I was thinking the other day about my first time in Emeryville, not driving past the city but putting feet on the ground in it. The attraction was an Oakland Oaks ball game against the San Diego Padres in the summer of 1949, an encounter between two Pacific Coast League teams in the era before major league baseball came to the Bay Area. Two friends and I, all teenagers with no money to speak of, heard from an acquaintance that you could sneak into an Oaks game through a loose board along the 45th Street wall of the stadium, the wall along the first-base foul line. Off we went in a borrowed car from our homes in Concord to mysterious Emeryville, found the loose board, and made it into the stadium. (I still feel guilty about our modest larceny.) We had hoped to see Ralph “Pine Tar” Buxton pitch for the Oaks, famous (or infamous) for loading the ball with pine tar hidden in his mitt. The illegal stuff gave Buxton, a right-handed pitcher, a wicked “screwball” that broke back over the plate from outside on right-handed batters or in over the plate to lefties. To our disappointment, Buxton didn’t