Athletics Will Incorporate Coliseum's Right Field Drum Crew into Crowd Noise Plan

The Oakland Athletics will start testing crowd noise in the Coliseum Wednesday, and part of that will be seeing how they can bring the right field drummers into the soundtrack. And if that means the club needs to do some recording, both A's president Dave Kaval and the drummers themselves are willing to figure it out.

The Oakland A’s will start introducing crowd noise into their workouts as of Wednesday.

It won’t be just standard prepackaged noise. It will be noise from past A’s games at the Coliseum, and, just maybe, it will include noise from some of their most ardent fans.

The A’s have a dedicated group of drummers who sit in the right field stands during normal times, and a few more in left field. In many ways, those drummers help dictate the fan experience, and the A’s organization would like to keep that even in a time when fans can’t be in the ballpark.

“It is our intention to incorporate the real unique sounds of the Coliseum into the experience of fans,’ A’s president Dave Kaval told Inside the Athletics Tuesday. “That includes everything from you know the guy who yells `Pizza!’ to the drummers to people in the bleachers to the `Let’s go Oakland!’”

Wednesday is the first in a series of tests to get the sound up to the levels the A’s brass hopes for. The A’s have soundtracks from games dating back to the 2012 season and more available from Major League Baseball.

“We are thinking through the how of doing it right,” Kaval said. “We’ve done some outreach to those key groups to ensure we get the right sounds from them. We know what it sounds like for big games.”

That’s music to the ears of Will MacNeal, a longtime A’s fan and one of the leaders of the core of about a half dozen drummers who populate the right field bleachers. Known to one and all as Right Field Will, he said the drumming, in his view, “is the heartbeat of the Coliseum.”

“You could be anywhere in the ballpark, I could be on the other side of the Coliseum trying to get a beer or something, and I could hear the drums and know my crew is doing what they’ve got to do,” MacNeal said. “They are bringing the energy, and they fire the crowd up.

“If it’s one of those nights where there’s not that many fans, if you don’t have the drums … I think we honestly pump up the players. I know it helps, and it adds to the environment of the stadium.”

Kaval said that while they do have some of the drumming on a soundtrack, the testing will indicate if they need more. And he said “if we need to get additional (drumming) sounds, we’re going to reach out to work with them to do that.”

He won’t have to reach far.

“I believe the group would be willing to do it,” MacNeal said. “I guarantee you if they were allowed to get together to record some drumming somehow, they would do it without question. The whole idea is to make is sound like is a real authentic home game. We’d do that.”

The drummers were already planning on being in the parking lot if the Coliseum Authority decides to go ahead and put up a drive-in screen so that A’s fans could watch the game in their cars, carefully socially distanced.

“When we heard about maybe being able to see the games in the parking lot, we were talking about bringing along the drums, set them up outside and watching the game on the screen,” MacNeil said. “I’m pretty sure if we did that, they’d hear them in the stadium, in a good way.”

Follow Athletics insider John Hickey on Twitter: @JHickey3

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