After more than 50 years, the Oakland A’s announced their departure from the city last year, leaving Oakland bereft of its sports teams after the flight of the Warriors in 2019 and the Raiders in 2020. To the dismay of fans, the A’s plan to temporarily relocate to a minor league stadium in Sacramento before permanently moving to Las Vegas in the 2028 season. Former A’s catcher Bruce Maxwell joins Edge of Sports to discuss the move, its impact on the local community and workers, and the trajectory of his own career and the place of the A’s in his life storyTranscript
Welcome to Edge of Sports, the TV show only on The Real News Network. I’m Dave Zirin.
We are talking baseball right now with former Oakland A’s and current Mexican League catcher, Bruce Maxwell. If that name rings a bell, it might be because Maxwell was the first Major League Baseball player to take a knee during the National Anthem in protest of racist police violence.
We’ll be speaking to Maxwell about the Oakland A’s temporary move next year to a minor-league ballpark in Sacramento, and their 2028 move to Las Vegas. In other words, the death of baseball in Oakland. Let’s speak with him now.
Oh man, there’s so much I want to talk to you about. But before we talk Oakland baseball, can you give my listeners and my viewers just a sense of where you are right now, and what your baseball life is like?
Bruce Maxwell:
Well, I’m currently in Monterrey, Mexico at Monterrey Nuevo León. I’m now coaching with the Toros de Tijuana. It’s another team in the Mexican League Baseball in the summer. Quick turnaround for me; I was just a player last week for a different team, and things didn’t work out so well. They didn’t see me in their future plan, so they sent me home.
And as I was headed home, the GM for this team who I know very well, he called me and offered me a coaching job. So now I’m here in Monterrey, preparing for Opening Day tonight against the Sultanes in Monterrey, and continuing my love for the game, man.
Amazing. It’s certainly a love I share. No matter how much the people who are in charge of the game try to mess it up, somehow the game is still the game.
Wow. So before we talk about Oakland baseball, I did an intro where I spoke about your incredible history where you kneeled during the anthem in such a conservative sport that is baseball. I just wanted to give you the chance to speak on it. Why did you take that move? Why did you kneel during the anthem?
Bruce Maxwell:
When it comes to that, man, these things are very important. That’s a bigger-than-baseball stance that I took.
Growing up where I grew up in Alabama, being biracial, me and my sister being very athletic, we grew up in similar circumstances to those of which can’t have their voices be heard. The racial profiling, the unfair treatment because of skin color. And with my sister and I, we actually got bad things from both sides of our race: because we weren’t enough of one or we’re too much of the other.
So it was difficult, especially me being the male. It was difficult for me growing up and being the only Black player on my team, literally almost my whole life. I think my junior year of college, I had a freshman who was a young African-American kid. And then in pro ball, they’re very scattered.
Most of the guys, when you turn on the TV that you see that are darker-skinned or whatever, most of them are Latin guys. And so as the numbers have decreased since … hell, in the last 30, 40 years, the significant decrease is something that’s important
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