The Oakland Ballers: A Sports Documentary Played Out in Real-Time
The Oakland Ballers baseball team lost their 2024 home opener to the Yolo High Wheelers, 9-3, but another figure from the independent Pioneer League matchup overshadows the final score.
A reported 4,100 filled Raimondi Park, a sellout of the renovated venue sitting northwest of downtown Oakland and not far from the Bay Bridge. About 10 miles southeast, the Oakland A’s lost to their American League West counterpart Seattle Mariners, 4-3, before an announced 5,624.
It’s unlikely A’s management got to that reported total by employing Anaheim Amigos math1; the organization’s season-long average at Oakland Coliseum is 6,491, half of the next-lowest attendance in Major League Baseball. Regardless, the A’s attracting only 1,500 more fans to the cavernous Coliseum, which seats 63,000, than the B’s welcomed to a refurbished city park2 scored the Ballers the most resounding win of the baseball season at any level.
A popular school of thought for elevator-pitching a movie idea is presenting it as combining elements of well-known and successful vehicles: X meets Y. In an era when sports-focused documentaries are all the rage, the Oakland Ballers are, in real-time, playing out a story best described as the final season of Last Chance U meets Rebels of Oakland meets The Battered Bastards of Baseball.
Despite Bill Simmons arrogantly declaring they “weren’t that good,” HBO’s catalog of sports documentaries offers some unheralded gems. Top of that list for me is 2003’s Rebels of Oakland, which exists in its entirety on YouTube.
The hour-long documentary chronicles the paralleling successes of the Athletics and the NFL’s Raiders during the 1970s, and how the make-up of both franchises reflected the identity of Oakland itself.
The 1976 Super Bowl XI champion Raiders are among the most dominant teams in NFL history, and they dominated with a kind of hard-nosed swagger the franchise has tried to recreate for the last 40 years.
Those efforts have largely been in vain — perhaps because the modern-day Raiders cosplay the identity of those tough, unapologetic Oakland teams. It’s a situation comparable to college football’s Miami Hurricanes: You can say you have swagger, you can replicate all the superficial elements, but there’s an aura that can’t be manufactured.
In much the same away the Hurricanes have never been the same since the demolishing of the Orange Bowl, there’s a poetic connection to be drawn to the Raiders’ extended mediocrity and Al Davis moving the franchise to Los Angeles.
While the Raiders returned to Oakland in the mid-90s and spent nearly 30 years there before moving again — this time to Las Vegas — the organization that I grew up with never felt like the Raiders described in Rebels of Oakland.
That’s part of what makes the A’s impending move, following the Raiders to Las Vegas, so much more gutting.
The A’s of the Rebels era were the unquestionable standard-bearer in club history — and the only MLB franchise to approach a dynastic run comparable with the post-World War II New York Yankees.
Athletics teams with legends like Reggie Jackson, Rollie Fingers and Vida Blue who powered Oakland to three straight World Series championships came well before my time. The first World Series I ever watched, however, featured an A’s lineup with Mark McGwire, Jose Canseco and Rickey Henderson (with Dennis Eckersley part of the pitching staff) sweeping the San Francisco Giants.
The legendary Earthquake Series was the second of three straight trips Oakland made to the Fall Classic. As a young boy discovering sports, the A’s were, in my mind, at the stature baseball fans of other generations view the Yankees.
Despite the Bash Brothers splitting up and the Athletics regressing for the rest of the ‘90s, the organization’s resurgence at the turn of the millennium coincided with the peak of my baseball fandom.
The club’s 20-game winning streak in 2002 produced one of the most captivating storylines of my baseball-watching lifetime. And, while I didn’t know it at the time, the organization’s staff worked behind the scenes to revolutionize the sport through Billy Beane’s Moneyball strategy.
Yes, Moneyball was born of the problems that have the 2024 A’s playing in front of a crowd comparable in numbers and undeniable less enthusiastic than their independent counterpart B’s. Beane and Co. needed an approach to counteract stars like Jason Giambi and Jermaine Dye leaving for teams in bigger markets with bigger contracts to offer; as Canseco and McGwire did before them; as Reggie Jackson did before them.
Maybe because Oakland had for previous generations lost stars but rebuilt in relatively quick order, the omnipresent threat of them leaving felt unrealistic. After all, one of the first YouTube videos I ever watched, “Ghostride the Volvo” — in which two A’s fans do exactly as the title says in protest of rumors the club was moving to nearby Fremont — dropped almost two decades before the move of the Athletics to Las Vegas was officially announced.
So it’s really happening, following years and years of speculation and in the immediate wake of the Raiders bouncing a second time. Gone, too, are the Warriors in a transition that perhaps more than the other two underscores the reality of present-day Oakland.
Though not a focus of Rebels, the Warriors won the NBA championship in the same era — and did so with a roster mostly bereft of star power.
Yes, Rick Barry is a certified legend who averaged more than 30 points per game in ‘74-’75. But the rest of the Warriors lineup featured rookie Jamaal Wilkes, a career glue guy who was never even the biggest star on his UCLA teams; Butch Beard; and Clifford Ray.
The lone championship in ‘75 was Golden State’s lone NBA crown for 40 years, until the Steph Curry-led dynasty produced four championships from 2015 through 2022.
What makes the Warriors’ departure so insightful on a social level is that, while the Raiders have long been mired in mediocrity and had already left once; and the A’s last refuge to compete, the Moneyball approach, has been co-opted by the same deep-pocketed franchises able to sign away their players; Golden State left at the organization’s apex.
And it went just a few miles away across the Bay Bridge to San Francisco.
Oakland and San Francisco have long had vastly different cultural identities. The cities also have much different economic make-up.
As property rates in San Francisco have grown exponentially in the 21st Century, a direct result of the tech industry, the effects reverberate throughout the area.
This provides one of the subplots for the fifth and final season of Netflix’s Last Chance U. The final installment of the docuseries examining life in junior college football saved the show and ended it on a high note after two disastrous seasons following the reality TV-style exploits of Jason Brown at Kansas’ Independence College.
The more grounded and human fifth season of Last Chance U is also the series’ most gut-wrenching. Laney College coach John Beam is shown working to parlay football into opportunities for his players, with a fraction of the resources season 1 and 2 coach Buddy Stephens had at East Mississippi.
California’s housing crisis is prominently in the backdrop of Last Chance U season 5. That reality constrated with the machinations of pro sports franchise owners really spotlights how absurd the latter really is.
Oakland Coliseum is dilapidated; there’s no two ways about that. The A’s and Raiders both needed a new venue, but there are simply more pressing issues that public funding should address in Oakland well before building privately owned stadiums.
That’s part of what makes the Oakland Ballers story intriguing. At a fraction of the cost for a new MLB park, from which an ownership group would directly profit, Raimondi Park is a true municipal park.
Its renovation is reportedly having a positive impact on the surrounding neighborhood.
Oh, yeah: It’s also keeping baseball in Oakland.
Now, independent baseball isn’t MLB. The 2014 documentary The Battered Bastards of Baseball covers the Portland Mavericks, an independent club owned by actor Kurt Russell’s dad and that operated in the same era as Rebels, and it shines some light on yesteryear’s challenges of independent baseball.
However, in 2024, there may be a real opportunity for sports to thrive beyond the bigger name, higher-resourced entities.
The sports landscape is undergoing mass change motivated by money. The Raiders and A’s are hardly the first franchises to leave a city for financial reasons, but not far away in Berkeley, Cal athletics are about to begin membership in the Atlantic Coast Conference.
It’s the asinine byproduct of big-monied players trying to strip-mine sports of every last dollar they can, the future be damned. I think some involved in college athletics decision-making are underestimating just how sizable of an audience they are alienating.
Pro sports differ in that the financials are much more clearly involved — pro is right there in the description. But it’s also becoming increasingly burdensome for families to make it to a stadium or ballpark together.
Non-traditional leagues and teams have an opportunity. Although some of the media discourse around it is exhausting, the WNBA’s growth is a reflection of this opportunity. The Savannah Bananas have built a nationally recognizable brand as a minor league baseball outfit with their Harlem Globetrotters-inspired presentation — and they fill ballparks with tickets sold at a price far less than most MLB venues.
The B’s may not have the ability to expand to a nationwide audience like the Bananas, but they don’t need to. They’re rooted in Oakland and carrying the banner for a city with a longheld underdog identity.
The Ballers’ story is fit for a documentary, and the film is rolling at this very moment.
In his outstanding book chroniciling the history of the American Basketball Association, Loose Balls, Terry Pluto quotes a staffer of the short-lived Anaheim Amigos who said his job during games was the crank the turnstile in order to inflate announced attendance.
Shomik Mukherjee’s report for The Mercury News on the renovation of Raimondi Park is a good read.