Dispatch from Great Falls

by Joe Horton

GREAT FALLS, MT—It’s been a long road trip for the Ballers with plenty more to come. Why the hell do we do all this?

“We always say, we're the place where you get to know your neighbors. Unfortunately, in 2026, you don't get to see everyone in your community all the time, and baseball, especially in Voyagers Baseball, is one of those last places where…you have hundreds of friends that you can run into and hang out with and talk with, and the ballpark just has to continue to be one of those places in our community.”

I met Great Falls Voyagers president Scott Reasoner as he was helping set up his team’s Pride Night on a warm, Simpsons-opening-clouds night for baseball.

“For everyone, whether no matter your job, your background, whatever you believe in, this is the place where you can come, get to know folks, hang out with your family, and have a great night—a baseball community.”

It’s one thing for a team boss to say that. It’s another for it to feel so real and earned. Here, from the moment we walked into Centene Stadium, it felt special. In a story rare in baseball, Reasoner started as the team’s general manager before he was able to take over the team from the beloved longtime owner Vinny Purpura and keep the team locally owned in Great Falls.

“This is something that you only really get in small town America still, where you meet a guy at a bar who has a liquor license, and we started a bar, then we started at another restaurant, then we started a concert venue, and we got to the point where we were just fortunate enough to have an ownership group of local folks that said, you know what? Let's take the risk. Let's keep baseball in Great Falls, Montana. We are the smallest population base with professional baseball left in the United States of America. And so we knew if we didn't step up and make it happen, it was never gonna happen again. That if baseball left a community like this, it wasn't coming back. 
And so we just said: we're gonna make it happen, and we're in it for the long haul.”

It was a great scene for Pride Night, and the team’s calendar throughout the summer is full of celebrations large and small. (Tomorrow is “Tammy Appreciation Night.”) It was also alter ego night, my favorite in the whole league: the River Otters. But it isn’t just the cute merchandise; it’s a partnership with local Great Falls College. “We love the people coming up with crazy names,” Reasoner said of alternate team identities, “and we just think it means more if you can actually tie that to an organization that matters in your town.”

For us, especially when your town is the Town. There was a group of fans near the B’s dugout wearing Oakland and Athletics gear, and I talked with Jason, the mastermind of the outing. He had with him a graduate of Berkeley High and in the next seat over a classmate of Gary May’s, the chancellor of UC Davis. I asked what brought him out.

“I love the idea that Oakland has such a commitment to baseball that when they got screwed by the owner of the Gap, they created their own team. 
I've been waiting for you guys to come to Great Falls for three years. I used to go out to the Coliseum, and you had to be a real fan to go to the Coliseum. You gotta be a real fan, especially from Montana,” Jason said. “I'm from Montana, I grew up in Havre. 
My brother was 10 years older than me, and he loved the Oakland A's and Oakland Raiders, and we played backyard baseball. I mean, I wanted to be Rollie Fingers and then Dennis Eckersley and Dave Stewart, Jose Canseco, all that stuff.”

And now, what makes him a Ballers fan from a distance of 1,200 miles from Raimondi Park?

“It's what baseball is. In a world where it's all about money, for Oakland baseball, it's not about money.”

A couple innings later, another fan in a Giants hat sought me out. “You must be someone important,” Michael said, making a huge mistake. He lived in Richmond and El Cerrito, “on Colusa Avenue; it was right behind the high school. It was a great spot to grow up.” He remembered going to his very first baseball game with the Oakland Oaks in 1954. “We almost got a foul ball.”

Michael, like Jason, had been waiting two years for the Ballers to make their first visit to Great Falls. He even tried to find a replica 1954 Oaks hat to no avail. “But I got Ernie Broglio’s autograph when I was a little kid. 
And anyway, I'm sure excited to see you guys come up.”

When Reasoner checked in on us later in our seats, he also asked the other local fans how they were doing; it was clear this was regular practice. “Fine,” said someone behind us, “except for those guys up front wearing the wrong colors.”

Later, when I bought a River Otters hat (yeah ok don’t @ me; they’re incredible), Reasoner was manning the merch checkout. He was everywhere, seemingly tireless, seemingly grateful for all of it.

It’s been pure joy to spend this road trip sitting between Dawn, the B’s best fan who breathes Oakland baseball, and my sister, who came for the national park hiking and stayed begrudgingly for the ball but whom we may have converted to the magic of Ballers despite bad starts and nightmares late in the big sky that never quite got dark. We’ve shared our games with the Chouinard contingent—Mike, his brother Greg, his dad Mike—whose good humor lifts even the toughest box score. We learned that Gabe Tanner loves chocolate milk and that James Harris—who introduced us to the statewide obsession with huckleberry everything—is a big Yelper who finds all the best places to eat on the road. I put a B’s hat on every branch and bush in Glacier National Park to mark our territory. I spent ten minutes in the gusting Montana plains wind trying to affix a B’s flag to the nub hands of a concrete dinosaur in a one-block town. I saw players genuinely and deeply consoling each other after brutal losses and sticking around to talk to me when they would naturally want to be anywhere else. I saw players taking the time to make sure a local ballgirl didn’t forget her water bottle and be sure another young fan went home with a souvenir. We met fans from across Montana who were generous and welcoming and admittedly amazed to see us. What amazed us were the number of fans like Jason and Michael with deep ties to the Bay who were not about to let distance diminish their love of Oakland baseball.

Would we have preferred to see a streak of dominating B’s wins? Sure. (But I should have taken the omen of our first hotel being across the street from a dump that regularly burned trash more seriously.) But there’s been so much in Montana that reminds me why we all do this: feeling a deep sense of belonging with your chosen fan-ily, putting your heart out there for the raw joys and miseries of a bouncing ball, choosing to be a part of a story that unfolds with reckless abandon every summer never knowing quite where you’ll end up. I’ll amend Reasoner’s opening thoughts only slightly to say that baseball, especially Ballers baseball, will continue to be my home at Raimondi and on the road. And I hope the team finds that too before the come back, because you don’t have to be where you’re from to know who you are.

Joe Horton is the editor of Dispatches from Raimondi.