Here's the part everyone knows. The Raiders left for Las Vegas in 2020. The Warriors crossed the bridge to San Francisco in 2019, keeping "Golden State" and taking everything else. The A's played their last game at the Coliseum in 2024 and decamped to a minor league park in Sacramento while they wait on Las Vegas.
Three franchises, five years. There isn't another American city that's been through that. The standard way to write about it is as a eulogy — the sad story of a town that lost everything.
That framing is wrong, and anyone who's been to a game in Oakland lately can tell you why.
What actually happened next
The teams left. The people who filled those stands did not. They're still here, and what they've built in the gap is one of the more interesting things happening in American sports.
The Oakland Ballers were announced in late 2023 and took the field in 2024 — independent-league baseball at Raimondi Park in West Oakland, up and running the same summer the A's were playing out their last games across town. The park holds about four thousand people. Tickets cost what a movie costs and you can hear the players talking. In 2025, their second season, the B's won the Pioneer League championship — the first baseball title this city has won since the 1989 A's.
Oakland Roots SC was founded in July 2018 and now plays in the USL Championship, with Oakland Soul SC on the women's side since 2023. The Roots put "Oakland" in the name and meant it — the club was built by asking the city what it wanted rather than by telling it. And they play their home matches at the Coliseum. The building the A's walked out of is not sitting empty; it has a soccer team in it, and there are plans to build a soccer-specific stadium on the site.
Add women's football, semi-pro basketball, and a full calendar of youth and community leagues, and you have a city that shows up for all of it.
Why it feels different
Pro sports in the Bay Area got expensive in a way that quietly pushed out the people who made the atmosphere worth selling. A family of four could not casually go to a Warriors game by 2019. The Coliseum's right field bleachers — drums, flags, people who'd been sitting in the same seats for twenty years — were the best thing about going to an A's game and generated exactly zero of the revenue that decided where the team ended up.
What replaced it costs less and is closer. You park for free. The people around you live within a few miles. Nobody is there because a client gave them tickets.
That's not a consolation prize. For a lot of people it's what going to a game was supposed to be, and they'd stopped being able to afford the version that left.
The 510 thing
Oakland pride got louder after the teams left, not quieter. You see it in how hard people lean on the area code now — 510 on hats, on stickers, on the back windows of cars in Fremont and Hayward and Richmond, because the 510 was always bigger than Oakland proper.
You see it in "The Town," which went from local shorthand to something people put on their chest. A nickname does that when the official names start walking out. The Town can't relocate. That's the whole point of it.
The franchises were the part of Oakland that could be sold. Everything that made those crowds worth watching was never on the market.
Rep The Town: the Oakland collection carries our California bear flag design made for Oakland, plus the Oaktown graffiti line in green and gold — shirts, hoodies, hats, stickers and phone cases. Across the bridge and up the road: San Francisco and Berkeley.