Such sentiments are harder to suppress the more of yourself you’ve invested in the team. Take Nina Thorsen, one of the leaders of the crew of drummers who for more than 20 years have occupied the Coliseum’s left- and right-field bleachers. “It’s one of the things that has made Oakland unique. There’s a lot of ritual in the drums,” she told me.
We were in the parking lot Tuesday night, ahead of the first game of the Rangers series. She had her drum, a 14-inch Pearl tom she’d purchased in 2016 from a yard sale in El Cerrito, strapped around her shoulder. “We have different beats for every player,” she explained. She reached into her pocket and pulled out her phone. On it she had recordings of dozens of drum patterns, which she and her crew had devised and memorized over the years. “Last night we were not having a good time with somebody’s beat. And I was like, ‘Hey, let’s just do ‘Matt Chapman,’ just for the hell of it, and that’s a great beat in addition to just being for a great player.” Sticks in hand, she gave me a brief, punchy preview. I recognized it immediately.
Thorsen moved to Oakland from Minnesota in 1992. She attended her first A’s game in 1999 but didn’t fall in love with the team until 2000. That’s a year most people think of as the dawn of the “Moneyball” era, but it was also the beginning of the drums. “I didn’t ever meet that first batch of drummers,” she said. “But I really loved their work.”