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The Oakland Banners suffered their fourth straight loss on Jul 17, 2026 (Oakland Ballers photo)

Oakland Ballers Weekly Report Mon Jul 20, 2026

By Lewis Rubman

Monday, July 20, 2026

By Lewis Rubman

OAKLAND–The Oakland Ballers finished the first half of the 2026 Pioneer Baseball League on a high note, tying the Yolo-Sutter Freebirds in a stirring, come from behind finish to  force a Knock Out Round that the B’s won, 4-3.  The excitement of the game was, however, marred by the tone deaf attempt of the team’s management to shorten the contest by two innings.

Oakland could feel good about its four game winning streak, although that being its longest of the year was a sobering fact. Nonetheless, spirits were high as the B’s headed south to Long Beach.  And go south was what they did.

The first encounter of the three game series in Long Beach took place on Bastille Day, Tuesday, July 14. The Ballers looked sharp for the first three innings and sharper still after five and a half, when they were ahead of the league leading Coast, 4-1.

But then that old Ballers nemesis, failure to execute, returned to the scene. Charlie Hurley, their starting pitcher, surrendered back to back walks, the first to Patrick Roche on a full count and the second to Cooper Vest on four pitches. Matthew Bardowell smacked a grounder to Jake Allgeyer, who whipped a throw to Nick Leehey, whose relay to Jeter Ybarra at first beat Bardowell to the bag for what looked like a rally killing around the horn double play.

But it was not to be; Leehy, it seemed, hadn’t touched second base, and, instead of two outs and empty bases, Hurley had to face Cuba Bess with runners on the corners and only one away. Bess drove Roche home with a ground out to first that also moved Vest over to third. Jacob Jablonsky’s single to right plated Vest before Emilio Corona’s homer to center crowned the Coastal rally to give the hosts a 9-4 lead.

That was it for Hurley; Valek Cisneros relieved him. It was only fitting that the first Long Beach batter he faced, Anthony Mata, reached base on an error by Leehey, who had not been charged with one earlier in the frame. After all, when keeping score you can’t anticipate a double play.

There were a few changes to the Ballers’ roster that day, not that you would have noticed it if you checked their or the league’s website, or even if you googled the Ballers’ transactions. Most notable was that Ahmad Harajjli, the player to be named later in the deal that sent C.J. Blowers to the Florence Y’Alls of the Frontier League, arrived and managed to give up two runs on three hits, two walks, and a wild pitch in the bottom of the eighth. He faced eight batters.

The Ballers now show him in the roster, but when I clicked the link to get details about his record, the numbers were inconsistent with a recent arrival.   I hope this will have been corrected by the time you read this. Harajilili had the excuse that he had taken an early morning, delayed departure flight from Kentucky. Other new acquisitions now on the roster but with inconsistencies in the details provided for them are Demias Jimerson, Reed Butz, and Austin Ballentine.

The line score looked like this:

Oakland Ballers (22-27)         000 022 000    4  10  1

Long Beach Coast (38-11)     001 004 52x   12 12  1

Winning pitcher: Jack Martin (5-0)   Losing pitcher: Charlie Hurlley (1-4)

Time: 2:58   Attendance: 2,184

The Ballers returned to Blair Field the next day, Wednesday July 15, and once more blew a lead, only this time they hadn’t needed come back from a deficit to gain it.. 

The Ballers owed their brief advantage to Jaden Collura’s two run double off the Coast’s starting and eventually winning pitcher, the franchise player and manager’s son Cole Percival, in the top of the third, following walks to Esai Santos and Jake Allgeyer.

The B’s starter, Hunter Day, had been sharp in his first three innings of work. He issued a free pass to the first batter he faced, Eddy Pelc, a human walking machine, but he immediately was erased by a double play, and that was all the offence the Coast could muster until  Cuba Bess’s two run double to right with two down broke the spell. Day’s terrific start became a footnote.  A glance at the line score shows how rapidly Oakland, shut out after their pair of third inning runs, fell out of contention.

Oakland Ballers (22-28)         002 000 000     2    8  0

Long Beach Coast (39-11)      000 212 03x     8  10  0

Winning pitcher: Cole Percival (1-0)   Losing pitcher: Hunter Day (0-2)

Save: Zach Voelker (10)

Time: 2:48   Attendance: 727

Voelker’s save made him the first PBL pitcher to reach double digits in that category this season

It was the Ballers’ seventh consecutive loss to the Coast.

Miles’ Militia needed to win the closing set-to of the series on Thursday the 16th if they were to get their first victory of the second half and avoid being swept away by a Coastal tidal wave. As you can see, they didn’t succeed.

Oakland Ballers (22-29)         010 332 000    9  13  1

Long Beach Coast (40-11)     004 230 03x   12 11  1

Winning pitcher: Gary Grosjean (3-1)   Losing pitcher: Matthew Maloney (1-2)    Save:

Zach Voelker (11)

Time: 3:55   Attendance: 717

The top of the fourth brought bad news to both teams. For the Ballers it was a disaster. For the Coast it was a pebble in their spiked shoes. 

After Conner Smith walked to open the inning, he was erased in the front end of Myles Bearle’s second to first double play. Then Tremayne Cobb got things started again. A player who can beat you in many ways, he got a leg single to short and then went to second when Esai Santos singled to center. With Leehey at the plate, Santos and Cobb pulled off a double steal. Immediately upon sliding into third, Cobb visibly was in extreme pain. He was helped off the field with an injured left knee. This would be a concern for any player. It’s more than that for Cobb—ignoring the human side of the question for a moment and considering only what the incident could mean in terms of wins and loses—Oakland manager Aaron Miles believes that Cobb is the best player in the league. He might be right.

Jaden Collura pinch ran for Cobb, and Nick Leehey then shot a 389 foot home run to left field   to tie the score at four.  That was the pebble in Long Beach’s shoe.

The Coast regained the lead in the bottom of the frame, with two runs, one of them unearned thanks to an error by Ybarra. Those tallies came off Jacob Petersheim, who lasted on a third of an inning. The more I watch Ybarra, the more I suspect that there’s a physical problem that interferes with his mobility. He’s still an asset to the team; it would be difficult for the league’s leading home run hitter not to be.

 I can’t give Petersheim anything but the benefit of the doubt. He might have impressive metrics like spin rate—I don’t know about that; and I don’t know how interpret data like that—but his more traditional numbers make me wonder—and I write this with a mixture of criticism and curiosity—why the Ballers ever offered him a contract. His college record over four years was 10-10-4 , 6.82. with an average of 9.4 runs scored against him every nine innings. His record with the Ballers as I write this is 0-1-0, 8.10, with 10.8 opponents’ runs per nine innings.

The Ballers showed the grit that had characterized them in their glorious season of 2025 .They scored a three runs in the fifth  on RBI singles by Brendan O’Sullivan and Conner Smith and a bases loaded walk to Leehey to give them a short lived 7-6 advantage that was wiped  out in the bottom half of the frame by Patrick Roche, Jr.’s single to center with Walking Eddy Pelc on board. Cuba Bess followed that up with a two run four bagger to right. Oakland fought back with a  run producing single to right by Paul Winfield that plated O’Sullivan and a sac fly by Myles Beale that brought inWinfield, who had advanced to third, with the Ballers’ last hurrah.

Many fans know that Willie Mays never considered The Catch his best defensive play. What he took most pride in was the throw he made from the Polo Grounds’ center field vastness was that, although Larry Doby was able to advance to third on the play, he had to hold up there and couldn’t score what would have been the tying run.  Jaylen Edmonds , pinch running for Matthew Bardowell, was able to score from second Cooper Vest’s sacrifice fly to right. 

In addition to the pitchers I’ve already mentioned, Oakland used Jake Villar, Valek Cisneros, Matthew Maloney, who was charged with the loss, and Langston Burkett. Cisneros was the only one who was effective, allowing just a walk and a hit batter over three full innings. The Ballers tried twice to appeal the play, but the umpires refused to approve the appeal. Since the call was a matter of judgement and not one of interpretation, Oakland couldn’t play the game under protest.

It was all over but the shouting. The Ballers went down one, two, three in the top of the ninth and then boarded the team bus for the six hour drive to Oakland. It was not the best preparation they could have made for the next evening’s scheduled 6:35 start against their nemesis from the north, the Modesto Roadsters.

When the Baller followers arrived at Raimondi Park for that game on the seventeenth, the baseball question that was troubling many of them concerned the state of Tremayne Cobb’s knee. The reports that I got from the players I spoke with were that he was in good spirits but that the club wasn’t counting on their spark plug shortstop to see action before next week.

It took Modesto four batters to put Oakland behind by three runs; clean up hitter Osiris Johnson’s full count homer over the low left field fence with Lucas Terilli and Jacob Lojewski on base took care of that. Modesto had to wait for their number four batter to do the job because their offense had stalled when their number three bat, Max Handron flew out to Beale at the left field wall. 

The Ballers originally had announced righty Griffin Smith as their starting pitcher. However, another portsider, Aidan Risse, took the mound and the loss for the B’s.. Modesto never trailed after that, first inning onslaught although Oakland did retaliate with a pair of two run bombs, one in each of the fourth and fifth frames. The first blast came off the bat of Jeeter Ibarra, who extended his hitting streak to 18 games and his league leading home run total to 22. The second round tripper was courtesy of Jared Collura, who has been finding a new home for himself in left field while Conner Smith takes over more of the team’s catching duties.  Recent acquisition Ahmded Harajlli pitched two scoreless innings before getting hammered for two runs on Max Handron’s double and Johnson’s round tripper, both to left, before he was yanked and replaced by Brock Mayer, who held visitors hitless for two frames before giving way to Brady Chávez, who also shut them down without a hit. Each of the Ballers’ mopper uppers granted the Roadsters one toll free passage to first base.

To sum it up,

Modesto Roadsters  (31-21)   304 002 000    9  9  0

Oaland Ballers (22-30)           010 220 000    5  9  2

Winning pitcher: Devyn Hernández (4-1)   Losing pitcher: Aidan Risse (2-5)

Time: 2:58   Attendance: 1,833

The game had started under balmy skies with the thermometer reading 81^o. It, like the number and spirits of the spectators, dropped precipitously over the nearly three hours of wouldabeen, shouldabeens. There was no objective way to  quantify the spirits or the number of people who stayed to the chilly end, but the temperature drop was 16 degrees.

Saturday, July 18 was Tyler Lozano Take Over Day. The B’s mainstay backstop of 2024 and ’25 one-upped  Bert Campanaris and Martín Dihigo. The former had played an inning of at each position over the course of one nine inning game in 1965. The latter had played all of them and also managed over the course of a lifetime. Lozano played a different ballpark role each inning. He caught the top of the first and threw out Terilli when Modesto’s leadoff hitter tried to steal second. At bat, Lozano struck out leading off the home first. Then he went to broadcast booth and threw out rubber balls to the crowd below him. Next, he went into the stands to toss hot dogs. He coached at first base. I lost track of where he was and what he was doing after that but found the time to wonder if the Ballers had managed to tie the game in the bottom of the ninth, would he have been eligible to replace the injured Tremayne Cobb as the team’s Knock Out Round representative.

This time, Griffin Smith really did start for the Ballers. He pitched well, by PBL standards, going six full innings and giving up three runs, all earned,  on six hits and a walk after throwing 85 pitches.But the bullpen let him down, and Smith and the Ballers ended up on the short end of another union work day score of nine to five. This is how that developed:

Modesto Roadsters (32-21)    010 000 431    9   11  1

Oakland Ballers (22-31)         000 001 121    5     6  0

Winning pitcher: Omar Serrano (4-1)  Losing pitcher: Griffin Smith (0-4)

Time:2:59   Attendance: 1,944

The next afternoon, Sunday July 19, we celebrated the achievements of the guy in the center of this photo:

Modesto also would have been a fitting venue for a celebration of The Man of Steal. He hit.345 in 134 games for the 1977 Modesto A’s of the Classs A California League.  His OPS was an incredible .934, not to mention his 95 stolen bases in 117 attempts.

The ball game that followed the celebration was a horror story. Its synopsis fits in these few lines.:

Modesto Roadsters (33-21)    113 140 020      12   13   2

Oakland Ballers (22-32)         010 010 001        3   11   1

Winning pitcher: Corbin Talley (4-1)   Losing pitcher: Charlie Hurley (1-5)

Time: 2:58    Attendance: 1,375

About the only bright spot for the B’s was that Ibarra was able to extend his hitting streak to 20 games. The sunny skies, complimented by a temperature that scarcely varied from the 64^o it stood at when the game began, took some of the sting out of watching the Ballers’ tepid performance.

Raimondi Park has a capacity of 4,001, but Sunday’s attendance was only 1,375 in spite of the beautiful weather, the chance kids had to run the bases and get autographs after the game, and, of course, the added attraction of the homage to Rickey Henderson. The most likely explanation for this disappointing turnout was the scheduling conflict between the attractions in West Oakland and the broadcast of the World Cup final.

That is but one way in which scheduling has become a concern around 20^th and Wood. Under the financially challenged Pioneer Baseball League’s new travel saving format, the Ballers will be on the road Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays and play at home Friday night, Saturday mid-afternoon, and early Sunday afternoon. Remember that six hour bus ride from Long Beach? I also heard some grousing from ballpark workers about these new arrangements.

This situation raises a really troubling question. What happens if the PBL goes out of business?

Do the Ballers go to semi-pro league like the Pecos? Do they and a few other clubs try to form a new circuit? Or do they dry up, like a raisin in the sun?

For the time being, carpe diem. The B’s will play this coming Tuesday through Thursday nights in Long Beach and then take another six hour bus ride to face the Boise Hawks at the usual three different starting times over the week-end.