Tuesday night in Oakland, and a baseball game inches toward first pitch before a minuscule quorum of witnesses. It's mid-May, and already this feels like a schedule-filler, a contest between a pair of bottom-dwelling franchises with almost nothing in common except an underlying sense of angst about their futures.
Things are so deathly quiet within the stained concrete bowl of the Coliseum, the plumbing-impaired home of the Athletics, that there's room for individual expressions of emotion to go viral: a lone clap along the third-base line for each member of the visiting Miami Marlins' starting lineup; a peanut vendor belting out a sales pitch from behind home plate; and a stray voice from somewhere in the upper deck shouting a denigrating slur at lame-duck Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria, who is likely lounging in a sprawling manse on the other side of the country, paying no mind to any of this.
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