One by one, they have left Oakland.

First, the Warriors headed back across the bay to San Francisco in 2019, a return for a basketball franchise whose recent championship reign has been defined more by glitz than grit. Then, a year later, it was the itinerant Raiders heading to Las Vegas, the eye patch on their gridiron bandit logo obscuring an apparently wandering eye.

Last week, the final departure became all but official: Major League Baseball owners unanimously approved a move to Las Vegas by the Athletics, who not long ago used the marketing catch phrase “rooted in Oakland.”

There is still much for the ballclub to sort out. The Athletics have another year on their lease in Oakland and their new stadium — a $1.5 billion, 30,000-seat ballpark with a retractable roof for which the Nevada Legislature approved public financing — won’t be ready until 2028. Where they will play in between is an open question. The Nevada teachers union is angling to put the subsidy on the ballot for voters.

But the A’s impending move, as inevitable as it has seemed, landed in Oakland like a fastball to the ribs.

“I don’t want this to sound hyperbolic, but for me it’s not only the death of the A’s, and of professional sports in the East Bay,” said Jim Zelinski, who more than a decade ago co-founded Save Oakland Sports, one of several groups that sprouted up over the years to keep teams from leaving the East Bay. “What this vote symbolizes for me is, this is really the death of the common, everyday fan.”

The working man has long been a central figure in American sports, attracted to games as a diversion from the 9-to-5 grind.

As professional sports began to expand west in the late 1950s, Oakland — anchored by ship building, automobile manufacturing and its port — became an obvious landing spot.

Within little more than a decade, Oakland became home to the Raiders of the upstart American Football League, the Athletics, the Warriors and, briefly, the California Golden Seals, who for a time played in unfashionable white skates.

All played at a complex centered on a vast asphalt lot, flanked by a major freeway and a rail line.

Soon, the lot will be vacant, mostly because the business calculus for teams has evolved.

Franchise revenue is now driven more by television deals and sponsorships than ticket sales, though those prices have skyrocketed. The transformation of sports into media products has relegated cities to backdrops and fans to props — a point that was driven home during the coronavirus pandemic when the games went on in vacant or mostly empty stadiums.

Another factor, per Roger Noll, a Stanford sports economist emeritus, is sports gambling.

As regional sports networks, a cash cow for sports teams, have begun to teeter — and in some cases collapse — Noll says sports gambling via streaming broadcasts is “the next golden goose” for sports franchises.

While Nevada has predictably welcomed internet gambling, California has not, with voters trouncing two measures last year in what was the country’s most expensive ballot campaign, with more than $450 million raised.

“If this is the next big thing, California sports teams are disadvantaged,” Noll said. “The old big-market, small-market dynamic is no longer going to favor the Bay Area and Los Angeles teams if a primary source of new revenue is unavailable to them.”

Despite several headwinds in recent years, the Athletics continued to be competitive, reinventing themselves by using data to assess undervalued skills, a process that became known as “Moneyball,” after the bestselling book. The A’s have not reached the World Series since 1990, but they’ve been in the playoffs 11 times since 2000.

Attendance had lingered in the lower third. But when the team began its latest teardown, trading away its best players for prospects rather than paying their accelerating salaries, fans finally had enough of owner John Fisher, who before last season had raised ticket prices in what many sensed was a ploy to suppress attendance as a pretext for moving.

The A’s averaged 10,276 fans last season, the fewest in baseball, and finished 50-112. Fans who did turn up at the Coliseum often wore T-shirts or carried banners urging Fisher to sell the team.

Those who miss the Athletics most might be people like Matthias Haas.

A Bishop O’Dowd High graduate, Haas grew up a few miles from the Coliseum, steeped in the city’s rich baseball history that traces from Frank Robinson to Rickey Henderson to Dave Stewart, all of whom matriculated from Oakland sandlots to stardom in the big leagues.

He learned the game’s finer points on the diamonds down the street at 66th and International in leagues that the Athletics helped bankroll. He sat in the stands during the 2012 playoffs when the old mausoleum was rocking.

“There’s a certain pride in being an Oakland Athletics fan,” said Haas, who plays baseball at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, plucking the adjectives “gritty” and “tough” to define his tribe. “People from Oakland say that they are from Oakland, not the Bay Area. That’s how it felt to be an A’s fan.”