Where Did All the Abandoned A’s Elephants Go?

In 2018, the Oakland Athletics flooded the city with elephants. Fifty of them, each measuring six feet tall and weighing 650 pounds, released in various locations around town.

Look, they weren’t living elephants — they were statues of the team’s mascot, Stomper, each uniquely decorated by local artists and fans, representing the baseball franchise’s 50th anniversary of playing in Oakland. This herd of Stompers were painted with A’s players, hip-hop tributes, modern art, geographic nods, glittery mosaics, and, in one case, weirdly nightmarish images of ghoulish hands and creepy eyes. There was “Luchador Stomper” and “Steampunk Stomper” and “Bat Boy” (not to be confused with MC Hammer, who was once an actual bat boy for the A’s).

When they were unveiled in 2018, the statues brought fans together and galvanized at least one East Bay mom to create a family guide on where to find them all. But in retrospect, these lovable, mostly cuddly-looking Elephantidae may have been the horsemen (elephantmen?) of an impending Oakland sports apocalypse.

One year after these sculptural Stompers arrived, the Golden State Warriors bounced from Oracle Arena in favor of San Francisco. The Oakland Raiders followed suit in 2020, moving to Las Vegas. And last year the Athletics themselves exited, and are currently playing in the sweltering heat of an underequipped minor league stadium in West Sacramento while awaiting a new stadium to be built in Sin City (an appropriate destination for the team’s hell-spawned owner, John Fisher).

But what about the elephants? Fisher may have taken the team from us, but he didn’t take everything: 50 symbols of regional pride, colorful fanship, and a testament to the Athletics’ half-a-century of goodwill in the community remain. And now the Oakland Ballers, known as the B's — an independent baseball team that formed in West Oakland in 2024 — are trying to find them all.

Stomper was initially introduced to Oakland as the baseball team’s official mascot character in 1997 — when he debuted on opening night of that season at the Coliseum, the place where he would eventually become famous for his hyphy dance moves. The elephant concept itself was derived from a 1902 press conference in which John McGraw, an opposing coach, disparagingly referred to the team as “white elephants.” Ever since, the image has been sewn into the franchise’s identity.

As one National Baseball Hall of Fame writer proclaimed, “The A’s defiantly adopted the white elephant both as a symbol of pride and an opportunity to refute and ridicule McGraw.” In 1905, A’s club manager Connie Mack gifted McGraw a stuffed elephant when their teams faced off in the World Series. In 1909, the A’s, then located in Philadelphia, formally adopted the elephant as part of their core branding. Strangely, when the team moved to Kansas City in 1968 the elephant logo transformed into a mule, until finally, in 1988, during their tenure in Oakland, the team brought the elephant back as an alternate logo — as coolly rebellious as ever.

The history of Stomper, then, is a history of flipping the narrative — fitting for a scrappy city like Oakland and its people. Having now lost their team, it makes sense that Oakland's truest fans would want to embody this resilience more than ever and carry that legacy forward.

For fans who grew up in the region in the mid-90s and onward, Stomper represents childhood. He represents family outings. He’s Rickey Henderson in his fourth and final stint with the team, wearing sunglasses while donning a batting practice jersey with a Spring Training patch on the sleeve. He’s those years of winning. He’s those years of losing. Stomper knows the nonsensical joys of superstitious baseball beliefs. Of cheering for players inside of a concrete bowl, in which the salty breeze of the nearby marshlands and Bay waters gets trapped and adds an unavoidable wind chill, even on the warmest of nights. He’s imperfect — I mean, are elephants even remotely athletic in any way? — but like all things in Oakland sports, he’s ours. And most importantly, he always shows up and looks out for us. It’s only right that in a time of need, someone looks out for Stomper, too.

The hunt for the missing Stompers began last year, led by Casey Pratt, a journalist who covered the Oakland A’s for ABC7 before joining the Ballers as part of their communications team. Pratt brought in the folks at The Last Dive Bar and Gamer Athletics — two major sources of grassroots Oakland sports fandom — and together, they began rounding up the forlorn Stompers.

The makeshift salvage crew started by sending out messages on social media. Soon, they heard from community members and local institutions who had Stompers. So Pratt hopped into a moving truck with a professional team of movers and began to rescue statues that had been left behind.

Their first stop was Jack London Square, where they picked up the “Tourist Stomper,” originally gifted to the Visit Oakland office. Dressed in a bright pink, Hawaiian-inspired floral shirt with a fanny pack and camera, it sat on the curb in Jack London for years, undamaged and unbothered.

From there, Pratt and his fellow elephant conservationists swung by the Oakland Zoo to pick up another iconic statue — the “Where-O-Where Is Stomper” — appropriately bedecked with animals. It had been left in the zoo’s play area near the train station and rides before being rescued by Pratt.

The third statue, which Pratt says has the most “sordid past,” came from Kingfish Pub (the “Kingfish Stomper”). Placed in front of the historic sports pub’s entrance, a patron once tripped over it and it led to legal troubles for Kingfish, so they exiled the Stomper to a warehouse, not to be seen for years.

The fourth statue was gained from a retired middle school teacher, Mimi Dean, whose art students worked on researching, designing and painting their “Steppin’ Out With Stomper” contribution. Themed around preserving the Bay’s natural resources and Oakland sports history, the statue was sent to the East Bay Municipal Utility District (EBMUD) office upon being finished, where it stayed for some time. Eventually, EBMUD gave it back to Dean, who kept it on her porch for years. One of her former students saw the statue on social media and reached out to the Ballers, who contacted Dean about it. Though it carried a strong sentimental value for Dean, she realized that the Stompers were meant to be shared and appreciated by all, so she happily parted with it.

Their most recent addition is a Rickey Henderson-themed “The GOAT Stomper.” Pratt told me that the Ballers acquired it from a construction worker who stumbled upon the hometown hero-inspired statue after bidding for it at an auction on his day off, on which he had been drinking and his wife had fallen asleep. Not sure what to do with it after it had been delivered to his construction site, he removed the concrete base and proceeded to tour the elephant to various bars in the region on the back of his pick up truck. Now, the GOAT Stomper can be seen at the Ballers’ home park in West Oakland in front of a Rickey Henderson mural that was unveiled earlier this summer with Henderson’s family in attendance.

Earlier this spring, the Oakland Ballers introduced a new home for these Stomper statues: Scrappy’s Sanctuary for Lost Animals. (Scrappy the Rally Possum is the mascot for the Ballers, a callback to the time when actual possums had temporarily taken up residence in the Oakland Coliseum during the A’s tenure due to managerial neglect and a lack of investment in the space).

There, the statues are clustered together in a surrealist collection where fans can take selfies and interact with them. It’s a humorous jab at the former baseball team’s incompetence, no doubt, but it’s also a way to recognize what has been lost, and what magic waits ahead in Oakland’s sports future.

“I thought it could be a special opportunity to create something in a way that would respect and cherish a piece of Oakland history,” says Pratt, who has also acquired an original BART car that will soon be featured at the park. “Raimondi wants to be a living museum, a love letter to the community to celebrate all kinds of Bay Area history. These Stomper statues were a perfect opportunity to do that.”

Dean, the retired teacher, loves it. “We all know we got robbed,” says Dean, a proud A’s fan who lives in San Lorenzo. “Saving the Stompers is such a really cool thing. Isn’t that adorable? We need to do what we can to keep this community together. None of us are going to Vegas. And who the hell is going to Sacramento? We can learn to love a new team. The Ballers are going to be a big part of our future. I was overjoyed that someone wanted to bring Stomper to the people.”

When I talked to her, Dean rattled off decades of memories about her students, community and the Athletics — how she can’t go anywhere without a former student, or family member of a former student, recognizing her. Often, they talk about the Athletics. She reflects on her time in the classroom as an East Bay arts teacher, which she sums up as “glorious, wacky, fun-filled.” Perhaps no three better words can describe what the A’s once represented in the MLB and for Bay Area baseball fans. Keeping Stomper around is just one elephant-shaped way of preserving that feeling.

“We’re still here,” Dean says. “We knew how to have a great time. We can bring it back.”

The search for these abandoned elephants continues. The Ballers may have already rescued five, but there are still 45 Stompers roaming Oakland’s proverbial wilderness that might need a new home. Pratt dreams that eventually Scrappy’s Sanctuary for Lost Animals might contain all 50 — a testament to the city’s durability and self-sufficiency. Despite its recent sports departures, Oakland is still home for many elephants and diehards alike.

If you have information on the whereabouts of a Stomper, please contact the team with any tips. Casey Pratt can be reached at casey@oaklandballers.com. The Ballers will compete in the Pioneer Baseball League Championship Series beginning on Tues., Sept. 16. Tickets for the series are available here.