The Oakland Ballers just edged the Yuba Sutter High Wheelers 5-4 on Sun Aug 31, 2025 at Raimondi Field in West Oakland (photo by the Oakland Ballers)

Oakland Ballers weekly report by Lewis Rubman Tue Sep 2, 2025

By Lewis Rubman

OAKLAND–Fats Waller was right. There’s been a change in the weather, a change in the sea, from now on there’s gonna be a change in me. For the rest of the Pioneer Baseball League season and its playoffs, instead of reporting daily on all the Ballers’ home games, I’ll be writing a weekly column on the team’s constant contradictions, its state of protean stasis.

Sandymount Strand has nothing on the base paths of Raimondi Field. Indeed, the coexistence of change and permanence and the related theme of cyclical repetition are prominent in many of my favorite writers, among whom are Joyce, Borges, José Emilio Pacheco, Rolfe Humphreys, the author of “Polo Grounds,” —which I consider the best baseball poem fever written — and translator of Heraclitus ‘s De rerum naturæ, which he democratically renders as The Way Things Are.

The Argos, whose crew, the Argonauts, searched the known world in search of the golden fleece, was destroyed and rebuilt over and over again. The debate over whether or not it was one ship or many, has repeated itself over the centuries and, as you read this, continues to this day.

Were the Oakland Athletics one team or 54? Or were they a new team with each passing day? Borges slyly signaled the practical futility of such nagging doubts when he called one of his essays, “A New Refutation of Time.”

This change in my schedule is not, however, a matter of high philosophical interest, however much fun it might be to play with such a conceit. It is a practical demonstration that time is always with us, that it lives in us and we live in it.

Since suffering a series of falls a month or two ago, I ‘ve needed a walker, or at least a cane to get around, and my energy levels fluctuate unpredictably. In short, as I approach my 85th birthday, I can’t meet the exigencies that have done in many a younger reporter.

My new way of doing things will, I hope, offer both you and me several advantages. I’ll be able to attend games without having to carefully follow the action on the field and simultaneously write coherently and accurately about it. I also should have time and perspective to notice trends and follow ongoing stories.

The new time frame will allow me to reflect a bit on what I’m about to say instead of putting my fingers to the keyboard helter skelter and turning out numerous typos, incoherences, lacunæ, and plain old fashioned factual errors.

I had played with the idea of doing podcasts, but, when I’m on my game, I write better than I speak. And, I’m proud and humbled to say, that several readers have complimented me on my recaps, warts and all.

I’ll write occasional pieces during the off season and plan on returning to the weekly column in May.

Fans and other followers of the fortunes of the Oakland Ballers shouldn’t have trouble handling the change. The team’s motto seems to be, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” The winningest team in professional baseball manages to to blow leads with alarming frequency, often against vastly inferior opponents.

The B’s clinched the first half pennant on a walk off pinch hit single by Esai Santos against the Boise Hawks on August 24. Two days later, they opened the second half in Marysville by jumping to a 5-1 lead against the rapidly fading Yuba-Sutter High Wheelers.

Yuba-Sutter reacted by scoring nine runs in the bottom of the fifth and went on to deflate the high flying Ballers, 12-8. All of the High Wheeler’s runs came against the then recent additions to the Ballers’ roster, Dylan Delveccho and Malik Binns.

New acquisitions are a frequent feature of Oakland’s lineup. TJ McKenzie had been a standout as a franchise player for the Colorado Springs Sky Sox (née Northern Colorado Owlz) over the first half of the season. His OPS was a staggering .917 and he had stolen 32 bases in 36 attempts.

The August 26 loss to Yuba-Sutter marked his first appearance in a Ballers uniform. The expression “franchise player” has a specific—and probably unique—meaning in the PBL. Each team is allowed one, and he

• must have played at least two years in the league • must have finished the previous season with the team that designates him as a franchise player • cannot spend more than one season as a franchise player.

Being a franchise player exempts position players from the requirement that they have no more than two years’ professional experience as of January 1 of the season’s year. (There are more details about what constitutes a professional season, but you get the idea).

The Ballers don’t have to lose a game to turn a laugher into a nail biter. On August 17, they were leading the Rocky Mountain Vibes 12-1 at the half-way mark. The game went into the eighth tied at 13 before Oakland eked out a 14-13 win.

Following last Tuesday’s loss, the B’s came back to plaster the High Wheelers, 14-3 and 14-0 in their next two encounters.They squeezed out a 7-6 win on Friday night before falling to them 11-5 on Saturday and then pulling out a 5-4 series-ending win with ninth inning RBI singles by Michael O’Hara and the clutch hitting Santos.

The weekend games presented an interesting and infuriating problem for East Bay based Ballers fans. 960 AM, which bills itself breathlessly as “The Answer,” chose to air the San José State football game on Saturday. 1220 AM, of Palo Alto, transmitted a barely audible narration, in which play by play announcer Nevada Cullen, with no one to back him up and suffering from cold symptoms, got so fed up that he complained about the post game home run derby, which he called one of the most stupid innovations, along with the uncaught third strike rule, of the PBL. He then said that he had just received notice that he had been fired for insulting the league. I suspected a joke, and I was right. Cullen was back on the job on Sunday, still suffering from what sounded like a URI.

This week’s six game series against the Great Falls Voyagers will be a tune up for the playoffs. If the hometown heroes gain at least a split against the Voyagers, they will break the PBL’s record for games won in the regular season. They have announced that the first two playoff games will be played in West Oakland, on September 11th and12th and that tickets for them have gone on sale.

The B’s also announced that Two $hort won’t be able to perform at this coming Saturday’s block party, but that the other plans for the party and Fan Appreciation Day still are in place. Hot dogs will go for $2 up until the first pitch is thrown, and you can get anything (or nothing) served in a plastic helmet for $2 a helmet.

The first 200 fans through the gates will get free Scrappy the Rally Possum bobbleheads. They originally had been scheduled to be given away early in the season, but supply chain problems put the kibosh on that.

The fans who would have received the bobbleheads got vouchers that were redeemable a week or so ago, but those of us who missed out on that have this one last chance (for this season, at least) to obtain this backhanded tribute to the Oakland Coliseum, which Peter Gammons once called—correctly—the best in the major leagues.

Game times will be 6:35 on Tuesday through Friday, 4:35 on Saturday, and, in a slight variation from the usual, 4:35 on Sunday as well.

I’ll write occasional pieces during the off season and plan on returning to the weekly column in May.

My future coverage of the Giants is, at this point, undecided. I’ve been working on ways of getting to and from Oracle Park safely. I’m very confident that I can arrange to be dropped off and picked up for day games next year, but scheduling for the few remaining ones in 2025 make a trial run problematic.