Artist and designer Dustin O. Canalin grew up in Alameda, where he played on a high school baseball team with future Major League players such as Jimmy Rollins and Dontrelle Willis. His father would sometimes take him out of school to watch the Oakland A’s at $1 Wednesday games.
Still a sports fan, Canalin runs the apparel brand Trophy Hunting, as well consulting for brands and artists including Nike, Bleacher Report, and Rihanna. He may live in Manhattan, but he’s still connected to the East Bay—and created the wildly popular Golden State Warrior’s “The Town” uniform.
“I’ve been working in and around the Bay Area, whether it’s through the Warriors, or Oaklandish, the store there, or doing my art shows—and my whole entire family’s there,” Canalin said. “I’ve always come back and tried to show people that you can leave and still represent and promote the good of what I grew up on.”
That’s why when a former Adidas colleague of Canalin’s heard about a new professional minor league baseball team, the Oakland Ballers, he got in touch.
“He was like, ‘Oh, my God, I got the perfect opportunity for you,’ and set me up with Bryan and Paul,” said Canalin, now the Ballers’ creative director. “We just hit it off.”
Paul and Bryan are Paul Freedman and Bryan Carmel, the co-founders of the Ballers. The two met in high school, taking BART to the Coliseum to see games, and so their idea that sports build community is personal as well as theoretical.
In a phone call, Freedman said he wanted the brand for the baseball team to be iconic, and that’s happening with the Ballers apparel becoming a top-selling Bay Area brand—the hats sell out as soon as a new one drops.
The decision to bring another baseball team to Oakland came about after hearing that the (oh, let’s not use words like “hated”) owner of the Athletics, John Fisher, planned to move the team to Las Vegas. Freedman texted Carmel, saying he had a crazy idea.
“I got a text back, ‘I like crazy ideas,’” Freedman said. “We talked about it and got excited about the concept and what it would mean for the community and then pretty quickly started working on that nonstop.”
Both men say they want a team that treats the fans with respect and gives back to the community. Freedman has experience starting businesses, including working with companies to provide their employees with debt free college educations. He and Carmel decided on the Pioneer League. Then they had to figure out how to put a team together. They started by hiring an executive vice president of baseball operations, who once worked as a bench coach for the A’s.
“Fortunately, we got connected pretty early with Don Wakamatsu, who has a huge career at baseball at all levels, including being the first Asian American manager in the history of Major League Baseball [for the Seattle Mariners],” Freedman said. “He grew up in Hayward, so he really understood what we were trying to do and how important the A’s were to the whole East Bay community.”
With the logo, a B, Canalin says wanted to capture the confidence of Oakland and the authenticity of the town and the fans. Lots of thought went into the simple B, Canalin says.
“We went through a bunch of sketches and illustrations and symbols, and I think what came out was this idea of home, and Oakland being home,” Canalin said. “That’s why within the B, there’s a home plate. And the angles show this sharpness and brashness.”
They also wanted to acknowledge the history of baseball in Oakland, Freedman says, so they created hats with designs that pay homage to teams like the A-26 Boilermakers, made up of Black union shipyard workers, or the Oakland Larks, who worked to integrate baseball.
The Ballers were blocked from playing at the Coliseum, so Freedman and Carmel had just a few weeks to get Raimondi Park ready for opening day on June 4. With sort of a breathless “let’s get together and put on a show” energy and a $1.6 million investment, they turned a park with no working facilities—deemed unplayable by local Little League teams—into a 4,000-seat stadium.
Canalin admires the founders’ commitment to meeting their goals.
“They’ve done it all in such a short span of time,” he said. “I know that building the stadium was last second. Funnily enough, I had a friend who works at the city parks, and he called and was like, ‘Your people are here.’”
Ballers fan James Manion lives just a short bike ride away from Raimondi Field, and he and his wife would go by to check on the progress of the stadium. It didn’t seem possible it would be ready in time, he says, and they were impressed when the founders made good on their promise.
Manion was familiar with the Pioneer League since his wife is from Montana, which has several teams, his favorite being the Missoula PaddleHeads. When he heard about the Ballers, he jumped ship and immediately bought a 12-pack of tickets for games.
“I emailed a bunch of her family members, and I was like, ‘Sorry, PaddleHeads, I have a new favorite Pioneer League team now,” he said.
Manion loves the apparel, which echoes the colors of the A’s.
“That green and gold and that scrappy attitude and a different look is really historically Oakland to me,” he said. “It’s honoring that legacy but creating something new for a new team.”
Ballers’ second baseman Brad Burckel says he loves wearing the uniform.
“Playing for the team, you feel like you’re a part of something special, honestly,” he said. “We’re trying to win a championship. You want to do it for this town.”
Burckel says his experience here is not like playing in Texas, where he’s from.
“It’s been a different vibe from anywhere I’ve been,” he said. “We had the Astros in Houston and the Rangers in Dallas, so I kind of know what a fan base looks like, and this kind of blows it out of the water. The Oakland fan base is just crazy in love with Oakland baseball.”
Going to a Ballers game is a joyful experience for Angela Tsay, the CEO and creative director of Oaklandish, which designs and produce Ballers merchandise. She says fans feel welcomed as opposed to at A’s games in recent years, where feral cats roamed the stadium, and a possum lived in the announcers’ booth.
Asked about the wild popularity of the apparel, she says Oakland sports fans have been waiting for this.
“I think Oakland’s Major League Baseball team has not had the best relationship with its fans for last few years,” she said. “There are a lot of people who love baseball who live in the Bay Area, who want to rep a baseball team but didn’t want that money going to the ownership of Oakland’s MLB team. Presented with an alternative, I think there was years of pent-up demand.”
The ballpark is easy to get to you, so you can go to a game on a whim, and Tsay says, once there, you are surrounded by your neighbors and feel like a part of Oakland. On the sold out opening night, she says she saw someone she knew everywhere she looked.
“It was bittersweet to go to an A’s game the last few years knowing they were on the way somewhere else,” she said. “It’s hard to love something that is leaving, but it’s easy to love something that was built for you.”
