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Before the Oakland Ballers ever played their first game, the franchise was attempting to author a comeback story.
Two years into their existence, the Ballers have written one heck of a tale.
The Pioneer League baseball team fell behind 2-0 in a best-of-five championship series against the Idaho Falls Chukars but ripped off three consecutive wins, including an 8-1 victory Sunday in Game 5 at Raimondi Park to capture the organization’s first league title.
The clinching victory followed a dominant regular season in which the Ballers broke the Pioneer League record with 73 wins. Oakland won 13 consecutive series to finish the season but faced elimination after losing Game 2 of a best-of-three semifinal series to open the playoffs against the Ogden Raptors.
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After advancing past Ogden, Oakland lost each of the first two games of the championship series to Idaho Falls. Then, the Ballers secured three consecutive blowout wins, outscoring their opponents 26-6 to bring Oakland its first baseball title since the A’s swept the Giants in the 1989 Bay Bridge Series.
The 1989 World Series was interrupted for 10 days after the Loma Prieta earthquake struck before the start of Game 3, causing widespread damage around the Bay Area and at the Giants’ home of Candlestick Park. Hours after the Ballers defeated the Chukars, a 4.3 earthquake centered near the UC Berkeley campus jolted residents of the East Bay awake shortly before 3 a.m.
The Ballers’ 73-23 regular season record gives them the same win total as the A’s, who are 73-83 entering the final week of the MLB season after departing Oakland for a temporary stop in Sacramento at the end of 2024.
A’s owner John Fisher is determined to relocate the franchise to Las Vegas, and the franchise’s decision to abandon a city it called home since 1968 inspired investors Paul Freedman and Bryan Carmel to start the Ballers.
“Our job is to make people happy, make them smile, and hopefully have lasting memories,” Freedman told The Standard in August. “There’s not a lot of jobs you can actually have to be able to do that.”
The Ballers’ semifinal victory over Ogden marked the first playoff series win for an Oakland baseball team since 2006, when the A’s swept the Minnesota Twins in the ALDS. Since then, the franchise lost three Division Series (2012, 2013, 2020) and three winner-take-all wild-card games (2014, 2018, 2019).
After earning a playoff berth a season ago, the Ballers entered this year’s postseason as the heavy favorites to emerge as champions. They needed to win four consecutive elimination games to make a title possible but achieved the feat with a show of resilience fitting for a team that was born out of a desire to prove that baseball can still thrive in Oakland.
“With the A’s leaving and the B’s being something else, it’s like a perfect kind of spin off,” pitcher Gabe Tanner said earlier this season. “I think the people are really liking it, and this is only the second year. So I bet over the years, we’re gonna get more and more attention.”
Winning titles will do that.