Bay Ball presents the complex history of the San Francisco Bay Area’s two Major League Baseball teams, from their arrival in the 1950s and 1960s through the 2020s, framed by a historical overview of the Bay Area itself during the same period. For nearly sixty years, the Giants and A’s existed in an uneasy peace as Bay Area neighbors. The Giants relocated from New York in 1958, while the A’s arrived a decade later from Kansas City. Almost immediately the teams clashed over territorial rights, notably in the South Bay, which the Giants claimed as theirs, thus squeezing the A’s out of future stadium sites and keeping them in the Oakland Coliseum.
Steven Treder covers the interests driving San Francisco and Oakland to attract and maintain Major League status, the complications of stadium building, the evolution of professional baseball ownership, Silicon Valley’s big tech resurgence, and the struggles and triumphs of both teams on the field. While baseball is often seen as a refuge from daily life, the story of the Giants and the A’s shows how their histories were very much tied to the real world of politics and culture and how it profoundly affected both teams while they coexisted for more than fifty years.