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.
Aaron Judge
It's very special to be the first winner in New Zealand. Phil Taylor has always said to me about trying to be the first player to win when we go to a new country and I'm over the moon to do that in Auckland.
Adrian Lewis
I grew up in Ohio. I was born in a suburb of Oakland, but I grew up in Ohio.
Alice Ripley
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.
Amari Cooper
I wasn't really happy in Oakland or anything like that.
Some people have compared the Klan images to ecclesiastical figures.
Andres Serrano
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.
Andrew Sean Greer
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.
Andy Cohen
At the time when I was in college, Oscar Grant had just lost his life in Oakland, Calif. He was an unarmed young black male who had a record. And at the time when his death was making headlines, more people were talking about what he had done in his past than the fact that he unjustly lost his life.
Angie Thomas
I dropped out of school, but I didn't drop out of life. I would leave the house each morning and go to the main branch of the Carnegie Library in Oakland where they had all the books in the world... I felt suddenly liberated from the constraints of a pre-arranged curriculum that labored through one book in eight months.
August Wilson
I guess Auckland just brings the best out of me.
Bianca Andreescu
I would definitely say the Oakland Raiders are the punk rock band of football.
Billie Joe Armstrong
I've had songs written during the Falklands war, and during the first Gulf war I got letters from soldiers saying they were listening to these songs, like Island of no return.
Billy Bragg
Oakland has always had artists attempting to define the immense beauty and ridiculousness around them.
Boots Riley
I was born in Chicago. I moved to Detroit until I was six and moved to Oakland at that point. And then we had a couple years in Stockton and Pasadena. And by the time I was 13, I was back in Oakland.
I've been diving for about 30 years, and I can honestly say that I've had some amazing encounters with sharks, squids, and other whales. But the encounter with the right whales in the Auckland Islands was probably the best thing I've ever done. It was just that amazing.
Brian Skerry
I moved to L.A., and I lived in the Oakland Apartments, which is this notorious hub for actor children and their stage moms. For the first few years that I lived there, Hilary Duff and Frankie Muniz frequented the apartments. I was much younger than them at the time.
Britt Robertson
On our way to the Super Bowl XV Championship, the Oakland Raiders played a frigid 1981 AFC playoff game in Cleveland, in which the temperatures plunged to -35 degrees. I remember looking up in the stands to see a dedicated Cleveland Brown fan celebrating topless.
Burgess Owens
If I've got a black joke, and I can't tell it in Oakland, then I shouldn't tell the joke anywhere else.
Carlos Mencia
I live in Brooklyn, New York, and hail from the 'East Bay,' Oakland, CA.
Cary Fukunaga
Every station I was at, I never said goodbye - when I was in Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Oakland, and L.A. I don't know why.
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.
As I spread my wings in politics, I discovered many Thatcher voters down south who were the same kind of people who loathed her in Scotland. They were puzzled by the Scots' antipathy, given the Falklands war and the strong militaristic history of the Highlands and elsewhere.
Sonny and another Hells Angel who was at the meeting thought they were beyond a little patch so they headed down to a local tattoo shop in Oakland and were the first to get the famous One Percent tattoos.
I have a good time doing 'Give Me Back My Man.' Keith Strickland can really fly on the guitar.
In high school, I worked at The Video Room in Oakland, California. It had the largest selection of laser discs in the Bay Area. One guy owned all of them.
I'm from Oakland and San Francisco, so I feel like the Pacific Northwest starts there and goes north - so, it's home to me.
Now that Sacramento is building an arena downtown, they're the only one not in an urban core. The only one. It's really not good business. It's nothing against Auburn Hills, Oakland County or L. Brooks Patterson. An arena in the middle of a field is not an ideal thing.
My son and I discovered Parkland Walk with the Beavers, a gem of a trail from Highgate to Finsbury Park in north London.
I never set out to convert anyone in the Klan. I just set out to get an answer to my question: 'How can you hate me when you don't even know me.'
I knew as much about the Klan, if not more than many of the Klan people that I interviewed. When they see that you know about their organization, their belief system, they respect you.
I have a former Baltimore City police officer's uniform and his robe and hood. He was the grand dragon, which means state leader. His day job, what paid his bills, he was a Baltimore City police officer, not an undercover officer in the Klan gathering intelligence, but a bona fide Klansmen on the Baltimore City police force.
I decided to go around the country and sit down with Klan leaders and Klan members to find out: How can you hate me when you don't even know me?
A lot of the media says, 'oh, black musician converts X-number of Klansmen.' I never converted one. But over 200 have left that, the white supremacy movements, because I have been the impetus for that.
I have just about every book written on the Klan and I've read them all.
A Klan member is not stamped from a standard cookie cutter. They come from all walks of life and various education levels and environmental situations which have led to their decision to join the Klan. The one common denominator that all share is lack of exposure to others who may not look like them or believe as they do.
In most of my encounters with Klan members, we would discuss reasons for why they were members in the first place.
I had to keep myself in check. Like, 'Whoa, whoa, whoa.' I'd never sat in a room, five feet away from a Klansman putting on his damn robe. That's what freaked me out a little bit. But I wanted to see a Klansman.
It doesn't sound rational for a Klansman to sit down to dinner with a black man. What you're overlooking is, to be racist is to be irrational. So, they are already irrational, and irrational people do irrational things. That's why a Klansman will sit down with me.
I've been sort of gentrification-obsessed. Right before I left Oakland in 2012, I was feeling it. Now I go back sporadically, and the change is drastic.
Neither of my parents live in Oakland anymore. They both got priced out.
It's hard to find someone who did as many drugs for as long and in such dangerous combinations as Nic - spending years going to Oakland and finding abandoned warehouses, getting beaten up, getting threatened by a guy with a crossbow. By all accounts, he shouldn't have made it, but he did.
I grew up in Nashville in a white suburb. We lived next to a Klan member. We didn't see hoods, but my dad knew that guy was a Grand Dragon.
I remember one summer I played, like, with the granddaughter of this known Klan member. Like, all summer we caught cicadas. And we had grown close, and so it was, like, time for her birthday party and I said 'Oh, like, what time do I come for your party?' And she's like 'Oh, no, you can't come to my house 'cause my parents don't like black people.'
I wasn't absolutely too sure where the Falklands was, and I didn't want to make a bloody fool of myself.
Raider Klan was crazy because we all had our own personalities and our own little worlds when it came down to this music. It was the first step to creating your own weird little universe.
The city of Oakland, since I got here, has been like my second family. They've taken me in and had my back through the hard times and they've celebrated with me through the good times. And so, I love Oakland.
My ultimate dream is for the Irvine Ranch to be known and celebrated as much for the outstanding communities we've planned and built as it is for what is not developed. The beneficiary being the 50,000 acres of undeveloped land that is now permanently preserved and conserved as Open Space and parklands.
My two primary areas of focus have been open-space conservation and education, and I expect those to remain my priorities in the future. The Irvine open space and parklands provide serenity and balance to our unique Orange County lifestyle.
Fantasy sports went a long way toward developing the sabermetrics formulas used not only by oddsmakers but general managers in hiring players. So the amateur fantasists ended up creating some of the algorithms that Oakland GM Billy Bean's statisticians used to win games with less salary money available for star players.
