It’s MLB playoff season, but if you’re a fan of Bay Area baseball, it’s not an easy hang this October. Your beer may be bitter for several reasons.
Ask corner store owners, Muni drivers, or die-hard baseball fans, traveling home this past baseball season on public transportation after team losses, maybe after grabbing a quick decompression bevy at the local watering hole, after the game, venting about their team. In SF the N-Judah was full of them this summer. From Carl and Cole to Ocean Beach, those Giants hats on the train were moving about with conviction. Swaying off heads. Fans had stories, not good ones, nor a happy ending in sight, about how the splash hits this year were gone.
The optics were undeniable.
As soon as Buster Posey became installed as a member of the Giants ownership group in 2022 and moved his family back from the state of Georgia to Lafayette in the East Bay in 2023, you knew the three-time National League and World Series champion catcher, seven-time All-Star and National League MVP, and captain of that dynasty ballclub that pushed the overbearing tech narratives out of SF headlines for years on end was going to be part of a bigger plan, as the team suffered after his retirement.
On Monday, September 30, the Giants announced Farhan Zaidi’s firing and the installation of Posey as president of baseball operations. Executives with fancy titles, who have never caught a pitch, or taken a swing or even a sniff at a high and tight 100-mile-per-hour fastball, will say the 37-year-old Posey lacks the front-office experience that typically accompanies those who ascend to those top jobs.
But you know who would call that a bunch of junk? The four-time World Series manager Bruce Bochy.
He always championed Posey’s baseball operations acumen, telling press officials Buster had the stuff to be a winning manager someday. Both players were catchers, a position many baseball elitists say gives you immediate managerial skills. The Giants organization fell out with Bochy. So he retired after the 2019 season.
But, a couple of years later, coveted by an upstart organization, Bochy led the Texas Rangers to the 2023 World Series title, beating the Arizona Diamondbacks in five games, making him the fifth manager to have won a World Series with multiple teams. The Texas Rangers wanted his experience and promised not to pass along notes from the team’s top brass, an in-vogue practice happening today that handcuffs managers from doing their job; operating in real-time, maneuvering through decisions by instinct and feel. Not just metrics.
Giant’s top brass could not ignore the fact of Bochy’s success. You could see it through Karl The Fog, clear as sourdough bread…
Well, you get my meaning.
Buster Posey was already tapped and in the vicinity to take a leadership role, but it was inevitable after Bochy’s successful return, without the Giants.
Let’s see what Posey can do….off the field.
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As for the A’s, it’s an unfortunate national story.
The Athletics, owned by John Fisher, the youngest of Gap founders Doris and Donald Fisher’s three sons, who stepped down from Gap’s board of directors in May 2022, has become the third sports franchise to leave Oakland in the past five years. The Raiders went to Las Vegas in 2020, and the Warriors left for Chase Center in San Francisco in 2019. The A’s will play at Sutter Health Park in Sacramento, a venue that seats 14,014, for at least three seasons, starting in 2025, before moving to Las Vegas for the 2028 season. Fisher failed to agree with the city of Oakland on a deal to build a more modern stadium. While fans bemoaned a greedy owner who just wanted to move the franchise to Vegas, and Major League Baseball covered their eyes while a strident fan base and stadium culture were finally killed off.
Years ago, I asked a friend, lifelong Richmond, California, native, Nishean McGee, if he wanted to check out the flick Moneyball; a film about the Oakland Athletics baseball team, its general manager Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt), and their sabermetric approach to assembling a competitive baseball team on a small budget. The homie looked me dead in the eye, without missing a beat, and delivered facts: “I’ve been watching Moneyball all my life.”
Listen, I’m a baseball fan in general, a semi-retired Red Sox fan—the whole Mookie Betts thing made me put that organization on an open-ended time-out—but I’ve attended games in Oakland, and they are awesome, despite it smelling like a toilet. I’ve had ex-girlfriends share with me their experiences about their whole family attending the Fourth of July fireworks year after year. It’s a tradition many Bay Area families took part in. Another ex brought me to a Yankees-A’s game for my birthday, where the Yanks hit a home run to our section way out in center field, where a fan caught the ball. But this is in Oakland, so most fans in that section rode and bullied this fan to throw the ball back, which he did. That stuff doesn’t happen across the Bay at a Giants game. Oakland A’s fans? They got onions, Jack. (And ballers, too.)
“Given all the hardships we’ve endured, A’s fans are a loyal community with an ‘us vs. the world’ mentality,” said T.J. Gorton, director of marketing at SF JAZZ and lifelong A’s fan. “The Coliseum was our home. Many called it a dump, which might have seemed that way from the outside, but many of us A’s fans loved it. As (A’s left-fielder) Brent Rooker said, you went there to watch a game without all the unnecessary distractions and fluff. Regardless of the constant rebuilding of teams and trading of players, the team would always eventually rise back up with a unique team full of interesting characters and personalities that were ‘very Oakland,’ even if they came from somewhere else. Baseball lost a part of its soul when it lost the Oakland A’s.”
