Goodnight Oakland A's

Analy grad Jeremy Wesler honors the Athletics with a video based on "Goodnight Moon" as the A's close out their final season in Oakland

Jeremy Wesler’s book, “Goodnight Oakland A’s,” has sold out all of its copies since hitting the market this month. (Photo courtesy of Jeremy Wesler)

Jeremy Wesler, like many throughout the Bay Area, has been an Oakland Athletics fan since birth.

“My mom had me propped up in front of the TV watching the playoffs,” he recalls of his infancy in the late 80s.

Two decades later, Wesler’s first job out of college would be working for the A’s, where he produced promotional videos for the team. He travelled to Arizona for spring training and watched every home game from the Oakland Coliseum for three straight seasons.

Now, with the A’s closing out their final season in Oakland, Wesler is helping others grieve the loss of their beloved hometown team with his book, “Goodnight Oakland A’s”.

“I’ve known this loss was coming for a long time,” he said. “I think that that put me in a unique position to make a book like this, because I feel like there’s a lot of A’s fans who still need to figure out how to process the loss. You know, it’s not just about going to baseball games. It’s about the experience of community. It’s a generational thing. It’s about taking your kids and them taking their kids. All those opportunities go away when the team leaves. People are just starting to accept that and process the loss, and my hope is that this book will help people do that.”

Wesler’s book—a knock-off of the well-known children’s book, “Goodnight Moon”—was first conceived as a video. When that video went viral, Wesler got tons of messages from fans saying they wanted a book version for themselves.

(Wesler used photographs from A’s photographers to round out the book, which can be purchased at goodnightoaklandas.com. Some of the pages of that book are at the end of the article, along with the original video.)

Wesler had plenty of material for his book, considering the A’s storied legacy.

In 1968, the Kansas City Athletics—which were once the Philadelphia Athletics—moved to Oakland and became the Oakland Athletics. By 1974, that team had completed a three-peat of World Series championships, and they’d win another in 1989 (when Wesler was still a baby), sweeping their crosstown rival, the San Francisco Giants.

The best players on those teams are some of the greatest players in baseball history, from “Mr. October” Reggie Jackson to Rickey Henderson to Dennis Eckersley. And the A’s best teams have been some of the MLB’s most memorable teams, like the one at the center of Michael Lewis’s “Moneyball,” which chronicled the 2002 team that won 20 straight games after losing their three best players and having a budget that paled in comparison to that of bigger market teams like the Yankees and the Dodgers.

“The A’s have more walk-off wins in [the Coliseum] than any other team in their home stadium,” Wesler said. “That sort of resilience is baked into the identity of Oakland, and that's why it was a great partnership.”

Now, after 57 seasons, the A’s are leaving Oakland after their infamous and dispassionate owner, John Fisher, who took over the team in 2005, neither sold the team nor made progress towards building a new stadium. Next year and perhaps for a couple years thereafter, the A’s will play in West Sacramento. They plan on moving to Las Vegas thereafter, where the once Oakland Raiders have played since 2020, and where plans for a new ballpark have yet to be finalized.

With the Golden State Warriors having left Oakland for San Francisco’s Chase Center in 2019, Oakland has gone from hosting three professional sports teams to zero in just five years.

Given that the Athletics have had the lowest per-game attendance of any team in the MLB for the last three seasons, their departure from Oakland may seem warranted. But, according to Wesler, this was all by design. While working for the team, Wesler recalls that the videos he made which celebrated the city of Oakland, including one with former A’s announcer Roy Steele, were the ones that the ownership least wanted to see.

“They didn't want the video out there, because, and this a direct quote, ‘It glorified Oakland,’” he said. “And that was 10 years ago.”

“The ownership wasn’t especially concerned with putting out a good product,” he continued. “They were more interested in doing the least amount of work that they had to do to make the most money. They made money just from owning the team because the MLB has something called revenue sharing, which means that all the richest teams send money to the poorer teams. The A’s are not actually a poor team, but they cry and they pretend that they're poor so that they can take this money from the Yankees and the Giants and, you know, the more popular, successful teams in baseball. That's their business model. Their business model isn't like, ‘Let’s put out a good team and then hope that we get a lot of fans.’ Their business model is, ‘Let’s do everything we can think of to make sure fans don’t come, so that we are not a successful franchise, so that we don’t disqualify ourselves from getting this corporate welfare.’ We’ve been able to tell people, ‘Oh, see, nobody showed up to the games.’ Well, nobody showed up to the games because you're making a hostile fan experience, actively pushing people away from attending.”

For example, Wesler said that, at the A’s last home game on Thursday, the stadium told fans they would stop selling concessions like food or water an hour before the game started (even though this is not what actually ended up happening).

“They were trying to make it seem as uncomfortable as possible so that people would not be in the building at the end of the game,” he said. “My personal belief is that they wanted it to look as empty as possible when the game ends—to try to make it look as if the fans never cared.”

But the stadium was the opposite of empty on Thursday, where the A’s beat the Rangers, 3-2. Wesler himself was at the game, where he and his mom, Laurie, sold out all the copies of his book in the parking lot a half-hour before the game started.

As for the A’s game itself, Wesler says it was an “incredible experience.”

“But it was also heartbreaking,” he said.

Panoramic view of the Oakland Coliseum before the final out of the A’s last home game. (Photo courtesy of Jeremy Wesler)

Fans stayed after the game to hear remarks from the team’s manager, Mark Kotsay. (Photo courtesy of Jeremy Wesler)

Wesler with longtime A’s equipment manager, Steve Vucinich, who is photographed in the book. (Photo courtesy of Jeremy Wesler)

Wesler’s mother, Laurie, selling books in the parking lot outside of the stadium before the A’s final home game. (Photo courtesy of Jeremy Wesler)

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Below is the video that inspired Wesler’s book, along with some of the pages of that book. The book can be purchased at goodnightoaklandas.com.