California League offers less-pricey baseball option
Take me out to the ballgame? Sure, as long as you’re taking me to San Jose. Or maybe Lake Elsinore.
Those cities don’t have major-league teams — that’s the point. In California, Major League Baseball is miserable. Big-league games run too long and cost hundreds of dollars to attend. The stadiums in Oakland and Anaheim are dumps, as are this year’s teams in San Francisco and San Diego. In Los Angeles, the championship-contending Dodgers greedily cling to a cable contract that prevents most Angelenos from watching their strong season on TV.
But there is an antidote to big-league baloney: the California League, our very own minor league. The games are fast-paced (the lack of TV commercial breaks helps), the ballpark entertainment is fun, and tickets are affordable for working-class Californians.
Of course, the California League is Californian and mirrors the challenges of our high-cost, high-poverty state. The league has teams in Stockton and San Bernardino, cities known for surviving municipal bankruptcies, and three teams each in the economically challenged San Joaquin Valley and Inland Empire. The other two squads in the eight-team league are in Lancaster, in L.A. County’s high-crime High Desert, and San Jose, a city with wealthy residents but a starving government because it has too few salestax-producing businesses.
Like California itself, the league has had trouble with out-of-state migration. After the 2016 season, two of the 10 teams were shut down and shifted to the Carolinas. One, the High Desert Mavericks, left after the city of Adelanto canceled the Mavericks’ lease in the publicly owned ballpark. The other, the Bakersfield Blaze, departed after seven years of unsuccessful attempts to replace historic Sam Lynn Ballpark, which failed to meet the minimum facilities standards under the Professional Baseball Agreement.
Charlie Blaney, the California League’s president, told me that the state’s elimination of local redevelopment agencies earlier this decade has thwarted attempts to build new ballparks. It’s hard to construct housing in California — for people or minorleague teams.
At the same time, the history of the league (it dates to 1941, 20 years before the first major-league team arrived) helps make it great. In Visalia, you can visit Recreation Park, built in 1946, and watch the Rawhide play in a park so intimate you can hear the players chatting with each other. In Riverside County, you can join the passionate crowds at the Diamond, the energy efficient home of the Lake Elsinore Storm, a San Diego Padres affiliate that draws 200,000 fans a year in a city of just 55,000.
But there is no place better to watch a ballgame in California than in the league’s oldest park, San Jose Municipal Stadium, which opened in 1942.
The San Jose Giants, an affiliate of San Francisco’s Giants, spruce up the old place with paint — baseball cartoons, quotes about baseball, and baseball banners cover every flat surface. The lovely old grandstand pleases nostalgists. The open picnic space down the left-field line appeals to party-throwing corporations and Millennials. Behind the plate, Giants staffers keep their office doors open so fans can walk in with questions or requests. The players are close enough for fans to get to know personally; in the right-field corner, young women flirt with pitchers in the Giants’ bullpen.
The stadium shows signs of age — worn spots in right field, and a lack of bathrooms that requires the presence of portable toilets down the lines. But I paid $13 for a ticket and sat behind home plate, 10 rows up. (You can’t sit in Dodger Stadium for less than $21 at the cheapest game.)
The game I saw was played well and quickly, in just over two hours. Every minute between innings was filled with entertaining promotion: Fans played blackjack against the mascot, tossed balls into a toilet (a contest sponsored by a plumber), and faced off in an air guitar tournament.
Fans really came alive when the night’s designated “Beer Batter,” Arturo Nieto of the visiting Modesto Nuts, approached the plate. The fans taunted Nieto until he struck out swinging, which meant beer would be half-price for the next 15 minutes.
“Don’t run too fast and don’t drink too fast,” said the announcer, as onethird of the crowd scurried to the beer stands.
I hadn’t planned to stay the whole game, but the hot dog and the Fritos nachos were cheap and tasty, and it was too much fun to leave early. I can’t wait to go back.