Battle of the Bay 2.1

By Roberto Santiago and Joe Horton

Roberto

The bus from Raimondi to Excite Ballpark in San Jose was slated to leave “at 4:45 PM sharp! Do not be late.” Or maybe it's OK because Jorge Leon is a nice guy and wasn’t going to leave until he was pretty sure the last two names on his roster of riders really weren’t coming. The clouds over West Oakland were foreboding and it was spitting rain like an old car engine trying to sputter to life. As the bus pulled away, one of several "Let's go Oakland" chants erupted from the riders, and The Phenomenauts’ Theme for Oakland blasted over the sound system. 

As we got closer to the game, the sun did its best to break through. No rain was forecast for the evening, but the rain itself had other ideas. As the game went on (it was a tough day to play the hot corner for Oakland), the weather seemed to have kept some fans at home. But the ones who came out for both sides did it out of a love for baseball, the Bay Area, and churros. San Jose natives Joe and his son, Colby, who was still in uniform from his game earlier at Piedmont High, said they came out for family and to support the two cities. "It's a great time," said Joe, "It's nice to see it fill up on a Tuesday night. Oh—and churros."

Annette and Patty, decked out in matching SJ Giants jackets, huddled together as the rain started to come down. Like Joe and Colby, they had come to the Battle of the Bay game last year and dug the vibe. "We've had season tickets for 28 years. The Ballers fans are here loud and proud, the Giants fans are here loud and proud so we thought, why not get baseball season started early?"

Ballers season ticket holders Janice and Jam felt the need to make the trek because "it's the first baseball since the end of last season, so you've gotta see it." For Steven, a drummer sitting in left field behind the visitor's dugout, the game was also an opportunity for his own spring training. "For me, it probably takes a couple of games to remember all the beats and not mess up." 

According to the scoreboard, the game was out of hand around the 7th inning. The crowd started to thin, but many of the Ballers faithful stayed until the final out. It helped that the B’s nearly got a rally going with multiple runners on base. As the rain grew steadier in protest to budget cuts at the National Weather Service, folks started heading for the gates. Back on the bus, Mayor Mike Davie asked, "Did everyone have fun regardless of the scoreboard?" A cheer went up in reply. "Of course," said Cass from the seat next to mine, "It was a Let's Go Oakland." With that, the chanting started and we headed home. 

Joe

The team was quick to point out in the aftergloom of the 13-1 loss that last year they lost the Battle of the Bay and ended up winning the championship and setting myriad modern Pioneer League records along the way. If it works again this year, I volunteer as starting pitcher for Battle 2.2; my knuckleball includes remnants of actual knuckles. But you would have found few fans yesterday that cared about the score no matter its portent: September is a lifetime away and what matters is B’s baseball is back, if only for a night.

San Jose is not an easy place to get to, in rush hour, in the rain. Excite Ballpark is fun, its staff friendly and the churros second-to-none, but it’s no Raimondi Park. This peek at “Spring Training,” especially in the lonely hollow of the big league’s full-fanfare return, is the promise that keeps us going until May.  The return of our boys of summer—the ones happy to sign your Last Dive Bar cards and say hi to your kids by name—is the reunion of our fan-ily. Together we call forth our spirit animal to see his shadow; in his magic there are six more weeks of winter and but it’s somehow spring too, perhaps because our prophet possum is a giant suave dancing marsupial instead of a bucktoothed groundrat. And it surely matters to the players too, having an organization care enough to gather them together for just one game, on tv, weeks before the real season, to get a jumpstart on names and nicknames and habits and trust. (And yes, the new sponsor patches on the uniforms look like nametags; welcome to the 2026 team Mr. Columbia Bank.)

When I came to this game last year, I didn’t really know anyone. A lot can change.  

B’s baseball was a green forest of our favorite consonant fifty miles from Raimondi. It was Jorge and Mayor Mike in midseason voice leading Oakland chants, Aaron Miles in postseason form furiously arguing…something at home plate, and not to disagree with Steven, but the Oakland 68s drums were in allseason form, never missing a beat (and look at me, with no preseason rust, making that work literally and whatever the metaphor one is). It was B’s fans explaining in sublime detail to Giants fans exactly how they would get rid of their apparel from the old Oakland team while enumerating all the good memories that having Town ball was keeping alive. It was seeing the fan I’d met in the back of an emergency-grounded plane in Vegas (hi Tia!) when we’d held our noses at the smell of that foreclosed human pawn shop. It’s fans from beyond the Bay Area (further investigation reveals them as family of new B Jaden Collura) who had ordered special bespoke Ballers sweaters from a TikTok designer that were the talk of the Town. It’s Scrappy and beer batters and toilet bowl tosses and Guy Sliwinski posters and Tyler Petersen’s voice zipping through the stadium and pretzels the size of your head. It’s Dispatches writers pitching new ideas and pursuing old ones. It’s buying a five-year-old a second pizza knowing full well he will not touch one slice.

In fact, the conviction of going to an exhibition game that will most certainly not be rescheduled if the rain insists is the hope that fills a baseball season—everything must work out because you have waited long enough. When it does, you can say you were there from the start. When it doesn’t, you find that waiting with the right people isn’t so bad. The Battle of the Bay arrives just in time to recharge the flagging faith of even the most ardent fan: the hibernation is almost over. All the stuff and moments and people you loved are still here. Our memories are splashed with rain and color to remind us that last year’s dream season was the best kind of real.

Roberto Santiago is a third generation Berkeley boy currently raising the fourth generation. Roberto’s writing has appeared in Latina, Parents, and various online outlets. A lifelong baseball fan, Roberto worked briefly with the Boston Red Sox and once hit an RBI single off Spaceman Lee on a 2-2 changeup. It was his only at bat ever in a real baseball game. Find him on Instagram.

Joe Horton is the editor of Dispatches from Raimondi.