Joe’s Season in Review
Your editor offers an unsolicited and overlong look back at the 2026 season
by Joe Horton
What a season. I know what you’re thinking: the only thing it’s missing is a 2,500-word essay about What It Meant.
I wrote and edited these Dispatches bankside the Missouri River next to a two-story Lewis and Clark replica canoe. I jotted notes in the parking lot of a dinosaur museum, next to sharks in an aquarium, and while being chased by wild Marysville geese. I did interviews from a hotel lobby in Mexico, trying to find the blankest possible wall behind me as far away from the surf and bumping beach music of an Arkansas Catholic high school graduation trip as possible to give a semblance of professionalism. I wrote among a crowd of two dozen at a Pecos League game in Santa Fe, ducking my head into the keyboard in shame because I didn’t have any cash to add to the pass-the-hat-after-the-homer tradition. I edited articles through ever-increasing states of disassociation from the fumes of a city dump in Kalispell, Montana where Pacific Steel & Recycling burned recycled trash next to one of the country’s most pristine national parks. My wife can attest that I brought my computer everywhere, often hidden under the front seat of our car, in case a link didn’t work or a picture was wrong or any one of the thousand other worries I had every moment a story was live came true. I fussed with photo dimensions in room 356 at Kaiser Oakland while my son, three hours old, slept. He will grow up learning Priorities and Passion and Ballers Baseball™.
With Billings sweeping Missoula and Long Beach on their way to the title and the 2026 Pioneer League season officially over, this past week was the first time since May that we didn’t publish a daily story on Dispatches. (To be fair, there might have been one or two days in there where we didn’t due to alligator attack or alien abduction or some other Force of Nature.) I haven’t been on a daily news routine in a long time, ever since it was my job as a desk assistant in D.C. to tell Jim Lehrer that his hair was sticking up after his afternoon nap, and the intensity of the work and intimacy of the beat doesn’t leave a lot for meditation to consider what it all means. So, when absolutely no one asked me to sit down and write what the season was about, how it mattered, and why we’ll remember it, I quickly realized the best I could do was how it felt and a few of the pieces, perhaps, that in some puzzling make up the whole.
⦿ I think about the bullpen pitchers early on in May being asked by kids at the Raimondi playground at an insistent pace for spare balls, and some of the players looking shocked and little helpless at the proximity. There’s scant distance between fans and players in the Pioneer League anyway, and all the more by design with the Ballers. It’s not for everybody, and it doesn’t need to be, but the players who embrace that symbiosis rather than shirk from it have—I think three seasons have born out—more success and more fulfillment here.
⦿ I know the field seats made a difference. Not just in the viewing (not one person I talked to who tried them said they could ever ideally go back to sitting anywhere else :), not just for the added fullness they gave the game day experience, even on days with lighter crowds, but in the way it gave fans a human connection to the players they didn’t have even in the closest stands. Here they could see how hard the game is, how young these guys are, how real the emotions are on both sides, and how heckling seems great and fun ten feet away but maybe not when you’re two feet away.
⦿ I know conclusively now that there’s no place like Raimondi. This isn’t just home-Townerism. I’ve seen games at six of the other ten league parks, and there’s nothing close to the mojo we’ve got going here. Two of the teams I visited this year are new and just getting off the ground, so it’s unfair to expect the same energy and crowds. But in a park like Glacier, the crown jewel of the league that does fill up regularly, there was a remarkable apathy about the action until the innings got late enough that insights and insults of the liquid variety took over.
Whether we had a traveling contingent of three or thirty B’s faithful, the other fans marveled. Almost better still were the local fans in Montana and Long Beach and elsewhere who kept up their Ballers fandom from a distance. I’ve said it before: I wouldn’t wish the past traumas of Oakland baseball on my worst enemy (other than, of course, FJF), but from that hell a particular slice of heaven we have carved in and beyond the 510.
I know the team loves to preach to our choir that Raimondi is a special place, but this season I can objectively say that it is, and not just as a place but as an idea. Nobody gets to tell you your minor league team is small time if you don’t believe it; the limits of your fandom are not bound by outfield or outcome but by outlook.
⦿ After a suitably depressing last-minute loss to the Voyagers in Great Falls and in their suitably open-air visitors’ dugout that was more a shallow slope, I think about the players consoling each other and taking private moments for a long time after the game. At this point in first-week June, Game 16, nobody knew each other very well, and the pressure of the playoffs seemed a long way off, but these guys cared early and often and about each other. There were no other fans around, no family members. This reflection and restoration wasn’t for anyone but themselves.
⦿ In the Salt Lake City airport on the way home from our Montana trip, watching that night’s game on my iPad set on my bag, having just greeted a fellow Baller’s fan who saw us from the concourse on his way to Raleigh, I remember learning that Gabe Tanner was moving up to the White Sox organization. Only days before, we’d gone to brunch with him and coach James Harris, and my first texts to him were…colorful.
The move, as we said at the time, couldn’t have happened to a greater guy or better B, but the fact that he had so much success this season for that other Ballers team, the Kannapolis Cannon Ballers, hits that sweet spot of good things happening to good people who are really good at what they do because they fight for everything they deserve. (Or that Gabe, in one of the biggest nights of his life, took time to help the B’s fans who had been locked inside the Great Falls stadium after waiting to congratulate him find their way out through the players’ exit.)
⦿ I think about fans cheering “that’s one for the lawsuit” whenever a home run would get hit in the direction of the litigious building-in-question beyond the Raimondi left field wall. Kudos to the team for turning what was another story of Oakland (and more aptly, carpetbagging suits in the predacious posh periphery) cannibalizing its successes into the Tale of the Team That Can’t Stop Hitting Homers in a neighborhood that loves it. (Oh and by the way, the B’s hit 193 this year—that’s two a game—by far and away a team record. Sue at your own peril.)
⦿ I think about Tremayne Cobb signing balls for kids midgame after announcing that his injury had finished his season and probably his B’s career. Not that I was surprised, Tre’s always been That Guy, but the ability to think outside himself in that moment in baseball, when signing a baseball, not sure if he’ll ever play baseball again, was special.
⦿ On the other orbit, I think about the steady arrival of winter for one hotheaded league manager whose transgressions large and small trickled to me over the season. That he was mean to our head groundskeeper was disqualifying enough; then came word of sending one of his players up to the Raimondi booth because he was convinced that the B’s were cheating on ABS reviews, the scoop that he’d chased an umpire off the field, and the story that he’d smashed a door in an opponent’s locker room and was barred from returning. I hadn’t witnessed any of this invective personally until we all did when it exploded on field after a loss to the B’s and in a game that he won and put under protest. He was a reminder that at any level how you win and how you lose matter almost as much as the result (especially when you don’t win it all).
⦿ Seeing disbelief on our Dispatcher Michael Thompson’s face when his first game covering the team saw a last-strike-game-tying homer and knockout round win, only to have his second game, after I’d already told him, “it’s going to take a miracle to get a miracle” with the team down 5-0, become The Game where Jeter Ybarra hit 3.5 homers including a 9th inning grand slam and knockout winner. We don’t always get a chance to see someone else witness the magic for the first time, much less on field level with the ability to then go talk to the magicians and write about it, but this kind of providence keeps me flush in faith that there is always more good stuff in the next inning.
⦿ And the ending I think about is pitcher James Pazdera, having just been relieved by two-way phenom Noah Blythe on the mound for the last game’s last batter, going into the outfield and catching that last out and then writing on his Instagram that it was the most fun he’d ever had playing baseball.
And on that matter of the playoffs. Yesterday was the one year champ-iversary that brought a Hennessy-filled trophy to Oakland. I’m a deeply pessimistic person by nature, and the monumental joy of last year’s impossible records and championship still glows for me with the half-life of a billion years. Add to that this year’s bad PBL decision to shorten the championship series to three games, and I believe more than ever that the happiest baseball fan just wants more baseball. Trophies are great, banners are swell, but an extra week with the fan-ily at Raimondi is, to me, its own reward. With the championship parade as the extended bookend, we had one more month last year where it was easy to believe that the season would never end.
So I don’t subscribe to the winning-is-the-most-important-thing philosophy by itself. I hope it sounds as Fred Rogers as possible to say that giving it your best shot is genuinely and realistically what matters. The best moments for me as a fan are the hope and anticipation: sure, you’ve made the postseason and are waiting for the games to start; sure, you’ve moved on and are waiting to see who you play next; sure, you’re begging to see another fire-breathing snail parade down Campbell. But even winning the last “meaningless” game of the regular season when you can keep that spark all offseason is enough. Or when you spy a sunny ad on the side of an AC Transit bus in a downpour in December and remember what leaping off a bench in summer joy feels like. When you smile at your favorite giveaway on your desk or shelf and wonder what new goodies are in store. When the feeling is pure excitement, pure love for your team, before it gets twisted by the necessary kinks of competition. I want to win every year because winning makes all the other stuff possible: more games, more fans, more visibility for the players, more people reading Dispatches, more days my watch reminds me it’s time to leave, more steadiness long term.
This is all to say, about a zillion words later, that this was the most rewarding season for me so far. Not just in better appreciating success through a little hardship, not only because the fan-ily continues to grow in diversity and creativity and empathy with each new theme night or block party or Ballunteer event or player reading at a public library. Our new Dispatches writers helped me, and I hope all of us, see the team and Town in ways we didn’t before. The more stories we tell the more the stories tell us.
And for the record: the biggest difference I saw this year was fans around Oakland, around the state, and indeed the country wearing Ballers gear or seeing ours who, when we talked, said they loved the team—and knew players & promos & park lore—but had not yet been to a game.
There was a shark tank wrangler in Long Beach, a Razorback Sucker fan in Santa Fe, an exhausted mom at Legoland. Travelers galore in airports; Dispatcher Kyle met “a random dude” on a rental car shuttle in Denver who spotted his B in an instant. The Kaiser ultrasound tech chatted away about planning her first visit while our baby thumped away on the monitor.
That absence, of course, should change, and that’s part of our central mission here at Dispatches to bring people in, but the affirmation that someone could believe enough in what we’re building or hear enough good things about a team with a big possum in a public park to be our emissaries out in the world without feeling the full vibe of Raimondi is staggering.
(And those Gusto ads that play on national TV all the time help too…)
Year three growth means, I hope, that we are just getting started with the most contagious and permanent kind of belonging.
I’m thinking especially about this because of the recent McClatchy media layoffs of local writers, many of them sports reporters (including, apparently, Dave Barry’s wife, Michelle Kaufman) across the country, notably the entire sports staff nearby at the Sacramento Bee. At least one significant driver of the cuts is a move to AI coverage.
Apart from the childcare and socialization they provide young people and the exercise they provide the youngish and young at heart who could get their sad sweaty kicks at the Planet Fitness like the rest of us pretend to, sports exist solely for people to gather and enjoy. They have no bigger real world value other than filling the utterly essential human need to inspire, infuriate, connect and confound through what people can achieve and how hard they’ll try and come up short. What on earth is the point of farming out this purpose to data centers and algorithms? Even in numbers-and-metrics obsessed baseball, even in this bet-sick, money-soaked sports moment, having the box score and slash lines is a thin gray sketch of the color and warmth of being part of the story, whether you’re in the stands or on your screen or in a YouTube chat answering a question from Gareth Kwok and Tyler Petersen. And for all of its manufactured tribalism and corporate shillery, for all that millisecond-and-megapixel instant replay still allows us to argue about what we really saw, sports is more than ever the third space or appointment television or open ritual for us to have together and at once.
⦿ One more moment from the season. I brought my son Elliott at eight days old to Raimondi. We stayed about an inning. It was too loud and he did a poor job following the game, but I wanted him there just for a moment because you are my people. His welcome to the world had to include our chosen fan-ily. And I know we belong because about two minutes after arriving two separate people asked whether the tiny delicate baby could fit in a helmet.
That’s my vibe. People talking with people about the amazing feats people did with sticks and balls on a diamond and grass painstakingly maintained by people while everyone shares parts of their lives far beyond that diamond is the essence that makes Dispatches, the B’s, baseball, and sports worthwhile for me.
Dispatches writers work purely for their love of the team and community, fitting writing pro bono into the swirl of the rest of their lives. We are not the alternative or solution to professionals paid and appreciated for a lifetime of skill. But this is a small, deeply human space full of joys and flaws sustained by the same foolish hope that flips a rally cap or a game back on and trusts that you really can get anything in a helmet.
When I warn my overburdened college students against outsourcing their engagement to AI, my chief argument is that AI does not care. Not about you, the assignment, the lesson, the reading, the grade. It might get it right, it might get it wrong. It will be unoriginal. It will certainly be faster as it thrashes together millennia of human knowledge into blurbs and tokens. And then it will move on.
After three seasons of B’s baseball, we know Oakland fans care, maybe too much for our own good sometimes, and we aren’t going anywhere. After this season of Dispatches coverage, I can say our writers care, our players care, our front office and broadcast and merch booths and game day staff and grounds crew and everyone we talked to and everyone who helped us and read along with us cares. We care, and I know that’s sustainable, irreplaceable, meaningful, natural. Is there anything that counts more in the end?
Joe Horton is the editor of Dispatches from Raimondi.
