Gabe Ross: Baseball in the East Bay

The A’s likely departure from Oakland is disheartening to thousands of baseball fans in the East Bay, but Gabe Ross has reason to hope.

While almost thirty-thousand A’s fans were filling the Coliseum in a reverse boycott, my family was at an elementary school diamond in Pinole for the East Bay Little League Tournament of Champions.

With the evening hills glowing green and gold, our Oaktown Larks jumped out to an early lead that they couldn’t keep. They battled to the end, but Clayton Valley won on a walk-off groundball single.

We got back in the car, caught the A’s game on the radio just after the silent protest at the top of the fifth. The A’s won, while we broke down what had gone wrong with the Larks.

Our East Bay—the urban suburb shaped by the Great Migration of Black people from the south and by later waves of immigration from the rest of the Americas and from across the Pacific—that East Bay has baseball laid as deep into its streets as the streetcar tracks. The Little League Larks are named after a short-lived Black baseball team. One of its pitchers became the first Black mayor of Oakland.

This is the home of Rickey Henderson and Dennis Eckersley, Dave Stewart, Billy Martin and Curt Flood. Dontrelle Willis and Jimmy Rollins. This season, Bryan Woo. Ballplayers whose footprints we still feel in the basepaths at Bushrod Park, at Oakland Tech, at Berkeley High.

This is the home of Cal softball in Strawberry Canyon, hitting homers onto Centennial Drive.

This is the home of eleven-year-olds who practice on those same fields twice a week, games on weekends, going out to the park just to play when there’s nothing on the schedule. It’s the home of their parents, gathered behind the backstop, doing what’s supposed to be impossible for middle-aged people: making friends.

It looks like the A’s are leaving all this behind. But this summer I’m playing catch and watching pickup games on those dusty East Bay fields, and here’s what I know for sure: baseball isn’t going anywhere.

With a Perspective, I’m Gabe Ross.

Gabe Ross is a lawyer and a Little League dad living in Berkeley.