SAN LEANDRO — It happens every spring here in San Leandro. Young baseball players from the Bay Area and beyond with their dads, moms or grandparents make their way to West Coast Sporting Goods, a mecca of baseball equipment for nearly three quarters of a century.
Once here, they quickly learn the place isn’t what it seemed at first glance.
Unsightly and unequivocally unpretentious, this monstrosity is tucked in between modest homes in the middle of an unremarkable neighborhood on the grittier side of town.
To understand West Coast’s charm and allure for customers, you must step inside the massive, 40,000-square foot amalgamation of six buildings with its partition walls made of stucco, glass, metal siding or chain link fencing.
First-time visitors typically get overwhelmed by the vast amount of athletic equipment and apparel they encounter. The inexhaustible collection of bats and gloves fill up multiple rooms. At almost every turn there are shirts, helmets, hats and more layered nearly to the ceiling. Narrow aisles are jammed with overflowing racks and stacks of pants, shoes, jerseys and jackets.
Somehow, the warehouse provides just enough space for owner Jeff Fingerut’s gigantic inventory, which features a head-spinning stash of 10,000 bats and 7,000 gloves.
“I find too much stuff here,” said 39-year-old Gary Elizarrey, a Hayward father of three baseball-crazed boys, while chuckling recently as he piled up pants, gloves and belts next to the cash register. “I’ve been coming to West Coast since I was a kid. I could spend hours in here just milling around … but now my wife just left to go back to the car.”
The glut of equipment is part of Fingerut’s never-ending push to provide anything and everything for his customers. With mom-and-pop stores such as his getting squeezed into submission by Amazon’s online shopping dominance as well as big box sporting goods stores such as Dick’s and Big 5, Fingerut knows his livelihood depends on it.
“I grade myself not on a profit, I grade myself on whether you got everything you wanted. If you didn’t, I failed you,” said Fingerut, the third generation owner of the family business that began in 1948 as a shoe store in Oakland. “Dick’s may have 12 red belts and they may run out by Friday. I’ve got 800 red belts in bins. And if you come looking for a youth medium red undershirt, too, I’d better have one for you to buy at the right price.
“That’s why there’s six buildings here with more stuff than the whole Bay Area could use.”
In addition to its multiple generations of owners, many of West Coast’s customers have had shared family experiences here over the years. Take 24-year-old Derrick Reese of San Leandro. The former high school baseball player remembers fondly coming to West Coast as a 6-year-old with his father to get Little League gear.
His visit to the store on this day was tinged with irony as he dug through buckets of baseballs with his 6-year-old son, trying to find the right ones to practice with for the upcoming season.
“It’s been here forever. It’s a staple,” said Reese, whose guilty pleasure is West Coast’s below-market New Era baseball hats. “It doesn’t matter if you’re from the East Bay, South Bay … you’re coming here. Where else are you going to go? We’ve needed Jeff and he’s always been here.”
Clearly, West Coast is baseball to its core — from one of its three full-time employees being named “Abner” right down to the daily “squeeze play” executed by patrons trying to maximize the store’s virtually nonexistent parking spaces. But the place still has plenty of room for softball, basketball and football gear that keeps the warehouse teeming with would-be consumers.
Their arrival is a constant testament to the power of word-of-mouth marketing, especially considering West Coast doesn’t have a website. Even more unlikely, Fingerut’s store has become somewhat of an international go-to place for affordable baseball equipment. Coaches and benefactors from around the world caught wind of West Coast years ago at sporting goods trade shows.
West Coast now regularly outfits schools and teams from as far away as Japan, Australia, Guam and Mexico.
“I now do more business in Mexico, Europe, Australia and Japan than I do here,” said the 59-year-old Fingerut, now in his 44th year working at West Coast, the last 30 as its owner. “I now do more business in Mexico, Europe, Australia and Japan than I do here.”
Times haven’t always been this good for Fingerut or his bottom line, though. It’s taken two epic, grueling comebacks for the store to remain in business.
Having to essentially close its doors for nearly 18 months during the pandemic wasn’t even the worst of West Coast’s catastrophes. For sheer devastation, it was the awful 2007 fire that leveled West Coast’s old building across town that truly brought the business to its knees.
“I was numb. All the inventory was gone and I was in debt. I was bankrupt,” said Fingerut, who had to quickly gather himself and move into his current spot to begin rebuilding West Coast.
It didn’t take long for Fingerut to get jolted back into focus, though. He experienced his “It’s a Wonderful Life” awakening the next morning when one coach from Berkeley handed him a credit card, asking Fingerut to charge $5,000 for future gear to help with the immediate rebuild.
Soon there were others pitching in to save their baseball mecca.
There were league administrators showing up with checks on spec. Representatives from major suppliers such as Easton, Wilson, Rawlings and Mizuno shipped new inventory to Fingerut with assurances he could repay them down the road.
It was more than enough motivation to keep Fingerut going.
“Every day I came here to work saying to myself, ‘Tomorrow will be better,’ “ he said. “I was in debt and broke but I came in here every day with a happy attitude.”
The pain and debt are now gone but there are some aspects of the fire will never leave him.
A singed baseball was among the couple pieces of equipment that wasn’t completely ruined on that fateful August night in 2007. Fingerut still keeps that baseball encased in glass at the front entrance of his warehouse as a daily reminder of how quickly life can spin out of control.
“Life is traumatic. It’s the ebbing and flowing of good times and bad times. It’s how you handle those good and bad times that matters,” Fingerut said. “I came back with a smile and rebuilt my life.”
Any visit to his bustling San Leandro warehouse surely proves that.
