Oakland Athletics - Stadium

Stadium

The O.co Coliseum—originally known as the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, and later named as Network Associates, McAfee and Overstock.com Coliseum—was built as a multi-purpose facility. Louisiana Superdome officials pursued negotiations with Athletics officials during the 1978–1979 baseball off-season about moving the Athletics to the Superdome in New Orleans. The Athletics were unable to break their lease at the Coliseum, and remained in Oakland.

After the Oakland Raiders football team moved to Los Angeles in 1982, many improvements were made to what was suddenly a baseball-only facility. The 1994 movie Angels in the Outfield was filmed in part at the Coliseum, filling in for Anaheim Stadium.

Then, in 1995, a deal was struck whereby the Raiders would move back to Oakland for the 1995 season. The agreement called for the expansion of the Coliseum to 63,026 seats. The bucolic view of the Oakland foothills that baseball spectators enjoyed was replaced with a jarring view of an outfield grandstand contemptuously referred to as "Mount Davis" after Raiders' owner Al Davis. Because construction was not finished by the start of the 1996 season, the Athletics were forced to play their first six-game homestand at 9,300-seat Cashman Field in Las Vegas.

Although official capacity was stated to be 43,662 for baseball, seats were sometimes sold in Mount Davis as well, pushing "real" capacity to the area of 60,000. The ready availability of tickets on game day made season tickets a tough sell, while crowds as high as 30,000 often seemed sparse in such a venue. On December 21, 2005, the Athletics announced that seats in the Coliseum's third deck would not be sold for the 2006 season, but would instead be covered with a tarp, and that tickets would no longer be sold in Mount Davis under any circumstances. That effectively reduced capacity to 34,077, making the Coliseum the smallest stadium in Major League Baseball. As of 2008, sections 316-318 are the only open third-deck sections for A's games, bringing the total capacity to 35,067.

The Athletics are the only remaining MLB team in the United States still sharing a stadium with an NFL team. In Canada, Toronto's Rogers Centre is shared by the Blue Jays and the Canadian Football League's Toronto Argonauts, and is also used by the Buffalo Bills on occasion.

In 2011, the Athletics had the lowest attendance in baseball, with an average attendance of 18,232.