Like a bad neighbor, State Farm wasn’t there.
The “ate” in the “State Farm” sign collapsed in left field of O.co Coliseum last night. It nearly “ate” Shane Victorino. The signage fell after a Danny Valencia double in the fifth sent Angels outfielder Victorino to the wall to retrieve the ball. The insurance company was nowhere to be seen to fix the mess.
No Flo from Progressive, Deep-Voiced Guy from AllState, or Discount Double Check Kid saved the situation. The same grounds crew that responsible for the wall’s fall re-erected it.
“That was a first for me,” Valencia told the Oakland Tribune. “It was probably because of the football game last night.”
The Raiders lost 30-23 on Sunday Night Football before the A’s lost their wall.
The A’s remain the last MLB club to share a stadium with an NFL team. This requires adding and removing yard lines, reorienting seats and walls, and piling and unpiling the mound, among other changes. The less-than-24-hour turnaround proved too much for the taxed Oakland grounds crew.
Bad neighbors make bad fences.
Both the Raiders and the A’s want out of the antiquated stadium. The A’s would like somewhere where they needn’t paint the outfield “grass” green after football game tears it up and that didn’t contain more foul ground than a garbage dump. The Raiders would like to compete on a field where they wouldn’t face a third-and-seven from second base. Presumably, this field lies in Los Angeles and not Oakland.
The O.co Coliseum turns fifty next season. One senses the structure was not built to last quite as long as its namesake in Rome.
The Oakland A’s spent three hours, 24 minutes picking apart the Anaheim Angels in the 11-5 victory. They spent ten minutes putting the O.co Coliseum back together. At least it wasn’t a flood of raw sewage.
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