‘Built off passion’: Amid talk of a move, A’s fans build community through bobbleheads
Baseball is the sport of nostalgia.
For older generations, it was the sport that helped form relationships. America’s pastime often nestled communities together long before smart phones pushed them apart. The ballpark often served as a community hub, where winning would be romanticized as much as the smell of grilled hot dogs, the sound of a line drive off the sweet spot or sweet footwork to turn a double play.
But baseball has taken a back seat to activities that serve shorter attention spans. Even Major League Baseball’s best teams in the biggest markets don’t generate the same electricity that baseball did during its various peaks. Which means the less-popular teams — or the ones mangled by poor owners — can get hit even harder in the digital age with phones commanding our attention.
Take the Oakland Athletics. They’re a second- or third-rate organization that’s punched above its weight on the diamond for years because the smart people making the baseball decisions have autonomy. That autonomy came from an owner, the billionaire John Fisher, who had the audacity to raise season ticket prices in 2022 nearly twofold while ordering the team’s best players to get traded away for prospects.
Yes, the A’s did it again this spring, dealing stars Matt Olsen and Matt Chapman to the Braves and Blue Jays, respectively, highlighting a tear-down that will surely lead to another season of low home attendance at RingCentral Coliseum. All while the organization cries poverty and threatens a move to Las Vegas if those in charge don’t facilitate a new waterfront ballpark at Oakland’s Howard Terminal that’s been a pipe dream for more than five years.
“The organization hates us,” Robb Roberts says. “As fans, they treat us like s---.✓ I get it, you’re a big corporation, but damn, man.”
Roberts, 42, is an A’s season ticket holder who lives and breathes baseball nostalgia. A’s nostalgia, specifically. He likely has the largest collection of Athletics related bobble-heads, collectibles and memorabilia in Northern California. It would likely stand up to any other baseball collection in the country if official tallies were kept.
Roberts keeps it all in his appraisal office in Galt, the town of about 26,000 people down Highway 99 between Sacramento and Stockton. Walking into Roberts’ office is like walking into a museum, only no one knows it’s there. For more than two decades, Roberts has collected and built bobbleheads, game-used jerseys, bats, helmets, gloves, cleats, signs, jackets of former manager’s girlfriends and anything else that could be taken out of a big league clubhouse.
He even has a former players’ kelly green travel suitcase from the 1980s that held a small mirror and a razor blade for chopping lines of cocaine. It’s displayed right next to a Dennis Eckersley game-worn World Series jersey from 1989.
“Nobody comes to see my anyways in my office,” Roberts says. “And if they do, it’s all kind of cool to look at.”
Roberts’ passion for bobbleheads — he has roughly 330, some of which are worth thousands of dollars — led to him learning how to make his own. He learned to sculpt, mold and paint the bobbleheads, and later incorporated 3D printing to add type face and patterns.
Roberts has become so good at making custom bobbleheads that he’s begun to partner with former players and charitable organizations to raise money for good causes. He’s made bobbleheads of Mike Norris, Dave Henderson, Joe Rudi, Oakland rapper Too $hort and others. He’s also made bobbleheads that stand 3 to 4 feet tall that are big enough to feature game-used bats and batting helmets, including one modeled after Jose Canseco.
Roberts is working with the daughter of the A’s recently retired clubhouse manager, Steve Vucinich, and his family to create a custom bobblehead to benefit the Catfish Hunter ALS Foundation. He said he’ll often make one prototype and have the mold sent out to bobblehead manufacturers to make hundreds at a time.
The bobblehead he made for Norris, a right-handed hurler for the A’s for 10 seasons, was produced for Norris to sign and sell for the Mike Norris school of Baseball and Wellness, an after-school program for kids Norris runs throughout the Bay Area in his retirement.
“What I really enjoy about this, his eyes light up,” Roberts said of Norris. “He almost cried when I brought out the bobbleheads.”
Roberts said he doesn’t make any profit off producing bobble-heads and has even created many at a financial loss. He simply enjoys the process and helping good causes.
All good deeds brought together by a love for baseball and its fans, which the A’s didn’t seem to prioritize when they created their “Rooted in Oakland” slogans while touring sights in Las Vegas for a new ballpark.
“I think it’s terrible,” Roberts said. “Who gets treated like this? And then they expect (fans) to stay with you. They’re expecting us all to be there?”
Roberts’ collection of bobbleheads and memorabilia caught the attention of another longtime A’s fan and season ticket holder, Bryan Johansen, 39, who works in engineering in the Bay Area. Johansen and Roberts sit among the Coliseum’s most passionate in the left field bleachers; Johansen is one of the team’s most visible fans on Twitter.
Johansen partnered with Roberts on various charity projects after creating “Baseball’s Last Dive Bar,” a T-shirt company that’s created a cult following and become charitable arm.
It started when Johansen’s favorite player, outfielder Ramon Laureano, was hit by a pitch during a game in 2019 immediately after his teammate Mark Canha was also drilled. Johansen stood up from his seat in the bleachers, teed his arms out and mouthed something that wasn’t difficult to lip read when it was caught on the broadcast.
“Next thing you know,” Johansen said, “the A’s tweeted it out and said, ‘our thoughts on leading the league in hit by pitches.’ And it was me as a GIF saying, ‘What the f---.’”✓
The video went viral and led to Johansen getting shirts made of the image in his pose. It led to the creation of “Baseball’s Last Dive Bar,” named after the dilapidated Coliseum, which now sells shirts, socks, pins and mugs that also benefit various causes. Johansen eventually made sure to switch from drop shipping to traditional manufacturing locally to ensure he would support local businesses.
The shirts made by “Baseball’s Last Dive Bar” would eventually become popular with players and continued making the rounds on social media. Johansen and Roberts in 2019 before the pandemic began working together on various projects and have raised some $80,000 for roughly 20 charities with their bobble heads and shirts.
“Everything we do was derived out of our passion for the Oakland A’s and we ended up just not profiting off anything,” Johansen said.
One benefactor was the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital in Oakland. That came about because of former A’s beat writer, and current sports producer for ABC7 News in the Bay Area, Casey Pratt.
Pratt’s daughter, Emmerson, who recently turned 5, had a heart condition when she was less than a year old that nearly took her life.
She had a double aortic arch that required surgery and an 85-day stay in the hospital. Johansen and “Baseball’s Last Dive Bar” had created a shirt with Pratt’s picture on it and, by Pratt’s request, gave the proceeds to charity. Johansen decided the hospital that saved Emmerson’s life was a worthy cause.
“I was just totally blown away. It was so nice of them,” Pratt said.
Having written about the A’s as a beat writer and covering the team for his news station, Pratt has had an up-close look at the complicated relationship between fans and organization. A’s fans, while often small in numbers, are known for being passionate, resilient and loyal, even while the organization rarely, if ever, pays players to stick around long enough to become expensive before getting traded.
That, on top of the stadium issue, is a leading cause for the A’s averaging just 8,767 fans per game last season, the second fewest in the majors ahead of only the Miami Marlins (7,933). And it would hardly be a surprise if Oakland was near the bottom again after dealing Chapman and Olsen, two stars in their primes that helped the A’s reach the playoffs three straight seasons from 2018 to 2020.
“People like Bryan and the Last Dive Bar guys, and the people you see in right field and left field, those people are super committed to the team,” Pratt said. “They do all kinds of amazing things to support the team and find charity endeavors. A lot of the Last Dive Bar stuff started by just donating money to the A’s Community Fund. But obviously (the state of the organization) stings and hurts them. I don’t know that they’re ready to just turn their back on the team completely.
“If they were to leave (for Las Vegas), that would probably be a whole other story though.”
The A’s packing up and moving to Las Vegas, or anywhere else, if they can’t build a ballpark in Oakland would break the hearts of thousands of fans, including Roberts and Johansen. Their work to help others started with the sense of community that going to A’s games has given them. It’s what makes baseball unique and is an example why Fisher should do all he can to make sure the team stays in Oakland.
“It’s built off a passion for our team,” Johansen said. “Not our owner, but our team.”
This story was originally published March 27, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
