looks to attract younger fans.”

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The A’s ranked 24th out of 30 M.L.B. teams in attendance this year. Credit...Lachlan Cunningham/Getty Images

Some evidence that Kaval might be right: The Coliseum averaged 20,500 people a game this season — or about 44 percent of its capacity — ranking 24th out of 30 ballparks. While the A’s offered a better team, warmer weather and often cheaper tickets than their cross-bay rival, the San Francisco Giants, they drew nearly 13,000 fewer fans a game. (Another sign of the Coliseum’s second-class status: Corporate behemoths AT&T and Oracle have bought the naming rights to the Giants ballpark, while the A’s have played in the Overstock.com and now RingCentral Coliseum.)

Around the Coliseum on a recent weeknight, many fans said they recognized the A’s needed a new home, but they worried the new park would lack the je ne sais quoi of a stadium some compare to a toilet bowl.

“Overall it’d be good for the A’s and the city of Oakland to get a new park,” said Bryn Williams, a 37-year-old lawyer in a seersucker suit keeping score in the second deck. “But there will definitely be something lost, in no small part because the Coliseum is cheap, it’s easy to access and it’s unpretentious.” He paused. “Says the guy in the seersucker suit.”

Some in the outfield bleachers — where fans wave flags, bang drums and blow horns incessantly — said they worried a new ballpark would price them out, in favor of corporate clients and fair-weather fans. They pointed to San Francisco, where the Giants left their multisport home, Candlestick Park, in 2000 for a downtown stadium. The new park has been an enormous success, drawing plaudits for its design, attracting bigger crowds and increasing revenues. The Giants have won three World Series since the move. Yet to the die-hard A’s fans, the experience was richer at Candlestick.

“Now it’s your corporate fan base. You have 20,000 to 30,000 people there who don’t care about the game of baseball,” said Will MacNeil, one of the loudest voices in the right-field bleachers.

Miguel Barahona, a 32-year-old lab technician from Alameda, Calif., paused his drumming to show off a tattoo of the Coliseum on his biceps. “I love this place,” he said. “Give me another 10 years here.”

Other fans were more realistic.

“I’d love to stay here but I know that’s not reasonable to think that’s going to happen,” said Jennifer LaMarche, a season-ticket holder and bleacher dweller for 17 years.

She said A’s ownership has assured them that the drums and flags would be welcome at the new park. While the Coliseum will be missed, she said, it’s the reality of 21st Century baseball. “Yes, it’s one of a kind,” she said. “But it’s still not driving the crowds.”

Jack Nicas covers technology from San Francisco. Before joining The Times, he spent seven years at The Wall Street Journal covering technology, aviation and national news. More about Jack Nicas

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: Seeing the Inner Beauty of America’s Ugliest Ballpark. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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