At the end of the 2021 MLB season, the Oakland Athletics announced plans to honor Steve Vucinich, who had worked with the team since its arrival in Oakland from Kansas City in 1968.
In the subsequent three years, they never followed through on those plans.
In 2021, Matt Kawahara, then of the San Francisco Chronicle, reported that the home clubhouse in the Oakland Coliseum would be named after Vucinich. As Lowell Hickey of the Castro Valley Forum detailed in 2023, Vucinich began working as a clubhouse attendant at the Oakland Coliseum in 1968. He became the visiting clubhouse manager in 1974 and the home clubhouse manager in 1993. Hickey also noted that by the time Vucinich retired after spring training in 2022, “He surpassed the legendary Connie Mack, first owner and manager of the team from 1901-1950 when it was based in Philadelphia, as the man with the longest tenure in A’s history.”
So, the honor was well earned. Or at least, the honor would have been well earned. On Friday, one day after the A’s played their game in Oakland before moving temporarily to Sacramento in 2025 and permanently to Las Vegas in 2028, Kayla Vucinich, Steve’s daughter, said on X (formerly Twitter) that the honor never came.
“(Not so) Fun fact: This never happened,” Vucinich said.
While the team’s time in Oakland was winding down, the A’s front office came under much criticism from the national media. This was no different. Local and national media members — among others — expressed their frustration with this revelation.
If this sounds familiar to you, it should. In 2019, the A’s announced plans to retire Dave Stewart’s No. 34 the following season. The COVID-19 pandemic kept that from happening in 2020. While that was understandable, the ceremony still hadn’t happened as the 2022 season began and more notably, Stewart hadn’t heard anything from the team. Fortunately, Stewart’s number was retired later that season.
But with the team leaving Oakland, it looks like the team’s promise to honor Vucinich will remain unfulfilled.
[San Francisco Chronicle, Castro Valley Forum, Kayla Vucinich on X]