Thanks for your patience as I dealt with a personal matter last week. We are back with our regularly scheduled programming this week, so get ready to be sick of me!
Many of you know that Beyoncé is one of my life inspirations. Well! I have the honor of seeing her tonight in concert at SoFi Stadium. There is something about her artistry, her bravery, and the care she puts into always putting on a dynamic show that makes me think all things are possible.
It is helpful and healing for me to see a woman my age (we were born the same month!) in all her power: creatively, physically, emotionally, messy, gorgeous, trying new things, all of it. I have not been feeling well lately, due to a recurrence of the POTS I developed from my awful bout of Long Covid two-and-a-half years ago. But I’ve learned to manage the best I can, and I’m going for more tests soon that will hopefully provide answers and help for my chronic fatigue.
Anyway, all of this is to say that the sense of community you guys provide has sustained me. I may not feel well enough to leave the house some days but I can join the chats and the zooms and feel less alone. I have heard many stories of you guys feeling the same about our community, and it has brought me light during a difficult season of my life.
On that note! As a reminder we have our book club zoom for our latest selection: “Lords of the Realm” by John Helyar, two weeks from today on May 12th from 5:30 PM to 6:30 PM PT. This zoom will be opened to all paid subscribers. I’m really, really excited for this one, as it delves into the history of baseball’s labor fights, which tees us up quite nicely for the next lockout. You don’t have to do anything to register for the zoom. All paid subscribers will be emailed a link the morning of the talk. And if you can’t make it, the recording of the talk will be available for paid subscribers on this site.
Secondly, we will have our East Coast meet-up this year in Boston on Saturday, July 26th for Red Sox vs. Dodgers. We sold through our allotment of 50 tickets in Grandstand section 16 fast, but if you’d like to join our group and buy your own tickets near us or anywhere in the stadium, that’s totally encouraged! We will meet beforehand for lunch/drinks at a sports bar near Fenway, location and time TBD but I’ll sort it out soon. Come hang with us!
I keep notes on all the baseball things I want to tell you guys about, and sometimes I can’t find a home for those notes. So perhaps at the end of each month I’ll do a column like this one where I list important stuff that I don’t want you to miss.
We will start with Gus Dobbins, who worked for the Oakland A’s for decades, and who I had the pleasure of chatting with during the A’s final home stand in Oakland last September. Here’s what I wrote about Dobbins at the time:
A’s manager Mark Kotsay held his scrum in the dugout and greeted the dozens of media members packed in by saying “welcome to the jungle” with a chuckle. He said he wanted to keep his sunglasses on because he knew he would start crying, but then he took them off because he’s a good sport…..
Kotsay held it together until he started talking about the Coliseum workers, and then he began to cry when talking about Gus Dobbins, a 92-year-old doorman who Kotsay had known since he joined the A’s as a player in 2004. Kotsay said he took a photo with Dobbins, and it will go on the desk of “whatever office” he occupies next.
When I spoke with Dobbins, he diplomatically said he wasn’t sure if he was going to go with the team to Sacramento, but that it didn’t seem likely as the commute would be too hard on him. (In lieu of ripping A’s owner John Fisher this is what most of the elderly employees at Oakland Coliseum said to me when I asked the same question, still somehow showing loyalty to an organization that had shown none to them).
Dobbins died last week at 93.
His death took my breath away, as the other person I trailed around the Coliseum during that final home stand was Rickey Henderson, who also died in December.
I don’t mean to imply that both of these men died of broken hearts. Dobbins was 93. Rickey was reportedly asthmatic and had health issues that the general public did not know about. But I do know that the A’s playing in Oakland gave both of these men purpose, community, and a sense of place to go every day. Those things matter.
And now the A’s are gone from Oakland and these two men are gone from this Earth. It’s grief on grief on grief for A’s fans, employees, the media who saw them every day, and for the community at large. I doubt John Fisher even knew who Dobbins was, or cared. But we do. Rest in peace, to a wonderful human being who loved baseball, adored people, and whose photo will remain on Mark Kotsay’s desk wherever his job takes him.
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Some happier news: the Mets were 22-32 when we had our first-ever Long Game meet-up at a baseball game at Citi Field. They have the best record in baseball since we graced them with our presence, at 84-47. (The Padres are second-best, at 80-48.) Should I let the Mets know so they invite us back? If we do this for the Red Sox this July it’s absolutely going to be come A Thing.
The Angels did something really petty that managed to piss off their players and employees and it all spilled into public view this week
