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Oakland Oaks Photo Gallery
Click on any image below to see photos in full size and to start Photo Gallery:

(Gallery contains portrait photos of Oakland Oaks players from the personal collection of Michael Tymn)

Today we welcome Michael Tymn with an interesting first-hand account as an Oakland Oaks fan in the 1940s. If there’s any topic we’ve overlooked here on Baseball History Comes Alive it’s the Pacific Coast League, and so Michael today sets the record straight. What’s really interesting is that Michael, now an octogenarian, is remembering stories from 75 years ago! As he relates,

“If, in 1948, some old geezer told me about games he saw in 1873, 75 years earlier, I would have thought of that as ancient history.  And now I’m the old geezer and the games of the 1940s are ancient.”

That’s OK, Mike. We’re just glad to have you with us! I think you’ll enjoy Michael’s remembrances, which I hope will be the first of many future essays. In the featured photo above, we see the three DiMaggio brothers, with Vince on the left, all alumns of the PCL. -GL

Remembering the Old Oakland Oaks

“Where have you gone, VINCE DiMaggio?”…  

While sorting through boxes of memorabilia recently, I came upon two scorebooks from games of the 1948 Oakland Oaks of the Pacific Coast League.  It dawned me on that this year makes 75 years since what was called the team of “nine old men” won the pennant under the now-legendary Casey Stengel. Time flies. If, in 1948, some old geezer told me about games he saw in 1873, 75 years earlier, I would have thought of that as ancient history.  And now I’m the old geezer and the games of the 1940s are ancient. However, I can’t help a little recollecting and reminiscing.  Moreover, remembering it provides something to talk about over coffee other than the weather, climate change, inflation, and dreadful politics.   

Growing up in Alameda, an island city of about 60,000 attached to Oakland by a tunnel and three bridges, in the San Francisco Bay, I was introduced to professional baseball in 1946, when I was nine, by a St. Joseph’s fourth-grade classmate, Pete Wegener, who often talked about the Oakland Oaks at a time when the major leagues had not expanded to the West Coast. Sometime that year, my Uncle Leroy took me to an Oaks game. The only memory I have of that game is of being surprised upon seeing a strike called when the batter didn’t swing at the ball.  In whatever lob-ball games I had played with Pete and other friends, the only strikes were swinging strikes.

I also recall Pete giving me a picture card of Wally Westlake, who played for the Oaks that year before heading off to the “bigs” in ’47. I don’t know what happened to the card, but it was among assorted items in a utility drawer throughout my school years.  I don’t think Westlake’s name had entered my conscious mind since his retirement from baseball in 1956 until just before beginning this essay. Curious as to what happened to him after baseball, I did an internet search and discovered that he lived to the ripe old age of 98 years, 301 days, departing in 2019. He must certainly have been the last of the Oaks from the 1940s.  So many of them departed at a relatively young age.

Encouraged by Sunbeam Bread baseball cards of the Oaks, I became a much more ardent fan during the 1947 season. The first three cards featured catcher Billy Raimondi, first-baseman Les Scarsella, and second-baseman Dario Lodigiani. I made sure to be at the L & M Market on Ninth Street at the right time every week to get the latest release. In those pre-television years, I began listening to the games on the radio, all night games on weekdays, as I recall. But, of course, homework came first.

Raimondi was one of the long-time Oaks. As I recall, he had some offers from big-league clubs, but he decided he couldn’t afford to move his family back east. He lived in Alameda and his two daughters attended St. Joseph’s, a few grades behind me.  During the off-season, he would pick up his daughters after school.  Pete and I would gaze in awe when we saw this “celebrity” ballplayer parked outside our school waiting for his daughters.   “Wow! It’s Billy Raimondi.”

The Oaks were also known as the Oakland Acorns at one time, but I think that name was a bit too “corny” for them and they gradually became the Oaks. I adopted Vince DiMaggio, the oldest brother of the more famous Joe DiMaggio and the Oaks best power hitter, as my hero during the ’47 seasons. As the oldest brother in my family, I recall wondering how it would be to have a younger brother – or two younger brothers in his case, including Dom DiMaggio – better and more famous than you are.  I felt bad for Vince.  Gene Bearden was my favorite pitcher during the ’47 season, but he left the Oaks the next year to have a 20-win season with the Cleveland Indians and help them win the ’48 World Series with a shutout victory over the Boston Braves.

While the PCL, which also included the San Francisco Seals, Los Angeles Angels, Hollywood Stars, San Diego Padres, Portland Beavers, Seattle Rainiers, and Sacramento Solons, was classified as “Triple A” baseball, not equivalent to the major leagues, there were many former major leaguers on the teams and a number of budding major league players just waiting to be called up. There were said to be quite a few PCLers of major-league quality, like Raimondi, who turned down major-league contracts because they didn’t want to uproot their families for a five-thousand-dollar salary, not much more than they could make in the PCL. It simply wasn’t worth the move.  The combination of former and future major leaguers along with those who rejected major league contracts provided something more than “minor league” baseball for the “Left Coast” before the Dodgers and Giants moved there in 1958.  Then again, many of those former major leaguers in the PCL might not have made it to the majors if not for World War II and the fact that many of the best major leaguers were serving the country for three years, thereby creating a need to fill major league rosters with players of questionable major-league ability.

Pete or one of my other friends and I would take the bus from Alameda over to downtown Oakland, where we would transfer to a streetcar to take us to the ballpark, which was actually in a small unincorporated town called Emeryville, between Oakland and Berkeley.  We took our autograph books and gathered up signatures near the dugouts before games. The Indians came once for an exhibition game during the off-season with the Oaks one year and I was quick to get the autographs of Bob Feller, Larry Doby, and Luke Easter.

As I also adopted the Brooklyn Dodgers as my favorite major league team in 1947, my father being from Brooklyn and my grandfather still living there, I was thrilled when Cookie Lavagetto joined the Oaks as their regular third-baseman, but I was mystified as to how a guy who was a World Series hero with the Dodgers, breaking up Bill Bevens’s no-hitter in the fourth game of the ’47 series, could be “demoted” the following year.  During the off-season, Lavagetto worked as a sales clerk at Maxwells Sporting Goods in downtown Oakland and I rushed over there to make a purchase from him. “Bought this from Cookie Lavagetto,” I boasted to Pete.

Besides Lavagetto, the Oaks had had at least 18 other former major leaguers on the ’48 team, including Scarsella, Lodigiani, Ernie Lombardi, Nick Etten, George “Catfish” Metkovich, Ray Hamrick, Maurice Van Robays, Merrill Combs, and Ralph Buxton.  There was one up-and-coming star, a scrapy second-baseman named Billy Martin, who would follow Stengel to the Yankees. Lombardi, a catcher, was ending a career that saw him win two National League batting championships and eventually be voted into the Hall of Fame. I recall hearing that he was pumping gas, cleaning windshields, and checking oil dip sticks at a service station – something that was routine in those days – not long after his retirement. How times have changed!  

Michael Tymn

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