Christian Almanza gets a lift from his teammates. Almanza had a three homer day against the Northern Colorado Springs Sky Sox at Raimondi Park in West Oakland on Tue Jul 22, 2025 (Oakland Ballers photo)

Colorado Springs Sky Sox (2nd half: 4-3, ’25: 13-41) 030 020 120 8 9 2

Oakland (2nd half: 5-2, ’25: 42-13) 450 300 00x 12 11 0

Time: 2:58

Attendance: 2,298

Tuesday, July 22, 2025

By Lewis Rubman

OAKLAND–A mere 91 years ago, New York Giants’ manager Bill Terry fell to thinking about the forthcoming National League season. His mused, “Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Chicago will be the teams we’ll have to beat. I don’t think the Braves will do as well as they did last year. I was just wondering, is Brooklyn still in the league?”

Mutatis Mutandi, a fan of today might wonder what the Northern Colorado Springs Sky Sox were doing at Raimondi Park, where they faced the Pioneer League’s first half champion Oakland Ballers, in the B’s second half home opener.

Didn’t the Sky Sox compete in the Triple A Pacific Coast League? Yes, they did, but that was only a three decade long blink of the eye of history, starting in 1988, when the Hawaii Islanders migrated to the Springs, and lasting through 2918, when they moved on to San Antonio replacing the Double A Missions and bringing Triple A baseball to the Alamo City .

In a nasty irony of baseball history, the current version of the San Antonio Missions is back in Double A as an affiliate of the San Diego Padres.

The home of the Air Force Academy and the US Olympic and Paralympic Training Center did and still does host a Pioneer League team, the Rocky Mountain Vibes, but when the circuit’s Northern Colorado Owiz closed shop in the last week of this season’s first have, the league took over the team’s operation, moved it to Colorado Springs and rebranded it the Sky Sox.

Only the name was changed; we saw the Northern Colorado Owlz (now the Sky Sox) in all but name fall to the Ballers, 12-8 this Tuesday night in a game in which the B’s led 12-4 after four frames and had to scramble to escape the top of the eighth without having blown their lead.

That commodious vicus of recirculation brings us back to Raimondi Park and Environs, where the temperature at game time was in the low 60s and dropping fast. In a way that mirrored the contradictions in the event itself.

The cold was not uncomfortable, Back in Colorado Springs, it was pretty warm, but not comfortable; it was raining. For my part, I still vividly recall having seen mounds of dirty frozen snow piled in front of the outfield fences at an afternoon home game of the PCL Sky Sox in July of, I think it was, 1989. And I remember how scared I was driving south after the game through a blinding hailstorm down I-25 to Las Vegas, New Mexico. Those images coexisted with what I was experiencing Tuesday night in West Oakland.

It was an interesting game but not a well played one.The Sky Sox set the tone in the bottom of the first when centerfielder Brett Robert turned this way and thataway when chasing afterDavis Drewek’s deep fly ball. He never touched the ball, so Drewek was credited with a triple and an RBI when Esai Santos crossed the plate. Because Kamau Neighbors’ relay ended up in the Sox’s dugout, Drewek romped home with the hosts’ second run.

The pitching on both sides was, for the most part, to put it kindly, inelegant. Colorado Springs’ two relievers, Maykol Lopez Esperanza and Danny Fox held Oakland to one hit and a walk over 2-2/3 innings after their starter, Austyn Coleman, had thrown a 112 pitches in his 5-1/3 innings of work that yielded a dozen runs, all earned, on 10 hits, five of which cleared the fence, and a pair of free passes.

The Ballers sent young Dylan Delvecchio, a product of St. Mary’s, to the mound to make his professional debut. He desperately wanted to stay in for the five innings required for a starting pitcher to earn a win. Two solo home runs, a fly out to the left center field wall, and a couple of walks frustrated that desire.

Delvecchio showed promise but clearly needs more experience before he can stop being a hope and become an asset. Dylan Matsuoka got the win, improving his balance sheet to 4-1 in spite of having surrendered a run, earned, two hits, one of them on Zane Denton’s second round tripper of the night, three walks, and a wild pitch.

This, after pitching to but nine batters. It took the struggling righty 34 pitches to get through his 1-1/3 cameo appearance. Conner Richardson didn’t fare any better. Chewy gave up one more hit and got one more out than his predecessor before yielding to Caleb Franzen, who was the one bright spot in the B’s mound corps as he put down the four batters he faced and set the crowd of 2,298 home happy.

Christian Almanza led the Ballers’ attack, going three for three. All of his hits went yard, and accounted for half of Oakland’s talleys. Three other B’s had multi hit nights. Tremayne Cobb, Drewek, and Danny Harris each had two. Drewek hit, in addition to the aforementioned gift three bagger, a four bagger of his own, and Santos also went yard.

The second of this six game series is scheduled to start at 6:35 Wednesday evening. It’ll be another Ballers’ Winning Wednesday with giveaway posters from Cape and Cowl Comics and AC Transit and a raffle for a hand built e-Bike from the Electric Bike Company. The first 500 customers will get a free lift ticket from Dodge Ridge and Bear Valley.