That's your dream, to play professional baseball. When you get the opportunity like that, getting drafted - especially by Oakland, a California team, pretty close to home - it was tempting. At the time, I just didn't think I was ready or mature enough mentally or physically to start pro ball.
There should be no real difficulty in condemning Nazis, white supremacists, and the Ku Klux Klan. They are, for God's sake, Nazis and white supremacists. This should not require moral courage. This is obvious. This is the moral equivalent of the text you type to prove you're not a robot.
I grew up in Ohio. I was born in a suburb of Oakland, but I grew up in Ohio.
I think a lot of games in Oakland were just time being wasted, for a lack of a better phrase. I felt like I would play in some games that were four quarters, just like every other game, but it didn't feel like I was doing anything. It just felt like I was out there.
I wasn't really happy in Oakland or anything like that.
Some people have compared the Klan images to ecclesiastical figures.
I even remember at the age of five watching a documentary on the Ku Klux Klan that was quite terrifying because it was men in white sheets who looked like ghosts to me.
Usually on Sundays, I won't cook because I'll have dinner at my mom's. She's the provost of Mills College in Oakland and lives on campus. It's a very beautiful school in a very bad part of town.
I love San Francisco so much. I call it the Emerald City and have been coming here since 1992. I have a few old friends that live here, and my aunt and uncle live in Oakland. I think it's a magical city - it's big, sexy and very 'cosmo' with a small-town feel.
The Klan had used fear, intimidation and murder to brutally oppress over African-Americans who sought justice and equality and it sought to respond to the young workers of the civil rights movement in Mississippi in the same way.
