Too many hot dogs at Oakland Coliseum? Lonely vendor at Oakland A’s game disagrees

"Look here," said Bartholomew Luna, motioning to his grill stacked with untouched hot dogs. "No one's buying today. Nothing."

OAKLAND — On many nights, the Coliseum’s vast concrete parking lots are crowded by hot dog vendors offering, for a few bucks, the bacon-wrapped indulgences that Bay Area sports fans often find impossible to resist.

They’re so popular, in fact, that stadium officials claim the situation has gotten downright dangerous. Vendors that fill the lots after A’s games and Oakland Arena concerts next door — and even crowd the tunnel bridge between the stadium and its BART station — are creating a safety hazard for fans trying to enter and exit, they say.

“If a fire broke out, there would be a crisis,” said Henry Gardner, executive director of a joint powers authority that oversees the Coliseum complex. “We have got to do something — maybe point them to a certain area where they can sell.”

Gardner and other Coliseum officials aren’t sure how to address what they describe as a problem of excess vendors — the rare headache at the ballpark and arena property that doesn’t involve a professional sports team.

It all seemed very ironic on Wednesday, following an afternoon A’s game, when the one solitary seller outside the A’s stadium could barely find takers for his bacon-wrapped dogs.

“Look here,” said Bartholomew Luna, motioning to his grill stacked with untouched hot dogs. “No one’s buying today. Nothing.”

Such are the wildly unpredictable times at the Coliseum, where the A’s acquired half the property rights in 2019 but have spent years disparaging the stadium and its infrastructure. As the team trudges through what may end up being its penultimate season at the venue with eyes toward Las Vegas, many vendors are looking for other places to go.

Attendance has been up and down, ranging from a season-high turnout over the weekend that saw 37,533 fans show up to “reverse boycott” the franchise’s owner, John J. Fisher, to the more-often dismal attendance numbers that reflect the on-field product.

The A’s have the lowest payroll in all of Major League Baseball, and both the fans inside the stadium and the hot-dog vendors on the outside, like Luna, have taken note of the result.

“I don’t have any other work right now, so I have to come,” Luna, who lives in San Jose, said in Spanish, adding that so far he hasn’t once been told by security guards to leave the parking lot. But the next time there’s an afternoon game, he may not bother showing up.

Luna and most other independent hot-dog vendors do not carry Coliseum-issued permits, which cost $500. The sellers began showing up in disproportionately large numbers once live events returned after the pandemic.

“These are not major corporations out there,” Gardner said. “These people are trying to keep a roof over their heads.”

Meanwhile, the team has said nothing about what it intends to do with its share of the stadium, though meetings have taken place in recent months between A’s officials and the African-American Sports and Entertainment Group, which separately is negotiating with the city to redevelop the site.

And meanwhile, the Oakland Roots soccer team is attempting to crank out the logistics of building a temporary, modular stadium in the Coliseum’s C Lot — one of several sprawling parking areas on the site.

If the logistics work out and the team reaches a deal with Gardner and the joint authority, Roots games — currently held at Cal State East Bay in Hayward — may begin kicking off at the Coliseum site as early as the start of next season, in March.

A lease deal with the Roots could provide a useful revenue stream for the Coliseum property after the baseball stadium earlier this year lost RingCentral as its naming sponsor.

The 10,000-seat stadium could ensure that sports remain in Oakland while the city waits for word on a WNBA expansion. And soccer games, too, sell hot dogs.

“We’re not going to escort these (vendors) off the premises or anything like that,” Gardner said. “But there’s just so many — it’s a very dangerous situation.”