A parade in Oakland

On a Sunday night not too long ago, something extraordinary happened in West Oakland: the Oakland Ballers — an independent baseball team not even two years old — won the Pioneer League championship, bringing a baseball championship to Oakland for the first time since 1989. The atmosphere was electric, but to an outsider, the roar of the packed house might have seemed perplexing: why such fervor for…​ an independent league baseball game?! The beauty of baseball is the narrative beyond the diamond, and that Sunday night in Oakland stands as an exemplar. Speaking personally, to understand not just why I was there with my wife and our teenage daughter, but the emotion behind our full-throated chants, you need to go back in time, to a little more than a decade ago.

It was 2014. After a promising season, the Oakland A’s had just had an early exit from the playoffs, having lost a gutting extra innings single-game wildcard in Kansas City. Our boys — then aged seven and ten — had had their hearts broken, in a way that a sports team uniquely can for kids of a certain age. The boys were weeping; we consoled them as parents of grieving sports fans do — not by saying that "it’s just a game" (an obvious lie!), but by saying what parents have said for generations: wait until next year. "Someday," I recall telling them as they went to bed, "perhaps decades from now, the A’s will be in the World Series in Oakland — and we will be there to watch it together." Tears dried, the boys went to sleep; there was, after all, always next year.

Fast forward a decade, to 2023, and I was being proven a liar — not by disappointment on the field, but by treachery off it: the owner of the Oakland A’s — titanic failson John Fisher — had won approval to move the team from Oakland; after years of threats, the A’s were actually leaving. As Brodie cried, so did we all. This emotion may seem confusing: is this grieving over…​ one less entertainment option? Well, no, it’s about more than the team or even the game — it’s about who we have watched those games with. It’s not just our fellow fans; it’s our friends — our families. In our house, it was our nuclear family: we had become A’s fans in 2012 when our oldest caught the baseball bug at seven (aside: he still has it). For other A’s fans, it was multi-generational; listen to Roberto Santiago describe it when he was interviewed at the Reverse Boycott at the Coliseum:

To rip a team out of a city, then, is to sour some of our dearest memories, ones that cannot be recreated; it is to come into a home and desecrate the family photo album. And the scar is permanent: look at the Sonics or the North Stars or the Expos or the Nordiques — to say nothing of the generation-defining trauma of the Colts or the Dodgers. For each of these — the most recent of which was nearly two decades ago — you won’t have to look long to find people who got passed it, but never, in fact, got over it.

And this is where I was when 2024 rolled around: passed it, maybe, but absolutely not over it.

And then, in March, a surprise. From the arsonous ashes of Oakland baseball emerged an unexpected green shoot: a new independent league team, the Oakland Ballers. In the video announcing the team, the words of Mistah F.A.B. echoed: "Anytime something ends, something else begins." I was elated at the prospect of the Ballers — and then doubly so when team co-founders Paul Freedman and Bryan Carmel joined us on Oxide and Friends. Somehow, in the span of just a few frenetic weeks in the spring of 2024, they turned historic Raimondi Park into a proper ballpark. The home opener in 2024 was sold out and while (per grand tradition of Oakland baseball!) the home team lost, the game was a blast.

As the 2024 season went on, the games felt like a neighborhood block party — you always saw people you knew. And the team knew their town: when they unveiled their new mascot, Scrappy the Possum, it was a pitch-perfect Gritty-esque reflection of the Oakland zeitgeist. The team made the playoffs that year, winning a game at home but losing in the semi-finals. I was at the game with the kids — and as my then-17-year-old said, "it’s great to have postseason baseball back in Oakland." And it was!

Then, the 2025 season — this season. Early in the season, there was a discernible shift. Something to know about the Pioneer League is that it’s professional, but it’s deliberately a development league: players can’t have more than three years of professional experience. And with the MLB draft having been drastically cut (from 40 rounds to 20), MLB-affiliated development leagues like the Pioneer League are increasingly where young players go to try to chase their dream of making it to the bigs. The Ballers were making a name for themselves among college players from the region — and the complexion of the roster was changing, with increasingly familiar names. These were kids who had grown up in Berkeley and Martinez and Hayward and Stockton — who had gone to JUCO at Chabot and Ohlone, to college at East Bay and Davis and Cal and St. Mary’s. These were…​ NorCal kids. Our kids. And they were good. Like, really good.

The structure of the postseaon in the Pioneer League is that the season is divided into two halves, with the top two teams of each half making the playoffs. This makes it exciting for the players and the fans: no matter how rocky a start a team has, they could still make the postseason with a strong second-half showing. But the Ballers had different plans: they won both the first half and the second half, becoming the winningest team in Pioneer League history.

All of this winning meant that the Ballers secured their postseason fate remarkably early in the season, which presented us at Oxide with a wild opportunity: as we were planning our annual internal meetup (which we call OxCon), we were realizing that the last night of the meetup was going to fall on the first postseason game at home. We felt we had to take the Oxide team to see the Ballers, and it’s a credit to our idiosyncratic team at Oxide that they embraced the idiosyncratic one at Raimondi. My colleague iliana — a Mariners fan! — felt that we should explain baseball to our fellow nerds, and the final session of OxCon was the two of us explaining what people were about to see. (Or tried to, anyway — baseball defies quick explanation!) We piled into busses and headed over to Raimondi, with kids and partners who were local meeting us at the game. We knew that we had kept our Oxide colleagues (very) busy over the week of OxCon, and told them that they should buy Ballers gear on Oxide’s nickel for anyone back home who might appreciate it. The game was awesome: the Ballers won — and Oxide employees went home loaded with swag for their families.

For the Ballers, their season continued. The three-game series went to the win-or-go-home third game, and after a gripping 1-0 victory, the Ballers advanced to the championship against the Idaho Falls Chukars. The five game set had a familiar format: two games away followed by three at home. The Ballers lost their first two games in Idaho Falls — badly. With the championship and the season on the line, the team returned to Oakland, where they needed to win three straight, starting on Friday night. My daughter was stoked: "Can you imagine the atmosphere on Sunday?" she excitedly asked. I pointed out that the team was going to be lucky to get the chance to play Saturday, let alone Sunday.

But my daughter’s optimisim proved to be prophetic. The team won decisively on Friday night — and again on Saturday night. And the atmosphere was indeed singular on the sold-out Sunday night. The Ballers got a good start with an early 3-run homerun — and then blew the game open with another 3-run jack to deep center in the 8th. Going into the top of the 9th inning, the Ballers were up by 8 runs. Any baseball fan will tell you that one bad inning can sink a game, that there is no lead large enough to assure a victory. Still, this felt pretty good.

The boys are away at college now, but they were with us in spirit, and my 18-year-old was listening from college in Washington. With two outs, he texted me: "Film this last out." I filmed it: a swinging strikeout as the stadium erupted. Oakland Fire, which would often position a fire engine in the outfield and sit atop it to watch the game, turned on their lights in celebration. The team stormed out of the dugout and mobbed their pitcher. And then, magic: that fire engine in deep center pointed a stream of water skyward and onto the outfield. The players instinctively ran to the water, like kids running through a sprinkler. They slid in the outfield, making snow angels on the wet ground. It was everything great about sports, in a single joyous moment.

These players know the significance of it all: they — like Oakland — have something to prove. The Pioneer League is a development league, so while we see some returning players next year, many will also move on. Some will move to other independent leagues, chasing their major league dream. Others will presumably hang it up, just as everyone hangs it up eventually. But for all of them, wherever their careers may take them, they will forever remember that electric Sunday night in West Oakland, when they proved what is possible when we refuse to give up on ourselves.

At long last, there’s a parade in Oakland.