Best Place to Watch a Baseball Game in the Bay Area (Before It's Gone Forever)
If you live in the Bay Area or are just visiting and have any interest whatsoever in baseball, don't waste your money watching the Giants. I love San Francisco and would LOVE to be able to walk to a baseball game from my apartment, which should be a possibility except that, well, it's expensive to watch a losing team in San Francisco.
The Oakland Coliseum, on the other hand, offers $2 Wednesdays to watch the Oakland A's. Tickets aren't usually more than $15 for bleacher seats on any other given day, and the crowd is not afraid to cheer loudly.
Getting from San Francisco to the Oakland Coliseum is easy too: board the Fremont or Dublin Pleasanton trains and get off at "Oakland Coliseum". Then walk a half block over the bridge straight into the Coliseum. You can bring in thermoses, but not coolers or 6-six packs, so plan accordingly.
You also get more beer when you order two of the large Corona bottles for each person you're at the game with. Everyone knows this, so give yourself 2-3 innings of waiting in line. Wednesday night games are the best deal there is all around, though, because with the exception of overpriced beer, you can get a $1 hotdog.
Tonight, the A's will be playing against long-time rivals, the Yankee's. If someone comes up to bat and the entire coliseum starts booing at the top of their lungs, it's because at one magical time in this batter's life he had played for the Oakland A's and is therefore a traitor and a sellout. You'll hear a lot of booing, because a lot of players leave Oakland for New York. And when they get to New York, the Yankee's make them cut their hair and shave their faces. You can walk into any clean-cut, preppy sports bar in the Bay Area, and for some reason (I'm guessing blind spite) every single person there will feel hurt by and ashamed of all the shaggy haired A's players who left for a larger pay check and cleaned their faces up a little.
So do the Oakland A's have hairy, shaggy faces. Absolutely. 
They're also a lot like rodeo clowns in their theatrics. But the best part of going to an Oakland A's game is that the Coliseum is tiny compared to most others - which means you're in the players' hairy faces. You see every goofy handshake, half-smile, shout, and every little teardrop. At one point in Oakland's history, a few fans were able to heckle a couple of Yankee's pitchers until one of them got so upset that he threw his chair at the guy. The heckler then ducked and the chair hit the guy's wife and broke her nose. THIS IS WHAT I MEAN BY LONG-TIME RIVALS. Have I mentioned that it’s Friday the 13th – the green blood of Oakland will ooze!
No one's sure how long it will last, because as many Yankee's know, everyone has to leave Oakland at some point. The Oakland A's have been sold and bought, and when the new stadium is built will we called the Fremont A's. A new stadium, just a few miles from the old one means higher ticket prices, hotdog prices, and hidden teardrops.
So come to the Oakland Coliseum while you can and live in a bit of history.
