Going to the ballgame.

Being from the Boston area, I'd say that we take our baseball pretty seriously out there. The atmosphere for a game against the worst team in baseball is going to be of high voltage. Cramming the park with roughly 35,000 fans every night is the norm.

Today, I experienced the norm for a baseball town that just doesn't have the passion of the fans out east. Hello, Oakland.

It doesn't really help the A's and their fan base that the stadium is designed for the city's professional football team. But even if it was a baseball-only stadium, which will typically seat between 30,000-40,000 people, they wouldn't come close to selling out.

Fans are, for the most part, disinterested in the game. Eavesdropping on conversation, I noticed that not even the subject of conversation was about the A's. Nor baseball. Nor sports. It's about sunscreen. It's about where they went this weekend. Is this how professional sports is supposed to be? Is this how "fanatics" spend their time at the game? Who are these people and what did they do to the true, die-hard fan?

Luckily for me, being a Red Sox fan, I was able to watch the game -- Oakland v. Texas -- without getting too caught up in the game, so I could observe these dreadful viewers. Yes, I've relegated the people who attended this ball game "viewers" -- not "fans" -- because they hardly mustered applause for their home-town-teams' players as the PA announcer was listing off the starting lineup. (Maybe it's the PA announcer's fault that the people don't get too interested, though. He wasn't very enthusiastic. Merely monotone. Or perhaps whoever is in charge of the audio, because the acoustics were drowned out by all the viewers' chit-chatting about what the newest treat Rachel Ray was whipping up this week.)

And the experience just wasn't one to write home about. I'm used to hearing "Center field" by John Fogerty as the home team makes its way onto the diamond going into the top half of the first inning. I'm used to hearing fans jeering, taunting and razzing the opponents of their home team as they step up to the plate, as they swing-and-miss, as they boot a ground ball. I'm used to a ruckus, sell-out crowd singing in unison in the middle of the eighth inning to the tune "Sweet Caroline" by Neil Diamond. And those are just the sounds. I'm not even including the glorious smells you inhale when you step foot into the ballpark. The mixture of all the smells -- beer, hot dogs, pretzels, pizza, peanuts, grass, air, people -- all conforms a smell that welcomes you to Friendly Fenway. Walk into the McAfee Colisseum in Oakland and you don't smell anything.

Following the ball game, I went to a local pub in Fremont to watch my home team play the Yankees on Sunday Night Baseball on ESPN and I talked about the issue with this lack of passion for the team. Even locals agreed that there wasn't a great atmosphere around these parts. In fact, I had a couple people say they root for the A's, but then for football, they'll root for the 49ers. Where is the allegiance to a town or city? Something isn't right in this area with the sports.

So, my question, in closing: What will it take to fix the sport world out west so I can feel as if I'm in the same world as an East Coast sports fan?