If They Won’t, We Will: Building the Ballers’ Beat
Dispatches From Raimondi to expand coverage areas, filling in a sought-after gap.
Hey Sports Fans,
You might have noticed: we get a lot of press! At some point, we lost count, but there have been at least 6,000 stories written about the Oakland Ballers since we launched two years ago.
That being said, we’ve noticed one crucial element missing in all that coverage: the story of who we really are—a historically dominant professional baseball team.
We get it. For a lot of folks, we’re a scrappy indy ball squad. The San Francisco press and national media tend to focus on teams in bigger leagues with bigger budgets and larger corporate networks. The coverage of the Ballers mirrors how Oakland itself is often portrayed. We get attention when we rise up, act defiantly, bring in someone noteworthy from the culture, or throw a party. Wall-to-wall coverage floods in if we fail. But when Oakland simply puts its head down and grinds—working day after day, quietly competing—that story isn’t deemed worthy enough to generate clicks.
But we’ve found that in the absence of baseball coverage, our fan community has stepped up and created their own content. The Oakland Ballers subreddit is a top 100 baseball community. Our own YouTube channel is growing at a fast clip. Fans do their own game recaps, analyze trades and roster moves as if they are their own beat writers. The same thing is happening in Facebook groups and other online spaces. One effort in particular, Dispatches From Raimondi, has been telling baseball stories about the Ballers for some time now.
You see: We play games in a league that’s been around since 1939, and we just had a season so historic that gas was 30 cents a gallon the last time a Pioneer League team was this dominant. We boasted the best winning percentage of any team in any league in our sport this year, and we delivered a championship to a community of fans that were so touched there were tears of joy in the stands.
But most of that was missed in the day-to-day sports coverage of the team. Because no one from, what is considered traditional or mainstream media, was there regularly to cover it.
We started this season hoping to convince sports media to cover us in earnest as a baseball team, not just as a disruptor. In a season full of unprecedented successes, that’s one place we still fell short. But we’re not deterred. If the media doesn’t have the resources to cover our baseball games, we’ll do what we do best and find our own innovative solution.
The Dispatches from Raimondi site wasn’t started by the Ballers. It was founded by Joe Horton, a fan and writing instructor at UC Davis and Berkeley. Before that, he worked for PBS NewsHour and wrote across the country as a journalist. Dispatches has been a place for stories about people, neighborhood rhythms, fan life and the city behind the ballpark—the West Oakland we all care about. This matters because when we ask for better coverage of the Ballers, we’re asking for coverage that treats us not just as a cultural story, but as a baseball team. Joe’s work has laid a strong foundation for that kind of reporting.
Today, we’re excited to announce the expansion of the Dispatches mission. They will now cover:
Game stories
Competitive narratives
Roster moves
Player profiles
Strategy breakdowns
…alongside the team color and character they’re already doing.
Dispatches will become a training program for aspiring sports journalists. Writers will be interns, students, and aspiring reporters looking for experience and guidance. Joe will continue as the publication’s instructor and editor-in-chief.
We will provide full access to Raimondi Park and our players and coaches, while Dispatches will remain independent. They will be able to hold us accountable. We’ve made mistakes on and off the field, and we’ll continue to have missteps. It’s okay for Dispatches to call us out and we welcome said criticism.
If you’re interested in participating in Dispatches through writing game stories, practicing photo journalism or even video content, reach out to Joe@DispatchesFromRaimondi.com.
If you care about the Ballers, we encourage you to get involved and get hands-on training in the process.
Oaklanders, don’t wait for someone else to tell our story.
—Paul Freedman & Bryan Carmel
Co-Founders, Oakland Ballers
In Dispatches fashion, here are some things we’ve overheard around the web:
“How in the world have KPIX, KTVU, KRON, etc. not covered the Oakland Ballers and the amazing season and records they’ve been setting? It’s amazing that a team doing so much for the Bay is largely ignored by local news.” — u/510gemini
“They should, but they don’t. I think the mainstream story is merely that we exist. Part of the importance of our community here is that we cover that gap.” — u/ernmanstinky
“I think that (especially) in the modern era, everything is driven by eyeballs and clicks… The coverage is going to lean towards ‘the B’s are Oakland’s antidote to the A’s’ and similar headlines.” — u/dms79
“Is Bay Area sports media seriously just going to ignore what’s going down?” — thread title in r/oaklandballers
“I understand it’s Pioneer League, but the lack of coverage is pretty sad. I think there’s plenty of opportunity to make this game bigger …” — u/dauntless101
