Which California Baseball Team Has the Worst Owner in Pro Sports?

The Oakland A’s and the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim Are in a Race to the Bottom

In California, a land blessed with more than its fair share of winners, we learn our most important lessons by dwelling among the losers.

So, in this final week of the baseball season, your columnist visited the bottom of the standings in American League West to ask: Which pro sports owner is the more instructive California failure—the failed heir fleeing Oakland, or the billboard billionaire sticking around in Anaheim?

Bay Area fans and pundits already have their answer: John Fisher of the Oakland A’s.

The core allegation is that Fisher, the youngest son …

by Joe Mathews | October 3, 2023

tktk | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

If You’re Latinx, Loving the Dodgers Is Complicated

The Team's Ballpark Has a Dark History. But There’s No Other Place I Feel More Like an Angeleno and Chicana

by Natalia Molina | October 19, 2022

As a kid growing up in Echo Park in the 1970s, I would walk to Dodger Stadium with my brother or kids in the neighborhood. For three dollars, we could …

My ‘Field of Dreams’ Above Carpinteria

At Santa Barbara County’s Ken McMullen Baseball Camp, a True Team Player Taught Us How to Teach Others

by Joe Mathews | September 15, 2020

Did you have strange dreams during this unsettling, crazy California summer? Me too.

Mine compressed time and space. In dreamland, I toggled between the anxious claustrophobia of summer 2020 and memories …

Why Was Baseball Legend Oscar Charleston Forgotten?

The Pathbreaking Player, Scout, and Manager Was Part of a Black Baseball Tradition That Is Still Obscured

by Jeremy Beer | March 1, 2020

History, more often than we would like, is an unjust judge. Consider the case of Oscar Charleston, a baseball player who for nearly 40 years was one of the most …

What the Dodgers and Giants’ 1958 Move West Meant for America

When the Two Teams Left for California, They Shifted the Country’s Focus From New York and Helped Fragment the Nation’s Culture

by Lincoln Mitchell | March 27, 2019

Few phrases are as evocative of a mythical, imagined urban past as “Brooklyn Dodgers.”

Those two words, particularly in the borough that is now a punch line for hipster jokes, …

Why Major League Baseball Tried to Rein in Babe Ruth

The Sultan of Swat Saved a Discredited Game, But the Sport's Establishment Sought to Tame Its Headstrong Superstar

by Edmund F. Wehrle | October 22, 2018

Babe Ruth was baseball’s greatest hero. So why did the national pastime’s establishment turn against him?

The answer lies in the untold story of Ruth’s challenge to the authorities ruling …

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