CASTRO VALLEY — When Matt Dooley started filming a documentary chronicling the 57-year historical past of the A’s in Oakland and the followers that supported them, he did so with out figuring out how it could finish.
“In 2023, we didn’t know which way it was going to go,” Dooley stated in a cellphone interview this week.
For one factor, it ended up with a brand new title. The unique title was “For the Love of the Game,” with apologies to the 1999 fictional baseball movie starring Kevin Costner as an ageing pitcher.
When it premieres on the Chabot Theater Saturday evening (there aren’t any tickets remaining for a free displaying) in Castro Valley, the tip result’s “The Last Game.” It’s a virtually hour-long documentary via the lens of longtime followers via every decade the A’s resided in Oakland beginning in 1968.
A screenwriter and documentarian, Dooley grew up an A’s fan in his youth in Castro Valley pretending to be Barry Zito. At 31, the previous Castro Valley Excessive and Cal-Poly San Luis Obispo graduate is just too younger to have watched the three-time World Sequence winners underneath proprietor Charlie Finley and was born 5 years earlier than the Loma Prieta earthquake interrupted a four-game sweep by the A’s of the Giants in 1989.
“Going back to the late 60s and 70s and up to the 80s, 90s and the 2000s, we really wanted to find voices from those decades with first-hand accounts of what it was like,” Dooley stated.
Voices like Steve Watkin, who went to his first A’s recreation of their inaugural season of 1968 at age 7 and “was hooked.” Or Joe Wolfcale, whose father got here to the Bay Space within the Navy and started taking his son to video games regularly. Wolfcale, who remembers followers driving on high of an Amtrak prepare via Jack London Sq. after a victory parade, turned a longtime Coliseum worker. Or Rob Roberts of Lodi, who has an A’s memorabilia and bobblehead assortment — he builds his personal bobbleheads — that must be seen to be believed.
Native teams have continued the A’s Fan Fest custom even because the membership stopped placing them on in 2019. Ray Chavez/Bay Space Information Group
“Every piece has a story,” Roberts stated. “It’s not like I buy this stuff just to buy it. I was there for a lot of moments, and this is my connection to it.”
Anthony Villias, a fan because the Eighties, had his title on the scoreboard for an essay he wrote for a membership studying program and acquired a private letter from pitcher Dave Stewart and bought to satisfy Reggie Jackson.
“If the A’s wanted me to read, I’m going to read,” Villias stated. “Everyone was down on our ballpark and organization but it was us versus everybody. That’s kind of an Oakland feeling.”
Villias remembers crying in his mom’s arms after Jose Canseco was traded in mid-game to the Texas Rangers for Ruben Sierra.
Todd Schwenk, carrying a garish all-yellow go well with, summed up being an A’s fan like this:
“A’s fans have considered ourselves to be unwanted children, the bastard step-child. But we had grit, we had guts and we took being underestimated to our advantage. To a large degree, that’s how Oakland is to San Francisco and San Jose. The Coliseum wasn’t a baseball park, it was a community event center. It was where Oakland came to party.”
To find followers for the documentary, Dooley labored with A’s fan teams.
“We put out some general feelers on line to see who might be interested in sharing their stories with us,” Dooley stated. “We were seeking people who had personal memories to re-tell.”
The result’s a grass roots documentary wherein no gamers or administration have been interviewed.
“I think there’s a lot of sports documentaries out there that talk about memorable games and star athletes or big moments like the World Cup or World Series,” Dooley stated. “But for us, the large part of the narrative has been a unique fandom and the love they have for this specific team.”
The A’s traded in style gamers with regularity however nonetheless managed to stay aggressive till the underside fell out for good in 2022 after numerous ballpark proposals had fallen via — the final being Howard Terminal — and far of the fan base boycotted the product as to not give any cash to proprietor John Fisher.
With Sacramento a actuality and the membership insisting it’s on monitor to be in Las Vegas, a way of grim actuality has begun to set it even when the brotherhood and sisterhood among the many followers persists. As evidenced by a properly attended Followers Fest 2025 in Oakland Saturday, many followers will nonetheless see one another at video games of the Pioneer League Oakland Ballers in addition to the lads’s and girls’s soccer groups, the Roots and Soul.
“I just want A’s fans to know it’s not our fault,” Villias stated. “I won’t be watching anymore, and I think I’ll miss that sense of community. I just want A’s fans to know it’s not our fault. It was things above us, politics, money. But I’ll always love the Oakland A’s.”
The documentary concluded with a montage from Sept. 26, 2024, with the A’s beating the Texas Rangers 3-2 earlier than a crowd of 46,899 on the final residence recreation. And a musical so-long from the East Bay band Tower of Energy, with its 1972 hit “So Very Hard to Go” that may have long-time Oakland die-hards reaching for a tissue.
“The last game was really painful,” Wolfcale stated. “There were random fans that were in tears and they made me cry because it was the same thing I was experiencing. I’d grab ’em and I didn’t even know ’em and say it was going to be OK. We sent everybody home happy on one final sad day.”
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Dooley hopes the documentary can present some aid amid the grief.
“I think it’s kind of a powerful, unfortunate ending for a lot of fans and through the experience of interviewing them and having them share their thoughts, I hope our project can be somewhat of a catharsis for folks who are looking for answers and what comes next,” Dooley stated.
Word: Info relating to free public theater showings of “The Last Game” could be discovered at @thelastgamedoc on Instagram. Dooley has an extra mission on World Battle I “Across the Border” scheduled to be launched into the movie competition circuit and has two different quick movies accomplished — a Western known as “The Painter” and a horror movie known as “Let Me In.”
