The World Series is the most important thing that can happen to a baseball player, and it is happening now to a bunch of them. You may have noticed that many have been conspicuously chewing things the entire time, including Yankees left fielder Alex Verdugo, who was blowing a bubble while misplaying a ball in the very first inning of Game 1.

The constant chewing is one of the weird things about baseball. Casual viewers respond to it by saying, “That’s weird.” Baseball fans respond to it by saying, “That’s just how it is in baseball.” And both statements are true. The chewing isn’t happening only during downtime in the dugout. Players with pizzazz blow bubbles while catching fly balls or hitting home runs. Outfielders are the most frequent chompers, but even players in the much-busier infield will sometimes spit out a shell in the middle of the action, or gnaw on a toothpick. Once in a while a player will even be tempted by the ballpark snacks that fans are eating in the stands. My question is, Why?

I’ll be honest: I care about this question because I love baseball, but also because I have a lot of dental problems and can’t personally imagine putting Dubble Bubble in my mouth ever again. I became fixated on the issue following a game this June between the New York Mets and the Texas Rangers, during which pitcher Max “Mad Max” Scherzer was shown in the dugout laughing maniacally and heckling his former teammates, while also munching on sunflower seeds so aggressively that it looked as though he were munching off bits of his own teeth. I can’t tell you how distressing this was.

The chewing habit is unique to baseball, America’s best sport. You don’t chew anything while playing football because you’re probably wearing a mouth guard so that you don’t accidentally bite off your own tongue. You wouldn’t want to run around on a basketball court with something in your mouth, because you could choke on it. Even golfers and soccer players, who sometimes chew gum, do not commonly have pockets full of loose seeds, or barter with children for bags of Nerds Gummy Clusters.

Baseball isn’t merely amenable to snacking; the game is arranged around it. Other sports have locker rooms and clubhouses full of snacks, but baseball has a dugout where players sit during the game and have continuous access to those snacks. A baseball player can even keep snacks in his pockets on the field, Brian Purvis, the head of the Chattanooga branch of the Society of American Baseball Research, told me. Then he added: “I would be curious why baseball uniforms even have pockets?”

One question at a time!

As for why all of this chewing is happening, I solicited input from dozens of baseball enthusiasts including historians, journalists, former players, sports nutritionists, and miscellaneous other interested parties, such as the publicists for various candy companies. Some of them acknowledged that it’s weird. Others told me, “That’s just how it is in baseball.” And more than a few had theories to explain the practice—somehow, only one mentioned Freud.

Obviously, in the old days, baseball players chewed a lot of tobacco. This was partly on account of players’ societally average addictions to nicotine, partly on account of its stimulating and supposedly performance-enhancing effects, and partly on account of their habit of slobbering tobacco juice onto the baseball so that it would be darker and harder for the opposing team to see and hit. The slobbering (but not the chewing) was disallowed in 1920 by a rule change against “ball defacing.”

For many decades after, children watched as players smoked cigarettes in dugouts and visibly chewed dip while batting. They watched as players would, occasionally, choke on their tobacco wads and delay gameplay. The wads themselves grew even bigger and more visible in the ’80s, when players realized they could wrap their chewing tobacco in bubble gum to hold the leaves together. Tobacco was not denounced by Major League Baseball until the ’90s, when it was banned first from minor-league stadiums and then from the annual All-Star Game.

But the habit was a sticky one, and hard to get rid of entirely. If tobacco was going out of fashion, it would have to be replaced, in the words of the internet’s favorite baseball movie, by re-creating it in the aggregate. Gum could replace the chewing; seeds could replace the spitting. Hence, a 1997 headline in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune: “Chew Tobacco’s Out, but Ballplayers Young and Old Agree That, Whether It’s Bubble Gum or Sunflower Seeds, You Need to Jaw on Something.”

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Tobacco is now banned from many Major League stadiums, and it was mostly banned from the sport of baseball itself in 2016, not long after Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn died from oral cancer. Bubble gum and sunflower seeds remain as popular as ever. Dodgers first baseman Freddie Freeman, who has been in the Major Leagues since 2010, doesn’t chew tobacco, yet he will dump an entire bag of seeds into his mouth at one time. Yankees pitcher Nestor Cortes, who made his debut two years after the tobacco ban, has said that he chews “at least 30” pieces of gum per game.

If they aren’t chewing for the high, what’s the point? Other claimed effects came up here and there during my interviews. Some people mentioned that baseball is a game that involves sliding in dirt, and that chewing gum can help you keep the taste of the field out of your mouth. Ken Clawson, a former minor-league baseball player, said he’d read somewhere that the habit gets more blood flowing to the head and can therefore help with focus. SABR’s Purvis thought chewing had to do with timing: “Something about the rhythmic moving of the mouth allows them to set their internal metronome.” Sure!

When I got in touch with John Thorn, the longtime official historian of Major League Baseball, he was unimpressed by the batch of theories that I’d gathered to that point. He said that eating is just a way of dispelling nervous energy. “The calming effect of chewing tobacco was largely in the chewing, not in the messy weed,” he told me. “The charm of sunflower seeds may be entirely attributed to Freud.”

In other words: The oral fixations relax the players, who are like so many giant, strong, and handsome babies sucking their thumbs.

Anxiety and dirt in the mouth aren’t the whole story, though. When looking to explain anything in American life, one should always look at the commercial interests involved—Big Chewing, in this case.

John Thorn walked me through the history of baseball’s relationship to the great oral-fixation industries. Lou Gehrig, Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio, and other baseball greats appeared in ads for cigarettes, which sometimes implied that their elite athletic performance was enabled by their choice of smokes. Chewing gum came in later: Beginning in the 1920s, William Wrigley Jr., the founder of the Wrigley Company and the owner of the Chicago Cubs, allowed numerous radio stations to carry Cubs games, because this would also serve to advertise his gum. His son and successor, Philip Wrigley, provided gum to players in the clubhouse (and, incidentally, referred to his product as “an adult pacifier”). Other entrepreneurs spread gum throughout the league. Sy Berger, of the Topps trading-card company, wooed players to license out their likeness by giving them free stuff, including Topps’s hit product, Bazooka bubble gum.

Gum and baseball cards were such a natural pairing that, eventually, kids could buy a pack of gum with a baseball card in it, or a pack of baseball cards with a stick of gum in it. In 1975, the TV broadcaster and former Major League catcher Joe Garagiola hosted a bubble-blowing championship. The contest was sponsored by Bazooka, and the winner, the Milwaukee Brewers’ Kurt Bevacqua, was honored with a special baseball card. Soon after, the debut of Big League Chew gave kids an opportunity to emulate professional baseball players by chewing gum that was shredded to look like tobacco—the idea being that money could be made in preventing kids (and adults) from taking up a truly disgusting habit while continuing to channel their dreams to baseball. (They could mail in wrappers to receive a World Series–inspired ring.)

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Candy companies have found ample opportunities in baseball ever since. Turk Wendell, a former relief pitcher for the Mets who is best remembered by the baseball-viewing public as the guy who wore a necklace draped with claws and teeth, was known to chew black licorice on the mound. He also received free candy all the time. “Brach’s candy in Chicago would FedEx me whatever I wanted,” he told me. “Any kind of candy—they would FedEx it to me on dry ice so it was fresh.” Today’s young players get excited about candy collaborations. The Yankees’ baby-faced shortstop, Anthony Volpe, used a Dubble Bubble–themed baseball bat in a game this year. The Mets’ baby-faced third baseman, Mark Vientos, wore cleats made by Adidas in partnership with Haribo, the German candy company whose gummy bears often appear in modern baseball dugouts.

Chewing seeds, which also goes back decades, is a somewhat less commercial custom. Reggie Jackson, who made it cool to chew packaged sunflower seeds in the 1970s, suggested that the nutrients provided by his habit could help prevent pulled muscles. “Mr. October may have been on to something,” Corey Tremble, the director of minor-league medical operations for the Texas Rangers, told me. The seeds are salty, and sodium is one of the main electrolytes lost through sweat. Chewing them during a game may work “to keep our muscles healthy and firing properly.”

Of course, there are a lot of other ways for players to accomplish the nutritional task of “consuming salt.” Many foods and drinks are salty, including—as Tremble noted—the cups of Gatorade that those guys are always swilling in the dugout. And a 1996 Wall Street Journal story about in-game sunflower seeds said that chewers were showing off their “tooth-tongue coordination” and that they stood in awe of Jackson not because his muscles weren’t cramping but, as one pitcher told the newspaper, because he “could eat ’em and spit the shells like a machine gun.”

In the process of reporting this story, I emailed 66 members of the Society for American Baseball Research, some of whom forwarded my question about chewing to still more members of the Society for American Baseball Research. The total number is unknown to me, though I received more responses than I could possibly manage.

Warren Simpson, of the West Texas chapter of SABR, got in touch to share his theory. Simpson is part of the Vintage Base Ball Association, an intriguing body that plays baseball in antique uniforms, and according to the rules of the late 1800s. In this league, it is still legal to throw spitballs, which is why Simpson himself started chewing tobacco in 2001. (He has since stopped.) He thinks chewing persists in baseball purely as tradition. Younger players chew because they think that’s what they’re supposed to do. “It’s part of what you believe is the culture,” he said.

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It’s true that baseball people are obsessed with tradition, and that kids will try to imitate their heroes. The retired center fielder Lenny Dykstra said he chewed tobacco because he’d grown up watching Rod Carew chew tobacco. Simpson told me that when he was a kid, everyone wanted to make basket catches like Willie Mays, or to be a switch-hitter like Mickey Mantle. In Simpson’s case, he wanted to get hit by a lot of pitches like his favorite player, Ron Hunt, who had set the Major League record for doing so in 1971 and famously said, “Some people give their bodies to science; I give mine to baseball.” They are not always valuable life lessons that you are learning from these idols, Simpson acknowledged. “It might have been better if he was blowing bubble gum.”

Baseball’s chewing tradition may also intersect with its long history of strategic rule-breaking. Baseball fans still gossip about which players might be flouting the tobacco ban. One of my favorite baseball players, Jesse Winker, is constantly eating Tootsie Rolls, even while running the bases—even while engaging in arguments with opposing players. I think Winker is chewing Tootsie Rolls just because he likes them, but it’s certainly true that having Tootsie Rolls or any other brown and waddish foods available in baseball dugouts gives cover to anybody else who might still be chewing tobacco. Tootsie Roll Industries, which once promised to award 1 million Tootsie Rolls to whoever scored the millionth run in the history of Major League Baseball, did not respond to my questions. Neither did the league.

That said, baseball is also a baffling sport played by fastidious people with numerous eccentricities and superstitions. Turk Wendell told me that he started chewing black licorice on the mound while he was in college. When his young teammates spat tobacco juice on his shoes, he needed a way to spit back without picking up a tobacco habit himself. “I thought, Well, I like black licorice and it looks like tobacco so it looks like I’m pretty cool,” he said. (He was chewing not-tobacco to cover up the fact that he wasn’t really chewing tobacco. This inverts the Tootsie Roll theory laid out above and also proves its feasibility.) Whatever his original motivation, Wendell got into chewing licorice, and then he never stopped. Wendell also liked to brush his teeth between innings. He did that for the first time because he had a bad taste in his mouth. (Was it dirt? I forgot to ask.) Right after, he struck out three batters. “Once you do something and you’re successful, you keep doing it,” he said.

If this is true for Wendell, perhaps it’s true for baseball on the whole. Once you’ve started chewing, how do you kick the habit?

I bet you’re still waiting for me to give the most obvious explanation for baseball’s chewing: The game is boring. Putting something in your mouth is something you do when you’re bored.

Fine. I’m a baseball fan, and I was inclined to dispute the premise, but even baseball players are partial to this theory. Wendell told me that he chewed in part because the games were so monotonous. So did Trevor May, a former pitcher and current media personality; he said that chewing sunflower seeds and gum is “the equivalent of watching a bad Netflix movie while you fold laundry.” Joe Nelson, another former pitcher, said that baseball is “incredibly boring.” Relief pitchers, in particular, spend much of the game out in the bullpen, separated from the action, he told me, and that “can get exhausting, mentally.” To chomp or spit is to stay awake and stay ready.

This makes sense to me. Agatha Christie used to eat apples in the bathtub whenever she was having a hard time working out her elaborate murder-mystery plots. You do whatever it takes to put your brain in your body.

Here I think it’s important to note that Major League Baseball prohibits the use of smartphones during games. Players in the dugout will sometimes watch footage of their at-bats on a shared iPad, leading fans to joke that they’ve been “rewarded with screen time.” But, generally, the players are more bored than you’ve been in years! You don’t remember what it’s like to be that bored. Maybe that’s why you—and I—might think all the chewing that baseball players do is weird, whereas the fans of prior generations might have understood it to be normal.

Time expands during a baseball game, and players have only what’s in their skulls to keep them occupied. “Baseball is a ponderous game with plenty of room for pastimes within a pastime,” Clayton Trutor, of the Vermont SABR chapter, told me. The snacks are raw materials. You will see players build little towers out of gum or use it to adhere a paper cup to an unsuspecting teammate’s hat. Baseball fans were tickled this year when Seattle Mariners pitcher Luis Castillo placed his sunflower seeds in the dirt in an ornate arrangement that possibly represented some kind of message to extraterrestrials.

“Baseball is a stop-action sport, and in that regard it permits not only such activities as bubble-blowing but also reflection,” Thorn told me, “and this is why baseball is the game of literature.” It was a little bit of a non sequitur, but I knew what he meant. Baseball is the subject of a good deal of classic American writing. And baseball players—though it may not always seem this way—are living the life of the mind. This is why they chew.

Fans are also in their heads. Thorn suggested that baseball’s open, airy nature is the reason that I, as a viewer, would even notice that players are chewing all the time. Arguably, watching baseball is making me a more observant and curious person.

My next questions are “Why do baseball uniforms have pockets?” and, relatedly, “Why do baseball players wear belts?”

The Oakland Coliseum, where the Athletics played baseball for 57 years until last Thursday, is beautiful to me, in the subjective way that anything you have loved for a long time is beautiful. But the stadium is not, factually speaking, nice to look at. It is mostly concrete, with exposed rebar tracing the ceilings and water stains mottling the floor, and so dark in places that I’ve had to use a flashlight to see the ground in front of me. Because it was dug out from nearly 30 feet beneath the surrounding dirt, much of it sits damply below sea level, and because it was built to be shared with a football team, the Raiders, its field is rounder and has more foul territory than any other stadium in Major League Baseball.

The Coliseum’s best feature—a wide, almost decadent view of the golden Oakland hills—was intentionally blocked in the 1990s after the Raiders’ owner, Al Davis, demanded that the city build more seats in exchange for the team’s moving back from Los Angeles. (The government did, for half a billion dollars. In 2020, the Raiders moved to Las Vegas, shortly after the Golden State Warriors basketball team’s move from Oakland to San Francisco. Mount Davis—the monstrous slab of seats named, unofficially, after Al—remains.) The Coliseum regularly lands at the bottom of ballpark rankings and is often compared to a toilet bowl, even by people who like it. I have been watching the A’s play there my whole life, and it is one of my favorite places on Earth.

Being an A’s fan has always been painful in the ordinary way that being a baseball fan is painful. But in 2005, it started to become agonizing. John Fisher, a Giants fan whose parents founded the Gap, bought the team with Lewis Wolff as minority partner, and they quickly began trying to get out of the Coliseum. Like many MLB owners, they wanted the public to help pay for a change, via a new taxpayer-funded ballpark in a new location. But the city of Oakland, in a prolonged budget crisis partly stemming from the Mount Davis project, could not give Fisher (who is worth $3 billion) and Wolff everything they wanted.

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Over the next several years, especially after Fisher became sole owner of the team in 2016, the product he was offering began to deteriorate. Oakland had never been a big-money team, but its management started spending even less on players and player development. Ticket prices rose precipitously. The Coliseum fell further into disrepair. A’s leadership announced that the team would explore other markets. It seemed obvious what was happening, and not just because it was basically the plot of the movie Major League: Fisher was cynically and systematically working to make Oakland baseball harder to love and then blaming the fans for not loving it enough. He miscalculated: We loved Oakland baseball anyway—unconditionally. We just didn’t like him. Last year, the A’s had the lowest payroll in baseball. They also had a possum living in a broadcast booth and the lowest attendance of any team in the league. But on nights when the fans arranged it, the park was packed in reverse boycott, 27,000 people and hardly any official A’s gear in sight, just an ocean of kelly-green shirts with a message for Fisher: SELL.

Like all activism, this was love. Like all activism, this was wild optimism—a belief that enough people, working together, could make things different. “All baseball fans believe in miracles,” John Updike once wrote. “The question is, how many do you believe in?” Last spring, Fisher abruptly walked away from negotiations to keep the team in Oakland. (The mayor called it “a blindside” and accused Fisher of using the city as “leverage.”) No miracle had come. The A’s were leaving. They will now spend the next three years in Sacramento, sharing a stadium with the Giants’ Triple-A affiliate, before, in theory, moving into a $1.5 billion ballpark on the Las Vegas Strip that will be financed in large part by taxpayers and seems oriented toward casual, visiting fans who are looking for a vacation activity and don’t mind paying high ticket prices. (Ground has not been broken, but according to renderings, the park will be very shiny and have a view of the simulacral Statue of Liberty that fronts the New York–New York casino across the street.) Every MLB owner approved the move. It is the first time in two decades that one of their teams has relocated, and the first time in history that one has done so after such a fight with fans.

Those fans are mostly done with Major League Baseball. They’re airlifting their devotion to the local Pioneer League baseball team or to the independent soccer team that will play at the Coliseum next year. Oakland, a great sports city with a population roughly the size of Miami’s, has no more major professional sports.

Fisher almost never speaks to the press, but last week, he emailed a letter to fans attempting to explain himself. He wrote that he had always wanted “to win world championships and build a new ballpark in Oakland,” and that he and his colleagues “did our very best to make that happen.” I received this message while I was on the phone with Steven Leighton, a fan who had dedicated the past few years to persuading Fisher to sell, perhaps to one of the many people who had reportedly come out of the woodwork to express interest in buying the team and keeping it in Oakland. (Leighton was telling me about the time his dad took him out of school to watch the final game of the 2012 season, as a surprise.) That night, Larry Beil, a local news anchor, called the letter a “great work of fiction” and ripped it up on the air.

A stadium is a funny thing for anyone to own. It’s real estate, sure. But I can’t think of any other building that holds so many memories. The Oakland Coliseum hosted 4,493 regular-season games, 61 playoff games, and one All-Star Game. It is where a batboy got the nickname MC Hammer, where a platinum-blond cheerleader called Krazy George invented the Wave, and where Rickey Henderson set a league record for stolen bases that still stands. It is where, on Mother’s Day 2010, Dallas Braden pitched the 19th perfect game in baseball history, in front of 12,000 people, every last one of them holding their breath; afterward, he scooped his grandmother, who had raised him after his mom died, into a weepy bear hug on national TV. (I was watching, away at college, holding my breath too.)

Some memories are collective; others are personal. The Coliseum is where Esperanza Uruena went into labor and begged her husband not to make her leave, even as her insides twisted and cramped—Dave Stewart was pitching. It’s where my friend Rachael once threw out the first pitch with her daughter, Ynez, strapped to her chest; this past week, Ynez, suddenly 5, was in the parking lot wearing a traffic pylon like a witch’s hat and waving a SELL flag. When I was a kid, my family and I would lay pilled blankets on the field after games and watch fireworks explode above us. I wrote in my diary after one of these nights that it was the happiest I had ever been. In our 20s, friends and I would sit 10 or 15 wide at weekend day games, cheap beers in our hands and feet up on the bleachers.

Ten years ago, the A’s played the Royals in a single-elimination wild-card game. It was in Kansas City, but I watched in Oakland, in a dive bar so crowded, I could barely move my arms, with a friend I’d been to a couple of games with. It was our first date. The A’s lost 9–8 in 12 innings. The next season, that man and I bought quarter-season tickets, and the season after that, and the season after that, touching knees in the right-field bleachers, April to October. The bleacher-dwellers have their rituals, and we were happy to submit: We clapped along with the drums and the cowbells, headbanged for Sean Doolittle, believed in Stephen Vogt. We watched as our favorite players left, traded away or given up to free agency. In 2015, the team entered a painful, protracted slide, and then—still among the worst-paid teams in baseball—they rallied to reach the playoffs for three seasons straight.

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During the last of those seasons, one shortened by plague and played in empty stadiums, we moved across the country. When baseball came back, we were somewhere else: We watched different teams, in different ballparks. We read the bad news coming out of Oakland. We had a baby, Bobby, in the middle of the postseason, and I listened to the World Series on the radio while I nursed in the dark. We loved our son without condition or limit, and then, just when we thought it was the happiest we’d ever been, we got even luckier: He became a baseball fan, running coffee-table bases on fat, unsteady toddler legs and begging to watch the highlights over breakfast. (He’s a New Yorker, so he roots for the Mets.)

This summer, we took Bobby to the Coliseum. We wanted him to see the place where his parents fell in love, and we wanted to chant “Let’s go, Oak-land!” one last time together. We sat in our usual spot: Section 149, among the drummers and the diehards, the people who reverse-boycotted and fought and still scream “Fuck you, Fisher” when their team scores a run. Since the deal had become final, their ranks had thinned considerably. “I had to be here as much as I could, but everyone grieves in different ways,” Esperanza Uruena told me that afternoon. But we got to see some old friends, and our son got a certificate that said MY FIRST A’S GAME, which we joked we should take a Sharpie to—add and last. Bobby, one and a half, did not understand the significance of anything, but he had a great time watching the game. His dad and I both cried.

In the face of the ineffable, A’s fans have been grasping for metaphor. Thursday was a funeral; no, a funeral for someone whose death was preventable; no, a funeral for someone who’d been murdered, and the killer was charging admission at the door. The Coliseum, meanwhile, is Baseball’s Last Dive Bar. It’s home. It’s a concrete cathedral—which is maybe a little grandiose for a place with so many sewage problems and such stubborn possums, but I like it. Mircea Eliade, the great religious scholar and historian, spent years trying to understand precisely what makes something holy, why people chose to pour their faith into certain containers and not others. His conclusion, ultimately, was that sacredness is defined subjectively and circularly: The sacred is that which is not profane, and the profane is that which is not sacred. The believer gets to decide, in other words, where and when and how she finds what Eliade called hierophany: the manifestation of the divine, the moment when an ordinary object ceases to be ordinary.

I had learned about Eliade and hierophany from the book Baseball as a Road to God, co-authored by the former New York University president John Sexton. Last week, I spoke with Sexton by phone. He is incredibly smart and kind, even though he’s a Yankees fan, and he could probably tell that I was a wreck. He told me a story about a trip he’d taken some years ago, to Australia. With a guide, he and his family went to Uluru, the giant sandstone monolith that rises out of the flatness of the outback like a breaching whale and is a religious site for the Aboriginal Pitjantjatjara people. “To our native Australian guide,” he told me, the rock “was the most sacred place in the world.” To Sexton and his family, “it was a beautiful, overwhelming natural wonder, but it wasn’t ‘sacred.’” These places are not intrinsically sacred—they’re sacred if, and only as long as, living people see them as such, find miracles in their presence. I think Sexton had intended to make me feel better, to help me understand that the Coliseum could be divine as long as I wanted it to be. Instead, I thought about Bobby, who will never remember the mighty Oakland A’s, oblivious and happy as his parents wept at the ballpark, and about all the people who had consecrated the Coliseum, only to see it abandoned and emptied out.

[Read: Baseball is broken]

A regular football season is 17 games. Regular basketball and hockey seasons are each 82 games. A regular professional baseball season is 162 games, 81 of which are played at home. Esperanza Uruena missed only nine this season. Baseball—like falling in love, or raising a child—is mostly about the choice to keep showing up. It makes the mundane holy, through repetition and commitment, attention that becomes devotion, one day at a time, just like Mary Oliver said. It is ritualized submission to forces beyond your control, and as such, it is about the most radical, sacred, bighearted thing a person can do: Loving a team, like loving anything unconditionally, is the decision to make your world larger, even though it will hurt. Streaks end. Leads are blown while you get up for a beer. Your favorite guy gets traded, or injured, or sent down. A thing you organized your life around for years is taken away. The Oakland A’s were so much to so many of us, for so long, and now they are nothing at all.

But on Thursday, we were at the Coliseum, 46,899 of us—there to show that the A’s meant something to us, even if we didn’t mean anything to the A’s. Krazy George was there, signing autographs and banging a drum. So were Rickey Henderson and Dave Stewart, throwing out the first pitch, and Dallas Braden, now a color commentator, choking up in the booth. Rachael and her husband, Matt, were up in the 300s with their kids, and Esperanza was down near me in the bleachers, her fingernails painted green and gold. Women carried sleeping, floppy-limbed newborns—so their babies could see the place, just once, even with their eyes closed—and ushers carried bouquets of red roses given to them by fans. We chanted “Let’s go, Oak-land!” and “Sell! The! Team!,” our voices made louder bouncing off all that concrete. At some point, a beach ball appeared, and at some point afterward, once it had traveled hundreds of feet and fallen onto the field twice, it was euthanized with a pocketknife.

Oakland took the lead in the third and widened it in the fifth. By then, it was mayhem: Security guards had abandoned their posts to watch the game, and the aisles were clogged with bodies leaking sweat and tears. Smoke bombs, toilet paper, and two people escaped the stands and made their way onto the field. Someone in the bleachers unfurled a white banner so wide that five people had to hold it; in spiky, handwritten capital letters, it said UNFORGIVABLE. During the eighth inning, Kara Tsuboi—who has been an in-game announcer since 2009 and will not be going to Sacramento—thanked fans and staff. “This place is special,” she said. We got on our feet and didn’t sit back down.

Then, the ninth. The Rangers had scored, so we were ahead, but barely. Mason Miller struck out two back-to-back, then Travis Jankowski grounded to Max Schuemann at third base for an easy out. It was over, two hours and 29 minutes and 57 years after it had started. As the crowd cheered and the players shook hands, I ducked into a corridor to call Bobby. I told him I missed him, which was technically, though inadequately, true. He was in his hometown, playing with magnets, and I was in mine, pondering devotion, and I wanted so badly to be closer to him, I thought I might swallow my iPhone right there.

When I returned to the bleachers, almost everyone remained, chatting and hugging and taking selfies and looking out at the Coliseum, still the same and so, so beautiful. People pitched their torsos over the fence to pass the groundskeepers souvenir cups, empty water bottles, and Ziploc baggies to fill with dirt from the field. For anyone who wanted a different memento, a wide-necked guy in a Henderson jersey was demonstrating how to yank a cupholder off the seat. A final “Let’s go, Oak-land!” rose and fell: There weren’t enough people there anymore to make it last. A drummer in a bucket hat passed tissues to a crying security guard. At some point, the stadium music died. And then, about an hour after the game had ended, we had to go. We filed out of our seats and into those dark tunnels, holding our cups of dirt, the concrete under our feet scattered with toilet paper and rose petals.

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