About Oakball

First of all, my name is Richard Sloven and I am the creator and webmaster of Oakball.

On December 10, 2000, I decided that it would be a great idea if I started an A’s fan site. Within a few hours I had come up with the site name and a slogan (at the time it was “Ultimate A’s Fan Page”). By December 12, I had a site up and on the web at oakball.itgo.com.

The site featured an article about Jason Giambi’s contract talks and some links an EZBoard forum. For a few weeks, the site get very few visitors, and nobody went to the message board.

Within a month, the Official A’s site announced it was going to be taken over by MLB. I promoted the hell out of Oakball at the Official Forums, and everyone decided to give the site a chance. By opening day, Oakball had roughly 100 members.

In mid-August, EZBoard became too much of a hassle, and I decided to fork over some money for a real domain name and a server. I registered Oakball.net and setup brand new forums, Ad free.

In less than a year, Oakball has become the most active A’s website on the Internet. The forum members are colorful and are a very tight group. Look out for me on the forums under the name “slichard”.

And that is the history of Oakball to this date.