The City of Oakland gets a bad wrap from sports "experts" who prefer to keep their nose upturned than to acknowledge the rich history of both the city itself and its place in sporting history. We happen to despise those experts, and we're here to prove them DEAD WRONG. Here's our list of the 5 Greatest Moments In Oakland Sports History.
5. Win #20 (2002)
The largest crowd in MLB regular-season history at the Coliseum shook the very foundation of the place in the team's AL record-breaking 20th win in a row, 12-11 over the Kansas City Royals. Everyone's stomaches dropped out of their butts when the A's somehow squandered an 11-0 lead, but Scott Hatteberg's pinch-hit home run in the bottom of the 9th sent the crowd and the entire city into a state of delirium. Moneyball (the philosophy, the book and the Brad Pitt movie) had its moment in the sun on this night in mid-September. Go back and watch the highlight above. It's a wonder this isn't higher on our list.
4. Welcome back to Oakland (1995)
Crap on the Oakland Raiders' recent run of bad play and bad luck all you want. I can still call upon 10-year-old me and the way my Bay Area heart jumped when the Raiders' move back to their real home was finalized. It sucks to think of the team potentially travelling back down I-5 again, but that's not going to take away how wide-eyed and freaking happy I was to watch my then-idol, Jeff Hostetler, airing it out on the Coliseum grass.
3. The Wild Cards (1981)
The 1980 Oakland Raiders went from the lowest of lows when starting QB Dan Pastorini five weeks into the season. What could have been a several-week stretch of mucking around and wondering what could have been morphed into a storybook run for the end of the punch-and-punch-again Raiders era in Oakland. The team's 27-10 victory over the Philadelphia Eagles in Super Bowl XV was the first by a wild card team and the second by a non-division champion (1969 Kansas City Chiefs). It's also the last Lombardi Trophy that's Oakland and Oakland's alone, as the 1983 Raiders did their championship damage after moving to Los Angeles.
2. Shaken, not beaten (1989)
The Loma Prieta Earthquake killed 67 people and injured some 3,000 more. Sporting history hindsight points to the ten-day delay in the middle of the Oakland A's World Series sweep of the San Francisco Giants as the touchstone of this horrific disaster. It's not. Thousands upon thousands of people were affected by the quake, and thousands more stepped up and galvanized through simple humanity to help their fellow man/woman in need. The actual earthquake delay occured in SF, but that's trivial and unimportant. It was a relief when baseball returned on October 27th, but that's all it really was. A relief and a needed return to normalcy.
1. A new 'Golden State Era' begins (2015)
Honorable mention goes to the 1974-75 Warriors for bringing home Oakland's first NBA championship. However, we've never seen the City of Oakland so galvanized behind a single team and single moment than this past spring's run to a long-awaited title. We can gush about Steph Curry, Klay Thompson, Iggy and the boys all day. Yet, the real testament as to why this is #1 is that, even with the looming move across the Bay, a million-plus people made Oakland their home for the parade, shedding well over a million tears for both the beginning and the nearing end of an era. 40 years, man. 40 years.
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