On the evening of Monday, June 12, 2023, a mere 4,848 baseball fans showed up at the Oakland Coliseum—a stadium that seats 63,000—to watch the Oakland A’s beat the Tampa Bay Rays. The following night, with the same match-up, attendance more than quintupled, to 27,759. In an essay published in The Oaklandside on June 14, Cameron Kelly wrote:
[Tuesday’s] game itself had little to do with the size of the crowd. Nor was it the A’s six-game winning streak, which has dragged them up from the dregs of “one of the worst teams of all time” to a regular level of awful, as most of the tickets for this game were sold weeks ago. It wasn’t any particular player, nor any special giveaway (at least, not one put on by the A’s), nor was it even the expectation of seeing a good baseball game.
What brought all those ticket-buyers to the Coliseum on Tuesday was an impassioned protest against the impending move of the hometown team to Las Vegas. Fans, and the media, dubbed the protest a “reverse boycott.”
Screenshot of SFGate headline and photo, June 14, 2014: “ ‘An Oakland tragedy’: A’s fans’ raucous ‘reverse boycott’ started with a single tweet”