OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) — The aging Oakland Coliseum experienced another maintenance problem Saturday night, delaying the game between the Athletics and visiting New York Yankees.
A panel of lights above left field would not turn on when the Yankees began warming up for the bottom of the fourth inning. A stadium official informed umpires of the partial outage, and the game was halted for 38 minutes before the lights came back on and play resumed with the A’s leading 2-1.
Oakland won 5-1.
The A’s said the circuit breaker turned off and had to be manually reset. Players and coaches from both teams said the lights never initially came on.
“That’s the Coliseum for ya,” A’s second baseman Eric Sogard said. “That’s why we love this place. Never know what you’re gonna get.”
Yankees manager Joe Girardi said he first noticed the issue in the second inning but didn’t mention it to umpirs.
“I was saying something to our guys, you know, ‘Are those lights always off?'” Girardi said. “They were never on, which makes me wonder why someone didn’t notice who is here every day.”
The Coliseum, which is shared with the NFL’s Oakland Raiders and is the only stadium in the country still home to teams from both leagues, has had multiple plumbing problems in the past two years.
In June 2013, a clogged pipe caused a sewage backup and flooding on the bottom floor of the ballpark that sent the Seattle Mariners and A’s scrambling around in towels and heading for higher ground in the Raiders’ locker room. After a hazmat crew inspected the affected areas for E-coli, new carpeting was installed and other extensive work was done in the hallway between clubhouses, and there was a cleanup in the umpires’ room.
A’s players also reported foul smells from the bathroom end of their dugout during a game last September. Then in March, A’s coaches were sent scrambling after toilets in the home clubhouse backed up and overflowed before an exhibition game against the San Francisco Giants.
The A’s have been trying for years to move to a new ballpark, including in San Jose, which the San Francisco Giants contend is part of their territory. Recently, the A’s have been in the process of negotiating a new lease at the Coliseum, which opened in 1966.
Joe Torre, the executive vice president of baseball operations for MLB, was among those in the announced crowd of 36,067 — the sixth sellout this season — at the Coliseum on Saturday night.
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