The Fords of a Devoted Baseball Fan and His Departing Team

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Cars and baseball, they go together like peanuts and Cracker Jack! So, when the Oakland Athletics organization decided to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the team's third consecutive World Series championship at a game a couple of months back, they brought in some of the great '74 A's heroes… and paraded them around the Oakland Coliseum warning track in a collection of decidedly non-1974 Ford Thunderbirds. Meanwhile, long-suffering but resilient A's fans enjoyed one of their final parking-lot tailgate parties before the team abandons the East Bay for a city of easy marks ready to part with plenty of taxpayer cash (see: California Golden Seals, 1976; Oakland Raiders, 1981 and 2019; Golden State Warriors, 2019).

I was there, after having flown into Reno and hit many junkyards between that city and the San Francisco Bay Area, and I brought along the beer I always buy when visiting my favorite Wyoming car graveyard.

A little personal baseball background will help with this story, so here we go. I was born in Minneapolis in 1966 and went to my first Twins game (versus the Baltimore Orioles, at the stadium that was replaced by the Mall of America decades later) in the summer of 1969. My father had been a beer and peanut vendor at at a Southern Minnesota League ballpark growing up and was forced by geography to follow Chicago big-league teams until the Washington Senators moved to Minnesota to become the Twins in 1961. Naturally, I was raised to be a Harmon Killebrew-idolizing Twins fan.

Both American baseball teams and Americans move around the country, though, and my family packed up the brand-new Chevy Sportvan Beauville and departed for Northern California in 1972. We ended up in the East Bay, at a house within earshot of the Oakland Coliseum.

This was the wild Charlie Finley era of Oakland baseball, and you can still find bumper stickers from that period on 1960s and 1970s cars parked on the Island that Rust Forgot.

The bar around the corner from my family's house, being located minutes from the ballpark, became a hangout for the Mustache Gang during the 1972-1974 World Series run (and legend has it that there was a hush-hush brothel catering to high-ranking officers from the Alameda Naval Air Station upstairs during this period).

Finley had moved the Kansas City Athletics, themselves the former Philadelphia Athletics, to Oakland in the dead of night in 1968, as part of the sacred major-league baseball tradition of ditching fans in a quest for public money. I switched my baseball allegiance to the Athletics; the photo above shows me (in rock-era KMEL shirt) at an A's game, circa 1979.

The crowd inside the ballpark was sparse, and the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the storied 1974 A's was done on a shoestring budget. Here's the pyrotechnic display on Mount Davis. The Oakland Coliseum is a 1960s-era dual-use baseball/football facility, bad sightlines, Stalinist concrete construction, trough urinals, and all. A's fans have always loved the place, though, and then there are all the great bands that have played there over the decades.

Yes, I said trough urinals!

Some of the members of the 1974 Swingin' A's were honored at the pregame ceremony, and they (or their heirs) were driven around the field in Ford Thunderbirds to enthusiastic applause from the fans. The T-Birds were supplied by the Bay Area Thunderbird Owners Club, who brought many nice examples of Ford's ever-evolving personal luxury car. Here's legendary pitcher Rollie Fingers rolling in either a 1955-1957 or 2002-2005 Thunderbird.

Charlie Finley is no longer with us, but some of his descendants got a ride in… a 1955-1957 or 2002-2005 Thunderbird.

In fact, not a single Thunderbird that I saw in the ceremony was from the 1972-1976 generation that would have been appropriate when celebrating the 1974 A's. The BATOC members had driven some examples of other generations of T-Bird to the ballpark, but only first- and last-generation cars hit the warning track inside.

The Thunderbird went through 11 generations during its career, and the sixth-generation cars were the biggest of them all. The 1974 Thunderbird had a 120.4-inch wheelbase, just a couple of inches shorter than that of the current Ford Expedition, and it scaled in at 4,825 pounds.

What better car could an East Bay baseball superstar drive? Reggie Jackson—who played with the A's for the 1967 through 1975 seasons—may or may not have owned a 1974 Thunderbird, but his collection of interesting wheels was already so extensive that I can't determine for sure. Sorry, Ford couldn't provide a car phone in 1974; the one in this photo was "available from outside sources" only.

So, no 1974 T-Birds to celebrate the 1974 A's, and team owner John Fisher never did pay serious attention to fan entreaties to sell the team rather than join the big-league sports exodus from the East Bay. The team will be playing at a minor-league ballpark in Sacramento for 2025 through 2027, after which they will move to a not-yet-build stadium in Las Vegas. The car that should have been inside was this beautiful 1971 Ford LTD Country Squire, restored by a family man who grew up a lifelong A's fan in the Oakland flatlands and still lives near the Coliseum. It has a built, evil-sounding 429 engine that makes 450 horses at the wheels, and the combination of California sun-bleached patina and modern wheels is perfect. I predict that this family and their Country Squire will be regulars at Oakland Ballers games, if they aren't already.