Battle of the Bay 2.0; Or, Home and Away

I promise I won’t get used to this:

A tour bus picks you up. There are cheers and drinks (including Ballers Love hazy, naturally) and a moment of silence passing the Coliseum courtesy of the Oakland 68s. Hot dogs come ready-to-eat, complete with condiment boxes sliding up and down in the overhead bins, courtesy of the man himself, Mike the Hot Dog Mayor. Your fan board member Jorge is sweating and hauling food and drink to everyone up and down the aisle. The co-founder and owner—sorry, fellow co-owner—of your team is sitting right in front of you, talking plans and promotions and outreach. When your driver honks at deranged motorists on 880, the whole bus cheers.

You are dropped right in front of the ballpark, and when you enter, a Guy Sliwinski poster is dropped in your hands as well as a pin of said poster from Bryan of Last Dive Bar. When you find your seats, you’re next to fan celebrities like Right Field Will and Gamer Athletics. The game starts, and one of your young stars hits a home run in his first at bat. Drums clang, Let’s Go Oakland rings out, Ballers flags and SELL flags and Oakland flags fly proudly, welcomed by your rivals. You feast on what RF Will calls the best churros around. Mascots hug. Your team loses but puts up a good fight and it doesn’t really matter anyway. The other co-founder takes a cake to the face. The only bad news of the entire magical evening is that you mistake your bus for the players’ bus when you exit, and their driver gives you one look and knows you aren’t a baller. Stick to being a fan, dude, his eyes say as he doesn’t open the door. It’s what you’re made for.

Truth is, I’d love to get used to this. We all should. We’re long overdue for feeling like we belong and we are valued, in Oakland and around the Bay.

*************

I saw another game this week, an “opening day” game for an old team in a new city. It was a deeply strange experience. The colors were there, the letters were there, but the vibe wasn’t. Not just the lack of drums or cheers—the stuff we could gratefully import to Excite Ballpark—but the waywardness and anxiety among the fresh fans who should have been celebrating the first of many glorious summer nights. But they know that the team’s days here are numbered just as they know this team was never really theirs. It’s like taking a ride in a getaway car or trying to get up the excitement to clean your Airbnb.

Few fans see their team at an away game in an unfamiliar park, and that distance can indeed make the heart grow fonder. As fans, it refreshes our sense of ourselves: we are so used to being in our own place, with our own people, cheering as part of the group… Be the visitor just once and you’ll remember all of the power and privilege and comfort that comes with it. Thankfully, far fewer fans will have the pain of seeing their squad as the home team for someone else. This instead pries at our elemental self: Who do we root for? Who do we root against? On this “opening day,” I could still, hypothetically, creep down into seats that weren’t mine to unfurl a SELL flag contrary to the rules (might just be a derogatory characterization toward any person(s)). Fans like me still have our villain. It’s tempting to see the battle going on and on. This, after all, is baseball—there are no ties.

But tonight with the Ballers feels so much better. It’s a game, yes, but a friendly, an exhibition. A battle in name only. It’s a marker of what can happen when both neighbors in the box score work together to make it work. The problem with the game alone, with winning and losing, isn’t just that sometimes you lose—it’s that the game itself can be taken from you. The kid with no friends can take his bats and balls and go home.

I say this to myself a lot these days: anger and resentment can eat you up. You’ve got to have something else that endures. Something that feeds you and doesn’t leave you hungry. Churros, maybe.

It’s early April, far out of B’s season, and here we are, together. Baseball brought us here (well, our fancy bus did), but we’re here. Nobody can take something from you that you build.

Whether you’re going to make your baseball your life or borrow an inning from time to time, it can’t just be about the battle. It has to be something like this, here in San Jose under a chilly spring sky, a celebration that reminds us what’s possible when we don’t always keep score.