Beisbol
I hate sports. But local baseball saved my summers.
Oakland, as everyone who cares about sports knows, managed to lose all three of its professional sports teams thanks to a combination of a corrupt and incompetent city government and craven team owners. I love this shithole city where I was born and raised, but my brand has always been sports hater, so it didn’t really break my heart when the Warriors, Raiders and A’s departed. But it hurt the people here and it hurt the economy too. We got two soccer teams, and they became wildly popular, but in my sports averse mind soccer just looks like people running around in circles while yelling, with fifteen hour intervals between goals during which fights break out in the stands.
And then we got baseball back. The stadium is in West Oakland, an industrial neighborhood near the Port, where Black families were pushed during the redlining era. After the Loma Prieta quake in 1989, when the Cypress Structure collapsed and killed 42 people, West Oakland became even more blighted, abandoned cars on the streets and gunfire a nightly soundtrack. West Oakland is also a food desert, with no grocery stores and very few restaurants. It was, in other words, the exact kind of neighborhood ripe for gentrification.
But instead of gentrification, it got baseball.
The (Oakland) Boys of Summer, via AP
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Many American kids with old-school dads grow up in sports families. Imagine an LL Bean catalog: handsome dad, handsome sons, chunky wool sweaters, tussling in a game of touch football on their meticulously groomed lawn with just a few picturesque autumn leaves falling in the background as the wife and daughters cheer them on. I used to see these kinds of images as a kid and find them bizarre, like a transmission from an alien planet.
Because sports in my family looked like this: five kids and two parents wearing various ripped and stained hand-me-downs cramming into a rusting VW van and driving from Oakland to San Francisco to sit in the highest, cheapest possible bleacher seats in Candlestick Park.
My dad was a baseball guy. And even though we lived in Oakland, a sad sack city that had its own sad sack baseball team, my dad was a Willie Mays guy. A Willie McCovey guy. My dad was a Giants fan, and that meant we went to games at a ballpark where nighttime temperatures were so cold that if you made it through a night game with extra innings, you were rewarded with a T shirt picturing the Giants logo covered in icicles and the logo Vini, Vidi, Vixi: I Came, I Saw, I Survived. They called it the Croix de Candlestick. We wore down jackets and hats to games in August and sometimes we brought sleeping bags because those nosebleed bleacher seats were battered by howling bay winds.
Like a lot of Gen Xers, my teen years were marked by a kind of intellectual posturing that involved sitting around in coffee shops chainsmoking and listening to punk and indie rock mix tapes and pretending to read Sartre. We are, as a generation, insufferable. But the arty kids wearing all black and popping zits in the bathroom while sneering at the popular kids? We’re the most insufferable of all. When my father died I was nineteen and by then, because I was insufferable, I hated baseball. Found it boring, repetitive, pointless.
Later in life, when I encountered people who liked sports in academia, they tried to intellectualize sports, talking about the Darwinian nature of competition and Foucault’s panopticon as the modern media landscape. In other words, yawn. I watched what sports did to my students who were athletes, and it seemed grim: disabilities that would become lifelong, lack of sleep, stress. And before women’s soccer and basketball became more than a niche, pro sports rolled out the red carpet for patriarchy, with women cast into the stands to jump up and down enough to make their boobs bounce.
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Many people assume teachers love summer breaks, but for a lot of us, going from 100 to zero when grades are submitted is a fast track to a mental health crashout. Last summer I was still in bad physical and mental shape from cancer treatment and toughing out a cancer drug that made me really sick, so I felt like a steamroller had laid me flat when the semester ended.
The solution turned out to be baseball. And not even minor league baseball. In 2024, a couple of local guys decided they were going to build a team from the ground up, and they were going to do it with the community and for the community. The Oakland Ballers debuted last year in a small stadium just blocks from where the Cypress Structure collapsed in 1989. Raimondi Park is also just blocks from the Bay Bridge, which was thankfully low on traffic the day of the Loma Prieta quake because the Giants and the A’s were about to play in the Battle of the Bay, a World Series later referred to as the Earthquake World Series.
The Ballers, unlike the Giants and A’s, play in a park that barely seats 4K people, and they’re part of the independent Pioneer League, rungs below the minors. And there is only one section of actual seats; everyone else sits on aluminum bleachers. The toilets are porta potties and the mascot is Scrappy the Rally Possum, often mistaken for a rat, a callout to the possums who’d run across the field at the A’s former home, the crumbling and neglected Oakland Coliseum.
Players in the Pioneer League are often recent college grads or players who’ve been bounced around the minors and have played in Mexico, the Dominican Republic. This season, they brought in one very tall German import. They’re not making a ton of money, and most of them work in the off season or, like many players in women’s soccer and women’s basketball, go abroad to play to make ends meet. And it’s important to note that they’re not all guys – last season, one of the Ballers’ pitchers was Kelsie Whitmore, the first woman to pitch in the Pioneer League.
At some point last year, sick as I was, I told my spouse, “let’s just go.” Tickets are cheap, it’s a short drive from our house, and if we got bored, we could always leave early. But halfway through the game I was grinning and didn’t stop. Baseball, as my dad knew all along, is fun. It’s a slow game of strategy, not the relentless pounding of basketball or hockey or the violent onslaught of football. With baseball, at some point, you just surrender to the zen of the game.
The Ballers have said from the beginning that the team is built by Oakland, for Oakland, and you see evidence of that all over at Raimondi Park. They have a system of fan ownership, unlike major league teams owned by the mega wealthy, like the A’s much detested billionaire business nepo baby owner John Fisher, or as we call him here, Fuck John Fisher.
The Ballers have murals of local baseball legends Rickey Henderson, Vida Blue and Ernie Raimondi, the local minor leaguer who died in WWII that the park is named for. Fans in jerseys from The Larks, the local Negro League Team, or the Oakland Oaks, the last local minor league team. Local politicians and celebrities make appearances. The park has local business sponsors (prepare for the local plumbers who roll a toilet onto the field so people can toss rolls of TP into it), local transit, local food.
And the fans are local, too. A couple games back we sat behind a queer family of two moms with their kids; at another game we sat behind a mixed race couple with five kids. At one game the owner of The Avenue, a local drive bar, brought an entire busload of crusty old punk rockers. The 68s, a group of local fans, bang drums and play tuneless horns in the cheap seats. Kids get to run the bases after games. Theme games proliferate: I’ve been to Teacher Appreciation Night, Dio De Los Ballers, Grateful Dead Night (complete with Jerry Garcia lookalike contest) and this week I’ll go to Bruce Lee Night. Pride Night is coming up because of course Oakland Pride is out of synch with Pride everywhere else. My more athletic spouse caught a ball a few weeks back, mostly because it was about to hit me in the face, but we still display it in front of the TV. I even have favorite players now. Tyler Lozano, the catcher, who has a magnificent mullet; Lou Helmig, the German guy, because he’s funny; Cam Buford, who smacks home runs with what seems like no effort; Esai Santos, just because he went to Berkeley High. And I have merch. Hats and t-shirts. Multiple ones.
The icing on the cake is that this scraped together, community owned team from a town everyone wrote off? They win games. They’re currently #1 in the Pioneer League.
Sometimes our personal brands get old, versions of ourselves that need to be sloughed off as we age and mature. Maybe I’m a little bit less of a sports hater, but I still can’t stand football, feel like most big money pro sports are just about billionaires grinding athletes into the ground, and thank God at least some college athletes are finally getting paid because that exploitation was ridiculous. But there’s something about sitting on an aluminum bench on a cold Oakland night cheering on a team of cute guys in pinstriped pants that can make you believe your city deserves something wholesome and fun, and sometimes, you do too.
