Dispatch from Marysville: Going the Distance
I have a confession to make.
My alter-ego lives on resentment and petty revenge. I would say, like old Star Trek, that you can identify him by his evil mustache, but that’s just me all the time. This season, Evil Joe occasionally visits another baseball team that used to call Oakland home to make his anger known in the most public of ways. He’s vindictive and selfish; he’s a destroyer. Sorry not sorry.
I teach to my Berkeley students one of my favorite movies, Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal’s Blindspotting (2018), which was filmed in West Oakland. The title comes from a character discussing Rubin’s Vase, where one cannot see both images at once and has to toggle back and forth between them. It’s a warning about our inherent biases and our frequent inability to “see both faces” in life. If we can’t hold two competing views in our head, if we can’t push past what we want to see to what we can see, we’re prisoners of our first reactions, most comfortable choices and basest beliefs. I would like to think that I’m just Good Joe, the one immeasurably bettered by being a B’s fan, but this other side exists too. I wish it didn’t, but it does, and I can’t be blind to it.
Last night, I made another visit to the pregame show for that team so I could be threatened with arrest by security and yelled at by one of its hosts—this is the confrontational toxicity on which Bad Joe thrives—before driving up to Marysville to see the B’s beat the High Wheelers 14-3 and Gabe Tanner toss the first complete game in B’s history. I sat right behind the Ballers’ dugout and heard the relentless encouragement and laughter that has seemed to define the bunch all year. I passed some of the game with the Tanner parents, one stoic and rooted while the other paced, stared into the limitlessness of space, and stood as though waiting for the midnight bus. (Not telling who was whom.)
The reality is, of course, that I spend far more time with our Ballers, writing on this site, meeting fans and family and bringing my family to great baseball. It brings me hours and hours of happiness every week compared to the occasional dark sugar rush I get needling our old neighbors. A recent post by the B’s made me re-see all of this: Our product is joy, what do you build?
It has always been far harder to create than to destroy. Any spark of retribution is short-lived and unsustainable. Take it from me, you keep needing to come back for more. The B’s and so many of you these past two years have put aside the bump of anger to build instead. Last night reminded me of that; Gabe Tanner reminded me what an accomplishment it is to go the distance, to finish something you started, to grab a game the hard way from first inning to last (even if he was destroying batters, even if he could make it look easy).
I’m never going to let my anger and loss go, because that’s a part of me. It’s not healthy—zero-out-of-five doctors recommend—but it’s mine. It’s a petty part of me that I hope gets smaller as the years go on but never quite goes away. As our resident artist Guy Sliwinski reminded us recently, we have together come out the other side of something terrible and only through that grief do we have the joy we have now. For a long time we accepted unmet promises and hope delayed; we saw only the face they wanted us to see. I am convinced that the other team, despite its longevity in the Town or perhaps because of it—coasting on good memories, taking liberties with our love—was never again going to be the team we wanted or deserved. The B’s are that team because they are us.
Call it fate, luck, karma; call it the respect finally coming due. How is it that I could drive two hours, get threatened by stadium security and a two-time World Series champion and then arrive at another park to see the tears in the eyes of a family watching their son accomplish something that had never been done before on a team trying for something that hasn’t been done in a long time, being the talisman Oakland is proud of? We earned it, an inning at a time.
