Brewers Close the Book on Long Rivalry with Oakland

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Photo by Quintin Soloviev via Wikimedia Commons

Oakland Coliseum

Oakland Coliseum

While they hadn’t added many sentences to the story recently, Sunday’s series finale in Oakland wrapped up a chapter in Brewers franchise history.

With the Athletics vacating the Oakland Coliseum and moving out of the city following the 2024 season, the Brewers’ three-game set against the A’s was their last-ever trip to a ballpark that once played home to one of their greatest rivals. The Coliseum is one of the last active MLB facilities where the Seattle Pilots played during their 1969 expansion season, and it was a frequent stop in the franchise’s early years: The Pilots/Brewers and A’s played nine games there each year from 1969-71, then were scheduled to meet there six more times per season all the way through the end of the Brewers’ tenure in the American League in 1997. 

This weekend’s series was just the fourth time the Brewers had visited Oakland since moving to the National League, but nonetheless the Coliseum is one of just seven road ballparks where they’ve played at least 180 games. Robin Yount played in more than half of them, and his 104 hits in those contests are still tied for the 12th-most ever for a visiting player (B.J. Surhoff and Jim Gantner also crack the top 25 with 87 and 85, respectively).

As such, it’s fitting that the Brewers got an opportunity to take a final curtain call in Oakland over the weekend. It’s also a fairly rare occasion: The A’s are becoming just the fourth MLB franchise to move since they relocated from Kansas City in 1968. The Brewers also played a part in the final season of the other three departing teams.

Montreal

The glory days of baseball in Montreal were long over by the time the Brewers joined the National League in 1998, so Milwaukee fans only directly witnessed the ongoing decay of a once-proud franchise. The Expos didn’t officially move to Washington and become the Nationals until 2005, but the franchise had been in visible trouble for some time before that: After the 1994 strike wiped out a season where Montreal was in first place the team slashed payroll, underwent an ownership change and was even a candidate for contraction during its final seasons.

The Brewers’ final visit to Montreal came well in advance of the move, as they were swept in their last three games at Stade Olympique on August 1-3, 2003. Livan Hernandez outdueled Ben Sheets in the series finale, which no one knew at the time would be the Brewers’ last visit to Quebec. The Expos split their home games between Montreal and San Juan in 2004 and the Brewers’ last road trip to face them were played at Hiram Bithorn stadium in May of that season.  

Washington

The Brewers also only briefly overlapped with the second of two American League franchises in Washington: The Washington Senators team that would leave to become the Twins moved west in 1961 but was immediately replaced by an expansion club that had an ugly decade in the nation’s capital, losing an average of 94 games per season. The Pilots/Brewers visited RFK Stadium just 18 times across their three seasons of overlap with the Senators, who spent most of their final seasons getting beaten up by the Orioles, Tigers, Red Sox and Yankees in the AL East while both American League expansion franchises, the Pilots and Royals, softened up the field in the AL West. 

The Senators franchise was clearly in trouble but their future had yet to be announced when the Brewers visited RFK Stadium to face the Senators for the final time on July 22, 1971, winning 2-0 behind a five-hit shutout from pitchers Skip Lockwood and Ken Sanders. Baseball would eventually return to Washington, however, and the Brewers played ten more games at RFK Stadium from 2005-07 as the Nationals moved in while awaiting the completion of Nationals Park.

Seattle

Finally, the franchise that would go on to become the Brewers played a much bigger part in the first and final season of Major League Baseball’s first attempt to expand to Seattle. While the American League correctly anticipated that Seattle would go on to be a great MLB city, the effort to get a team there was extremely rushed and led to a new franchise playing the 1969 season at Sick’s Stadium, a dilapidated AAA ballpark, instead of the domed stadium voters had already committed to eventually build. Faced with a sub-standard ballpark and underfinanced ownership, the Pilots reportedly lost significant money in their expansion season and needed a $650,000 loan from the other owners just to finance sending the team to spring training in 1970. By June of the 1969 season the wheels were already turning for the Pilots to move to Milwaukee, although the deal would not become official until just days before Opening Day the following spring.

As such, fans did not know they were witnessing the final MLB game at Sick’s Stadium when just 5,473 of them came out to see the Pilots’ season finale on October 2, a 3-1 loss to the Athletics. Pilots left fielder Steve Whitaker scored Seattle’s only run with a ninth inning solo homer, becoming the last player to touch home plate in an MLB game in Seattle until the Mariners started play in 1977.