It’s Good to be the Champ
The Oakland Ballers won the Pioneer League Championship two weeks ago, coming back from two games down, winning three elimination games in a row at Raimondi in front of raucous Town crowds absolutely salivating for their first professional baseball championship in 36 years. The team finished with the best record in the modern league and staked a claim to being the best independent and minor league team of all time.
This you know.
What I didn’t know—what very few of us knew, considering our drought—is how good it feels to be the champ. It’s something else, isn’t it? You’re walking around, doing household chores, and then a moment of warmth wraps you up for precisely no reason and takes a second to place: why am I happy? I hate folding laundry. Why am I smiling? The world’s on fire. Then you remember what you’re remembering—the pure joy of your team going all the way, doing the damn-near-impossible, being in retrospect the team of destiny you definitely totally knew they were. That winning, the permanence of winning, stays with you. It’s ours forever. Nobody takes it away, least of all laundry. We always knew we were something, and now we’re something more.
In these intervening weeks, I was invited to a gala event for Community Kitchens—where Ballunteers can work with some of the best people around to fight hunger in all forms—by someone extremely senior in the Ballers administration. I had to look up what business casual meant. I spent a glorious 45 minutes eating everything I could from the assembled market stalls of Oakland’s best chefs and then excused myself from ready view before my diner’s club card on file could be used for the high-ticket auction items far beyond my station.
I got another tattoo, shamefully non-Ballers related, from your B’s booth tech wizard, creative main-brain and artist Ben at Pastime Tattoo. I did it mostly because of my baseball withdrawal; I knew we could talk new ideas for next season (BART car, tattoo contests, tournament of champions) and superstitions (you can’t be actively eating anything during a game when a pitch is being thrown; don’t wear the other team’s colors in your clothing, anywhere, obviously) for as long as the ink took.
And what kind of champions’ universe do we now live in where you can turn on major league playoffs or College GameDay and see an ad for Gusto featuring your Ballers from down the block? Or Cal Bears football celebrating your victory as part of their own homecoming? We’ve always been here and now we’ve arrived. Maybe I should have bid at the auction.
And nothing but nothing says you’ve arrived in the Town more than not one but two bootleg merch carts rolling around Oktoberfest.
Thanks Mike Chouinard
But now we’re here, Parade Day, on the steps of Oakland City Hall. I’m waving a B’s flag attached to a broom handle I bought to re-seal my roof. A student journalist interviews me for the Chabot Spectator; he wonders if it’s ok to ask me a few questions, and I tell him I have been terrorizing people with the same demands all season. All debts are coming due today. Our founders accept the proclamation for Ballers’ Day and the key to the city from the mayor. There is, I am thrilled to report, an actual and thoroughly gigantic key. (The team claims it doesn’t open any doors, but it did open at least one that was 36 years old.) A helicopter hovers overhead. That’s can’t possibly be because of us, right? A few of the speakers talk about this season being magic, and that’s the right word. Magic can’t happen every year, but it sure worked for us for now. Our manager Aaron Miles is an East Bay guy, and our assistant coach, James Harris, an Oakland guy, and they say there’s magic in being able to do this here, to pass this kind of success on to the next generation so that they can carry the joy. We are also reminded, with the Oakland and B’s flags flying overhead, that for a long time it seemed the only lessons the Town could impart were commiserations of hardship. What do we do now—what can we do now—with a message of victory?
Then we’re at the parade, packed with many others at the busy corner of Campbell and 18th. And for a moment, we are the parade. Fans ride bikes, push strollers, wave to friends and take pictures of themselves in the middle of the luxuriously closed street. If this had been it—a last big block party just like all those that have brought us together this whole season long—it would have been enough. But then you can hear the lifeblood beat of the Oakland 68s drums. Then the car stereo unce-ing out of an open door. Then…skyrocketing flames? Here they come.
Soon we’re in the thick of it: classic cars and fire engines, a Hotboys Mustang, lowriders and highwheeler bikes, a GIANT FIRE-BREATHING SUPER SNAIL. Naturally it is your founders at the levers of this Mad Max monstrosity. The SASS squad is here, Ice Cold and Mayor Mike of course, Bleacher Dave and Gamer Gabe, Mostly Martha and Beans (or Stephen), the Dobermans and Super Guy, and so many I did not see; the front office and the partners, Rubenstein Supply and Dan Silvert Homes and BART and AC Transit and Oakland Fire. Where else does the caboose of a parade consist of a forklift holding a B’s flag 20 feet aloft? This is the opposite of showing up just for the glory at the end—the parade was a part of us all season.
There are such lovely Town touches throughout the day: The key to the city having the iconic tree roots at its head, that big ass key visible for all the assembled. The Hyphy Bus’s soundtrack audible for nautical miles. The scraper bikes in the parade with their myriad tricks and relentless motion. A bystander on 20th asks what all the fuss was about, says he’s never heard of the Ballers, and then proceeds to stay the whole time. I am handed flyers for a Major Statement by Bob Avakian, the Fall of Fascism, and music video about trash. Playoff rally towels are plentiful. The bootleg merch carts are back, the stuff looking pretty good—watch out Oaklandish. The mayor somehow wears a shirt that perfectly matches the yellow of her Ballers hat. At City Hall, a woman who wasn’t a B’s fan and seemed to be shouting *mostly* at random wasn’t hustled aside or told to be quiet. Instead, she’s given one of the cheer cards and coached through more opportune chants. You never know who will be a fan next season. (And a small note: in the overload, I leave my son’s scooter near the Raimondi playground, and when I come back hours later, it is still there.) That’s all so very Oakland, baby.
I am once again surprised and impressed at this wild wizardry, but at some point I suppose I shouldn’t be. I have two years of evidence to know that when the Ballers go for it, they go for it. The parade route is small, but it’s a big block we know so well. It’s Raimondi, it’s Prescott, it’s where we’ve spent so much of our desperation and elation. That the team was crowdsourcing for a few extra cars right up to start time or that I captain an impromptu staff carpool from City Hall makes the show more charming, not less. Before and after the procession, anytime someone comes up Campbell with a flag or some extra zip in their step, cheers go up, thinking this is yet another wave of festivities. And this, I think, most of all makes our celebration so Ballers and so Oakland: there’s zero real division between the parade and its onlookers. Fans join the procession, children run in to hug the Ballers’ Princess, autographs are signed en route. Players take selfies with groups that shuffle alongside the cars. Your #1 Ballers Fan™ is invited aboard a fire truck, the engine unfurling its steps like a spaceship as the rest of us terrestrials wave on in awe. (The back of the engine’s KEEP BACK 300 FEET is righteously ignored.) This parade isn’t just something we watch; the words on the cheer cards we wave aren’t just a message but our meaning: we built this, it’s ours.
A victory parade is the single best way to end a season, but it’s still the end. Every fan fears the offseason, but this team is different. Maybe you’ll Ballunteer around town. Maybe your own team will play on Raimondi’s field this winter. Maybe the friendships you’ve made will let you do stuff together sans baseball (gasp). The B’s subscribe to the iceberg theory: what you see on the field is only a fraction of the whole. Today is a reminder of that. Today is only a glimpse of what’s to come. Today, I am promised one of the coveted handmade crochet rally possums from Cat next season. Pitcher Gabe Tanner has already said he’ll be back to run it back. We were all reminded on the steps of City Hall that this is only the beginning of the next year, the next ten, next 50, next 100. That’s a lot of magic.
But we’re here for it. I heard it more than once, in many voices but shared in tone, not comfortable but hopeful, hungry but not greedy.
“I could get used to this.”
