For Ever and Ever
Before your co-founders said all the right things to fans and media around the Bay and the country—“We always knew that Oakland was a championship town. When we started a team, it wasn’t just good enough to build a team with the community. We wanted to build a winner” / “It feels like the start of a new chapter for baseball in Oakland”—on a booze-and-fire-engine-soaked field littered with jerseys and bottles, they had a slightly different take.
“How are you feeling?” I asked both separately on the way into Game 5.
“I’m okay” was their identical answer, delivered in the way that suggests the lowest conceivable point of okayness. They are by nature easygoing and confident guys. They were nervous.
Who could blame them. If we won—if the Ballers pulled off the nearly impossible feat of coming back in three straight games, of winning four elimination games in the playoffs overall—the narrative was there: a team built by Oakland had made it a town of champions again. Teams left and the one that stayed won it all. A city park became a gem of baseball in 18 months. Fans invested in themselves and won. The gamble to host games three through five at home paid off. The best team ever had proved they were the best team ever. Hell, the mayor had just come out onto the field and said that young people should watch to see that “champions rise from Oakland.” That is pressure.
The B’s put themselves in the best of tough spots all year. When you’re the best regular season team in modern Pioneer League history, how can you also be the back-to-the-wall underdog that the Town knows and loves so well? Was this really a team that could go four months without losing more than two games in a row? Gabe Tanner said it best. The 11-0 pitcher, the pitcher who had not lost a game the entire season and pitched the team to victory just one day before, was walking across 20th with me when I asked him what he’d get up to in the game now that he’d already done his part.
“I still brought my cleats,” he said, holding them up. He was ready to play if they needed him. He’d given five innings, faced 27 batters, and he was still willing to suit up if things went south.
Turns out, of course, that we didn’t need him. And we didn’t need to be nervous for too long thanks to a Jake Allgeyer first-inning homer. By Cam Bufford’s blast in the seventh, the stands were literally shaking with joy, and no one will tell me Berkeley’s 4.3-mag earthquake in the small hours of the morning wasn’t triggered by elation vibrations on the Raimondi Fault. A party 36 years in the making finally got a chance to start early.
“We’re going to win” was all I could say when Bufford left the yard. I could feel it, but I couldn’t believe it. I was emotionally and joyfully spent. And I was glad to know that I wasn’t the only one. As the celebration raged on the field and in the stands and later at Prescott Market, I saw players, your founders, general managers and vice presidents, Mayor Mike, mermaids, Last Dive Bar-minders, Ballers-in-Five Kenny, and parents all at points alone, walking aimlessly in a daze. I saw members of the tireless social media team put down their phones and cameras and the Oakland 68s put down their drums and shakers, each in their own time and just for a moment directionless, taking it in and letting it out. At least for me it did feel like a dream coming real, and there was an overwhelming sense of relief, but there was also the simple exhaustion of giving everything to get to the top and taking in the vastness of a view you had only seen in old and crinkled pages.
This is my 44th dispatch this season. Yesterday was my 41st game. Turns out a lot happened this year. When I left Prescott Market still in full glorious Jwalt and jazz swing, I drove down to West Oakland BART and retraced the walk I’d taken by myself on a rainy winter morning seven months ago for the very first dispatch I wrote. There were no other fans around then; I did not know the neighborhood well and was nervous. Baseball was on the opposite side of its orbit, only a memory or a promise. Last night there were B’s on hats and shirts and hoodies; big B’s draped from balconies and shouted from cars. The music carried far from Prescott and the lights from the field’s floodlamps glowed like a patient sunset in the distance. We have all come a very long way; whether this celebration is the start or the end remains to be seen. But no one will ever say it better than the young girl and her father leaving Raimondi, walking through the puddles left by the fire engine, tossing a ball back and forth between them, a rally towel tied around a ponytail in her hair.
“Does this mean we won?” she asked.
“We won the whole thing, baby,” he said.
“How long are they going to be here?”
“For ever and ever.”
