Oakland Athletics Tickets

Oakland Athletics Tickets

Oakland Athletics Some White Elephant

Oakland Athletics has its origin as one of eight charter franchises. As the Philadelphia Athletics, they won three World Series from 1910 to 1914; two more came in '29 and '30. Decline followed for twenty years, when in 1955 they became the team for Kansas City. After mediocre ho hum seasons in the heartland, the franchise landed in Oakland in 1968.

Pulling from the original winning history, the California iteration of this team became three time World Champions during 1972-74. Then again, from 1988-1992, the A's won three pennants and one World Championship. More currently, at the start of the new millennium, from 2000 to 2006, they reached, but lost the Division Championships the first four straight years. The last year of this period, they made the pennant series but lost being swept by the Detroit Tigers.

Oddly, the mascot for the franchise is an elephant. First as a comment made about the value to cost ratio of the Philadelphia team being a white elephant. The logo started appearing on the team sweaters and became part a logo on the uniform in 1918.

Charles Finley, owner of the Kansas City franchise, changed the elephant to a Missouri mule. He thought this was a way to entice local Democrats to the game. The elephant logo returned on the jerseys in 1988. As a mascot, the elephant appeared in the middle 1980s and it showed up again in 1997. Today the elephant remains and is known as Stomper.

Currently the Oakland Athletics play at the O. Co Coliseum (Overstock.com), which was originally built during the early 1960s. The stadium was dug into the ground making the top level where people enter the structure. The A's first game was played here on April 17, 1968.

As a shared venue with the NFL Raiders team, the stadium expanded to a 60,000-seat capacity in the mid-1990s. However, in 2006 the organization closed the third tier bringing capacity to 34,000 seats, the smallest in the league. Talks are currently taking place for a new stadium location.

Oakland Athletics Tickets