If you think the above headline is stupid, just keep in mind, I was very tempted to opt for “Oakland’s Committment To Excrement”. In what had to be the most distasteful event to take place in the o.Co Coliseum since Phillip Seymour Hoffman put on an Oakland uniform, A’s and Mariners players were forced to flee their respective clubhouses and shower together in the Raiders’ facilities yesterday when a sewage overflow threatened to engulf all present. Speaking Monday to the San Jose Mercury News’ Carl Steward, A’s owner Lewis Wolff suggested this isn’t the first time his charges have found themselves in the middle of a shit storm.
Wolff said Monday he has no plans to talk to baseball commissioner Bud Selig about the urgency of the club’s stadium situation in the wake of a plumbing issue that flooded the Coliseum’s baseball clubhouses with sewage Sunday.
“No, he knows about it,” Wolff said by phone from Los Angeles. “Unless he’s a plumber, there’s not much he can do, either.”
Wolff said this was just the latest issue of many the A’s have encountered with the Coliseum’s aging plumbing, noting, “It’s not a rare occasion for us, maybe not this extensively, but it’s happened several times.”
Wolff said it was the second Coliseum sewage issue he encountered this week. When he tried to have dinner in the Coliseum’s West Side Club on Wednesday, food service had to be halted because of a sewage leak in the kitchen.
A’s general manager Billy Beane was reluctant to talk about the matter since it looks as if the team is politically posturing for a new ballpark.
“Today this is national news, but it happens here all the time,” Beane said. “If we say anything, we’re told we’re being opportunist.”