On a warm Saturday afternoon in mid-October, before a group of community leaders, political officials, and former A’s diehards leaning forward intently on their elbows, Bryan Carmel and Paul Freedman called to order a “secret” meeting about the imperiled state of Oakland sports—and their audacious, multi-million dollar plan for saving a piece of it.
The audacity of the plan stemmed, in part, from the scale of the peril. Once, not all that long ago, Oakland sports were exemplary, respected, and reliably established. The East Bay was home to teams representing all four of the major American leagues. Three of those teams—the Raiders, Warriors, and Athletics—doubled as beloved civic institutions that changed the city for the better. The community spaces they supported, such as the Oakland Coliseum parking lot, which turned into a kind of goth outdoor church revival in the fall, and the Coliseum’s right field bleachers, which hosted raucous little family reunions all summer, served to bring the city together and transcended its divides as little else had. An expansive youth sports scene propped up and inspired by the pro teams, provided young Oaklanders—among them Curt Flood, Damian Lillard, and Marshawn Lynch—an outlet and a ladder. The scene, for its variegated utility, featured prominently in the story Oakland told the world about itself. To some, it was the story. Oakland, at its core, was a sports town.
In the late 2010s, however, Oakland’s major league teams started abandoning the city. First the Warriors left, in 2019, then the Raiders, in 2020. Finally, last April, John Fisher, billionaire owner of the Oakland Athletics, made official his intention to relocate. Like the Raiders, he wanted to move the A’s to Las Vegas. Earlier this month, Major League Baseball’s 29 other owners voted unanimously to approve Fisher’s relocation application. It now appears likely that the A’s will be leaving Oakland perhaps as early as 2025.
Oakland’s sports was never defined solely by its major league teams; the Roots and Soul, minor league soccer clubs, still play here and to great fanfare, after all. But those teams were, undeniably and for a long time, the most important aspect of it. Their abandonment portended an end of something. Specifically, the end of Oakland as a major league sports town.
Fans have been trying, confoundedly and with much consternation, to contend with that prospect ever since. Today, most find themselves depressed and unmoored, in a daze processing a diagnosis that, a decade ago, still felt unthinkable.
And yet, the fate of Oakland sports is not written in stone. Some still see great potential—not to mention opportunity—in its future.
Carmel and Freedman are two such people. And their plan for realizing that potential is in fact already underway. Ahead of the secret meeting they convened that afternoon in October, the two had already paid a million-dollar-plus expansion fee to join the independent Pioneer League—a historic professional minor league based out of the mountain west. They had secured $2 million in seed funding from several dozen Bay Area investors. They’d built out a staff. They’d spent months courting Oakland’s most influential cultural mainstays, like Mistah F.A.B., for their endorsement and support. They’d even designed a logo; they’d emblazoned it onto the shirts and hats that they handed out like battle armor, at the onset of the secret meeting, as attendees filed in.
Both 45, Carmel and Freedman became friends taking BART from Rockridge to the Coliseum, in high school. Those afternoons attuned them to the importance of pro sports in the context of this specific place—what A’s games, for example, truly meant for the people who attended them. As they saw it, what made Oakland sports most worthwhile was their capacity for connection and community-building. Freedman moved to Oakland from Chicago in 1992, at 14. He didn’t know anyone. For a while, he felt lonely and resentful. But the A’s and Warriors—and, more specifically, the shared languages, experiences, and meeting spaces they created—helped him make friends, like Carmel, who endeared him to the East Bay. They also, over time, as if through a kind of osmosis, made him feel more naturally connected to his new home. A sense of connection translated into a sense of belonging. Aside from a few years in college, he’s lived in Oakland ever since.
“I didn’t know what was happening,” Freedman, who is bearded and bald and speaks at a terrier-like pace about topics he’s passionate about, told me recently. “I just know how it felt. And it felt great being a fan. Games were accessible. Fans were passionate, even when the teams weren’t good. It was easy being impacted. Oakland sports became a big part of my identity.”
Carmel, who could be described as Freedman’s physical antonym—tall and bespectacled and possessed of a smile so wry it borders on furtive—told me that the bond that Oakland sports created between him and Paul has endured indefatigably into midlife. And it functions as a kind of proof of what East Bay sports are capable of—and why they’re worth fighting for.
“The real value of a sports franchise is the relationship it creates between fans and a community,” said Carmel. “It’s something that goes beyond numbers on a balance sheet.”
It also, Carmel and Freedman contend, provides essential context for Oakland’s sports misfortune. There’s a tendency among more casual observers of East Bay politics—including, notably, members of the national media—to dismiss what’s happened to Oakland sports with a kind of reflexive both-sides-ism, one that finds fault both with government bureaucracy and greedy businessmen. In this narrative, team owners wanted too much out of their negotiations with the city and city leaders weren’t willing to part with enough. There’s plenty of blame to go around, of course. But Carmel and Freedman take a simpler view.
“It comes down to the priority of the owners,” Carmel said. Team owners in the East Bay, preeminently John Fisher, prioritized profit over community, resulting in a fan-franchise relationship that was predicated perniciously on exploitation, extortion, and, ultimately, extraction. It has been painful seeing that relationship end. But, in Carmel and Freedman’s mind, it may have also had a hidden benefit, in that it illuminated for Oaklanders the path to their sports salvation.
This, Carmel and Freedman believe, resides in the elevation of homegrown teams whose owners embrace pro sports for its communal, humanistic potential.
Their plan for helping save Oakland sports—which they were discussing surreptitiously that afternoon in October, so as not to spoil the more official announcement they made this week, at a November 28 press conference at Laney College—is to provide for Oakland sports fans precisely such a team.
Specifically, a new professional baseball team, one that, unlike the A’s, will be run definitively “by Oakland, for Oakland, and that will never leave Oakland,” as Freedman put it at October’s secret meeting, his words followed by applause.
They’re calling it the Oakland Ballers.
‘A new social contract for sports in America’
Carmel and Freedman have been laying the groundwork for the Ballers, which they also refer to as the B’s, for months. They intend for the team to make its debut in May, 2024, at Laney College, which they’ve already contracted architects to help them add capacity and pizzazz to. Carmel sent me a virtual tour of the renderings several weeks ago. They depict an intimate but festive setting, adorned by food trucks and strung lights, picnic benches along the foul line, extended bleachers rising up wing-like behind home plate—and, plastered everywhere, the name of the city the Ballers proudly represent.
I accompanied Freedman on a tour of the Laney College baseball field as it currently stands not long after. The tour was led by John Beam, Laney College’s cowboyish head football coach and Athletic Director. He listened bemusedly as Freedman described what the Ballers want to turn the field into. The field right now is only slightly more regal than a high school field. Freedman and Carmel’s dreams for it constitute a metamorphosis.
Their off-field ambitions are similarly grand.
“I would like the Ballers to be a part of creating a new social contract for sports in America,” Freedman told me one afternoon in September, at the Athletic Club Oakland. It was the first time I’d met with him and Carmel. Freedman ordered fried pickles. I asked him what he meant.
“I love sports,” he said. “But I feel pretty disheartened about how sports as a business versus sports as a joy factory have run in opposite directions. They don’t need to. They can be aligned. It takes partnership. We want to demonstrate what that looks like.” Carmel, in a separate conversation, was even more intrepid. “We want the Ballers to be a beloved institution that delivers championship baseball, and that’s also a community pillar.”
A few obvious questions arise, in the cynical sportswriter’s mind, in response to such grandiloquence. Such as: is this just lip service? I’ve been reporting on the degeneration of Oakland sports for several years now, and I remember well how not a few of the city’s former team owners once launched marketing campaigns that hit these same notes. “Rooted in Oakland,” anyone?
Carmel and Freedman’s commitment to community partnership, however, became clearer that afternoon in October, during the secret meeting they convened downtown. Seated around the horseshoe-shaped conference table were, in truth, not just a few civic leaders and community representatives, but a veritable Voltron of Oakland politics, community, and sport. An abbreviated list of attendees includes Beam; Leigh Hansen, Mayor Sheng Thao’s chief of staff, whom the commissioner of Major League Baseball, Rob Manfred, had recently called a “Hatchet person,” for her defense of her boss’s integrity as a negotiating partner; Oakland City Council President Nikki Fortunato Bas; Steven Aldrich, chair of the Oakland Roots; BART director and civil rights organizer Lateefah Simon; a slew of community activists, coaches, teachers, and former athletes from the east and west ends of the city; and a tight-firsted triumvirate of diehard Oakland sports fans—Jorge Leon, Anson Canseras, and Hal Gordon, AKA Hal the Hot Dog Guy. Over the summer, Leon, Canseras, and Gordon had become key figures of the “Sell the Team” movement, the grassroots, fan-led effort to repel the peril bearing down on Oakland sports by forcibly refuting the lies that had been disseminated about it, and by challenging the norms and preconceptions that had given those lies purchase. Their keystone protest, June’s “reverse boycott” at the Coliseum, was recognized by the San Francisco Chronicle as “one of the great protest moments in the history of the Bay Area.”
Carmel and Freedman had courted each of these leaders over coffees, concept renderings, powerpoint presentations, and good old-fashioned persistence. “I think I know the color of all their cars,” Freedman told me, only half-joking. The pair had sought their endorsements, but also their partnership.
From Hansen to Bas to Hal the Hot Dog Guy, each had been involved to some extent in the fight for Oakland’s sports future, and by virtue of that experience, understood intimately that fight’s precarity and context—as well as what remains probably most needed out of a solution. Carmel and Freedman understood that that wisdom was a premium resource.
“We’ve been working since day one on finding the right stakeholders and the right brains to help us with this,” Carmel said. “This started with two guys and a crazy idea. Our success depends on listening and responding, knowing what we don’t know.”
That’s probably a wise mindset for the two to have, because about building a professional sports franchise there’s a lot Carmel and Freedman don’t know.
Freedman and Carmel first came up with their “crazy” idea for the Ballers—the name is a personal homage to a late friend—last June, after the reverse boycott, which they say impressed upon them how deserving of committed sports teams Oakland sports fans are. But neither have experience working in sports, let alone running pro sports teams. Before the Ballers, Carmel made his living as a filmmaker in Los Angeles. Freedman is a semi-retired serial entrepreneur in the education space.
Building a professional sports team that buds into a beloved community pillar in a community that’s lost precisely those kinds of pillars—and in painful, scarring fashion—would be a tall task for even the most seasoned sports entrepreneurs. For Carmel and Freedman, who are starting from scratch in more ways than one, it’s gargantuan.
What made them want to take it on? The answer is a mix, they say, of what they perceive as their undertaking’s innate civic importance, how enticing was the prospect of building something new and cool and durable in a community they love and respect, and their own professional availability, which made the project feasible. Carmel, who’s a member of the WGA, was on strike in June, when the idea for the Ballers started taking shape, and Freedman, who has started and sold several companies, had been looking around for his next big project, when he and Carmel started kicking the idea for the Ballers around.
“There wasn’t exactly one moment when we looked at each other and decided to go all-in” on starting a baseball team, Freedman told me. Rather, he and Carmel grew progressively more committed the longer the idea took up residence inside their heads. Eventually, they found themselves consumed by it. “We went from ‘this is an interesting idea,’ to ‘we’re doing this!’ very quickly. We’ve been obsessed with it ever since.”
Of course, there is also the economic opportunity inherent to owning a professional sports team—and in an established market within which you face minimal competition. Carmel and Freedman recognize this, but in our conversations, they always seemed to place it in what felt like appropriate context. Freedman and Carmel’s ability to realize the Ballers’ business potential depends, for several reasons, on their ability to earnestly meet the needs of their market. This isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme. If they deliver anything resembling what Oakland sports fans are used to, they’re probably dead in the water.
“We believe that Oakland needs to have pro sports,” Carmel said. “That necessity also meets a tremendous opportunity with the A’s deciding to leave Oakland for Las Vegas. There is an activated, engaged, organized, and impassioned baseball fan base here. We hope to give that fanbase a new team to root for and believe in. The fans here deserve that.”
One question for the Ballers now is whether anyone in the community will answer; perhaps a bigger one is what, reasonably, can be expected of the team, even if they do.
Can they deliver on their vision?
If they’re grand, Carmel and Freedman’s ambitions for the Ballers are also undeniably admirable.
Certainly a new sports team that doubles as a new community pillar is something most Oakland sports fans would like, just as a new social contract for sports teams is something Oakland could most certainly use. As Simon, the civil rights leader, put it to me recently, “The A’s and Raiders and Warriors, they provided opportunities for folks to come together. In a city without a Main Street, Oaklanders need that opportunity for community gathering. Oakland’s suffering from and pissed off about so many societal things, we need something to say ‘yes’ to collectively. A team that can provide that is something this city deserves.”
But what, exactly, can such a team reasonably be able to provide? The Pioneer League is an MLB Partner League, which means effectively that MLB scouts have free reign to plumb rosters for talent and to use clubs for their player development, but, importantly, Pioneer League teams have no official Major League affiliate to answer to, as do traditional minor league teams. It’s also a historic league that’s been in operation since 1939. But it is still very much a minor sports league. In terms of more typical standards of pedigree and might, it operates on a level several steps down from major league sports, and perhaps even a step or two down from the USL Championship, the professional minor league soccer league the Oakland Roots play in. The teams whose shoes the Ballers are hoping to fill sold tickets by the millions, captivated fans on an international scale, and delivered to Oakland precisely the major league prestige it had always sought, but had otherwise always failed to obtain. They also did big business; the A’s—one MLB team—drew an MLB-worst 832,342 fans, in 2023. The Pioneer League’s 10 teams combined drew only about 100,000 more.
Is that just too small of a platform? Carmel and Freedman don’t think so, but to prove they’re right, they’ll need to win the trust of the fans those teams used to unite.
This is challenge number one—and it doesn’t come without complication. The Oakland sports scene has not only been abandoned and dazed by its former team owners, but abused and diminished. Razed. Before committing officially to abandoning Oakland, John Fisher subjected sports fans here to two failed relocation attempts, persistent painful frugality—Fisher is worth $2.5 billion, yet refused over his tenure to offer even one of his beloved homegrown stars a market-rate contract—and, finally, the tortured negotiations over what became known as the Waterfront Ballpark Project, at Howard Terminal. When he announced publicly his interest in Las Vegas as a relocation destination, in 2021 (this was the birth of the infamous “parallel paths” development strategy), Fisher proceeded to go scorched-earth, sabotaging the A’s competitive prospects, leaving the Oakland Coliseum to rot, and, finally, raising ticket prices. Most fans felt alienated and betrayed by all this, and, indeed, many sportswriters have speculated that alienating fans was precisely the point all along: by depressing interest in the A’s, Fisher sought to call into question Oakland’s viability as a sports town.
In a way, he succeeded. Attendance at A’s games plummeted, disillusion and apathy spread, and the Oakland sports scene—once the envy of the sports world—became a laughing stock, at least online.
Participation in the city’s once-prominent youth sports programs, such as the Oakland Babe Ruth little league, headquartered at Greenman Field, at the corner of 66th Avenue and Lucille Street, also suffered. Back in the halcyon days of Oakland sports, the Babe Ruth League was nearly as salient a source of pride as its pro teams were. James Harris, Jr., a native East Oaklander and former first-round pick for the A’s, out of Oakland Tech, who played in Oakland Babe Ruth as a boy, and who was present at the Ballers’ secret meeting in October, told me that Oakland Babe Ruth has long been “a community unto itself,” an “inner city safe place.”
“Once you were inside those gates at Greenman Field,” he told me, reflecting on his time in the program. “It was a whole new world.”
One key reason for the program’s reliable success was the robustness of the support it once received, primarily from the A’s. In 1981, Charlie Finley, the cranky and parsimonious owner of the A’s sold the team to Walter Haas, Jr., then the chairman of Levi Strauss. Haas invested in the A’s in ways Finley never did—by more generously and strategically promoting the team, assembling an innovative front office, renovating the Oakland Coliseum, and signing star players. The A’s—whose roster included several Oakland-born future Hall-of-fame players, in Rickey Henderson and Dave Stewart—flourished. But Haas also invested in the A’s relationship with Oakland, including by donating regularly to Oakland Babe Ruth. The A’s kept up the infrastructure at Greenman—replacing backstops, outfield fences, lights—gave players free tickets to games at the Coliseum, sent players to classrooms and practices in the East, and even helped cover airfare when Oakland Babe Ruth League teams traveled out of state to regional and national tournaments, which they did often, because the teams were so good.
Even after Haas had moved on, the mere presence of pro sports lent young Oaklanders important sources of inspiration.
“Even just hearing the games being played at the Coliseum—you can hear the games from Greenman—that gave you something to dream about,” said Harris.
Pablo DeProto, a teacher based out of East Oakland who has taken hundreds of students to A’s games over the years and who was present at Carmel and Freedman’s secret meeting, said this sort of thing “can change people’s lives.”
But now that support and inspiration is gone. Funding dried up. A cancerous sort of disillusionment has spread. Belief in the benevolent potential of pro sports has been superseded by distrust. After the MLB owners’ vote to let Fisher move the A’s to Las Vegas, my social media feeds were ablaze with former fans denouncing Major League Baseball, in part for the manipulative practices propping up the business model. At the Ballers’ secret meeting in October, people like Harris, DeProto, and Beam lamented how access to sports like baseball has effectively been cut off for kids growing up in the inner city. “Oakland once produced more baseball players per capita than damn near any other place,” Beam said. “That’s disappeared.”
Not everyone is so militant about all this. But even Oaklanders not ready to swear off pro sports altogether have at any rate armed themselves with a new kind of skepticism, an immune response to being burned one too many times. This has bled into conversations that Carmel and Freedman have held with the community members.
Simon told me that when she first met with Carmel and Freedman she had her guard up. “I thought that maybe they were just going to ask me for something.”
Leon, president of the Oakland 68s and one of the leaders of the summer’s fan-led reverse boycott, said the same. “I was very skeptical if I’m being honest. Oaklanders have heard this sort of pitch before. Were these guys going to walk the talk?”
Carmel and Freedman empathize with the concern; in fact, it guides their decision-making. “We know nothing is going to be handed to us,” Carmel told me. “We know we have to be authentic. We have to state our vision, we have to stay loyal to it.”
Loyalty, in this sense, is also among their primary means of differentiation.
“We want to go about this very differently than the A’s,” Freedman says. “The A’s said, ‘What can the city do to entice us to stay?’ We’re saying, ‘What can we do to prove that we can bring something to this community?’”
And to-date to that end? They’ve done quite a bit. Of course they’ve paid the Pioneer League’s expansion fee and raised money. But they’ve also collaborated with fans to create a “fans bill of rights,” which will inform the fan experience. They’ve cultivated relationships with cultural stewards, such as local rapper Mistah F.A.B., who spoke at the Ballers’ press conference on Monday. They’ve worked with Oaklandish to design and produce Ballers’ merchandise, as they’ve contracted the designer of the Warriors’ famed “Town” jerseys to design the Ballers’ uniforms.
They’ve also hired personnel with extensive major league experience—including Oakland native and former MLB player, scout, and head coach Don Wakamatsu, as executive vice president of baseball operations—and set into motion a far-reaching and well-funded player scouting and development effort. They’re planning a series of local tryouts to find and uplift local talent, a bit as the Roots have done with their Project 510 initiative. And they’ve started conversations with coaches across the city—from Laney’s Coach Beam to Oakland Babe Ruth’s Coach Q—“to start a dialogue about how to increase youth access and participation in the game,” in particular among inner city kids. DeProto, the teacher in East Oakland, has started working with Carmel and Freedman to connect the Ballers with East Oakland schools.
Their goal in all this, they say, is to “walk the talk”—to borrow the parlance of Leon—and to prove that they want to play in Oakland for the right reasons. “I’ve always believed you can do well by doing good,” Freedman told me at Athletic Club. “I think if we can do that, we’ll be successful.”
The further they’ve shared that message, the more others have started to agree. “Bryan and Paul want to provide opportunities and culture for folks in Oakland,” Simon told me. “Trust needs to be earned, but by the middle of our conversation, I got the sense their intentions were to bring us together. They understand and love this culture and know that folks need something to lift their spirits. I’m always going to stand behind people who want to do things to help bring Oakland together.”
“What won me over was the work they’d already put in by the time they came to me,” Leon said. “They walked the talk for sure.”
“I truly believe Bryan and Paul want to do something good for the community,” Harris, Jr., the former A’s first round pick, told me. “They just need to use their platform. Send players to camps. Send them to games. Use your platform for good. I think they will.”
“There’s a role for sports to play in creating a sense of belonging,” Bas, the city council president, said during the secret meeting. “The A’s were once a part of Oakland’s social fabric. The Ballers can be, too.”
Just about everyone that has spent time with Carmel and Freedman and that I spoke to for this article, in fact, seem bullish about the Ballers. It helps, of course, that there exists a model, in the Roots, for what the Ballers are trying to do.
Unsurprisingly, Carmel and Freedman view the Roots very much in this light. Through their resonant branding and overt commitment to community ownership—the organization just closed a $3m round of crowdfunding, becoming one of the only truly community-owned professional sports organizations in America—the Roots have overcome certain of the same challenges related perception, pedigree, and popularity facing the Ballers. Today, despite having missed the playoffs last season, and in spite of the fact that they had to play all their games in Hayward, the Roots remain a huge hit. The club’s crest—Oak tree rising like a clenched fist out of stained-glass soil—is spottable all over town. Recent investors and outspoken evangelists of the club include former Raiders running back Marshawn Lynch, “Hamilton” star Daveed Diggs, and Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong. As of the start of their crowdfunding round, the Roots valued themselves at $78 million.
Like the Roots, Carmel and Freedman plan on crowdfunding before the 2024 home opener, in part so as to consecrate their community-based ownership model. But that’s hardly where the replication ends.
“We’ve taken inspiration from the Roots and especially the ways they have partnered with local non profits and developed strong community partnerships,” Freedman told me. “That’s definitely a model that we plan to replicate.”
Something bigger than the big leagues
There remains, however, that more stubborn concern about the Ballers that even Roots-like success won’t redress. It’s perhaps the central question hanging over the enterprise. Even if the Ballers do what they set out to do, what’s their ceiling? What’s reasonable to expect small-scale, homegrown sports solutions to achieve? And what’s the risk of relying on such solutions exclusively, as a way of getting back what Oakland has lost? Oakland has for many years now been battling the charge that it is not a “major league” market. Indeed, that it isn’t was among the central claims of Fisher’s relocation campaign. Will attempting to replace the city’s relocated major league baseball team with an organization that operates at such a definitively minor league scale reinforce that perception?
Some have feared that it might.
“My willingness to be excited about an alternative baseball team was limited,” Hansen, Mayor Thao’s chief of staff, admitted to me. “My general inclination was skeptical. We’ve been facing this conception that Oakland is not a major league city, and the Ballers seemed like they might confirm that.”
Carmel and Freedman respect this concern, too—as well as the anxiety it stems from. “I know some people might think this is just going to be a mom-and-pop operation,” Carmel told me. And that there’s “legitimate concern about trying to replace a major league team” with a minor league one. But, ultimately, they aren’t letting it stop them. “Frankly,” Carmel told me, “we just don’t see it that way.”
For one thing, they view winning as a trump card—and they very much intend for the Ballers to win. In addition to Wakamatsu, they’ve hired former major leaguers Micah Franklin as manager and Ray King as pitching coach, as well as Tyler Peterson, former head of player scouting and development department for the Rocky Mountain Vibes, a fellow Pioneer League team, as assistant general manager of baseball operations. He’s presently busy poaching some of the Pioneer League’s best players, scouring the international market, and scheduling the upcoming local tryouts—and all with the explicit expectation that the Ballers will be Pioneer League contenders. “You have to earn fans’ interest,” Freedman said. “Winning is one way we’re going to do that.”
They also don’t see the Ballers as a means of replacing the A’s. Rather, they view their project as part of a broader, more nuanced reconstruction effort. And, to that end, they see the Pioneer League’s independence, which encourages a culture of experimentation, as an asset. One example: the Pioneer League doesn’t do extra innings. Instead, when games proceed past the 9th inning, they’re decided by a home run derby.
Carmel and Freedman believe this will bolster the Ballers’ ability to create fan experiences that are compelling and inclusive in their own right. And this they still see as the most important thing. The scale of the experience a sports team provides is immaterial. What matters is its potency, the strength of the bond it forges between fan and place.
“There are real opportunities here to make the games fun,” Freedman told me. “To actually be a ‘joy factory’ for fans. We think that’s everything. That’s why the games matter, and it’s why you center the fan experience: because fans put meaning into the games. They always have.”
Carmel and Freedman see joy and community as an upstart sports team’s most important product. They’re not alone.
“The Pioneer League doesn’t come in with the built-in hype machine of Major League Baseball,” Casey Pratt, Senior Sports Producer at ABC 7 Bay Area, told me recently. “But enjoying a sporting event is so much less about the actual team or game and so much more about the people you enjoy it with.” Compare the experience of attending A’s games recently with that of Roots games. The former, aside from the games fans themselves packed for protests, have felt haunted and cold, like company offices picked apart by private equity. The latter, conversely, and in spite of the comparatively intimate scale, crackle with evidence of Oakland’s most attractive and inclusive cultural traits. Roots games prove that if you go about it the right way, you can create connection with—and affection among—the fans you play for to such a consummating extent that it more than compensates for your league’s lack of relative pedigree, hype, or clout. The experience endears your organization to fans by all it clarifies about why we, as fans, go out and watch pro sports in the first place.
“Something about the experience of the A’s being taken away, and then attending Roots’ games with my family, and seeing how much fun my daughters have there,” Pratt said, “it opened my eyes to what really matters here. It’s all about the experience. The Ballers have an opportunity to capture that essence.”
Though the opportunity could be even bigger than that. If the Ballers find a fanbase, and ingratiate themselves into Oakland’s cultural fabric as earnestly as the Roots have—and if they serve in turn to elevate residents’ self perception and celebrate the singular experience of living in the East Bay, much as the Roots have, and as the A’s, Raiders, and Warriors all once did—it could go a long way towards affirming the legitimacy of a new model for sports-aided community building. This new model could function as a corrective to what-all mistakes Oakland once made, negotiating with team owners of old. It could invite the participation of more organizations similarly committed to serving Oakland in the manner of community partners.
“We decided to cater to billionaires,” said Beam, reflecting back on what mistakes Oakland made in previous negotiations with team owners in pro sports. Oakland may not be a major league sports market, technically, anymore. But it can still be a proud, vibrant, and even enviable sports town. “We lost our way. With the Roots and now with the Ballers, I hope we’re going back to putting our community first.”
This, ultimately, is the potential of the new social contract for pro sports that Freedman and Carmel rhapsodize about.
In Hansen’s view, if the Ballers can succeed in helping the city realize it, it would go a long way towards nullifying concerns about status and prestige altogether. Status means little compared to ownership, perception inconsequential next to pride.
“We’ve been talking a lot in our office about what our responsibility is in helping people process the loss of the A’s,” Hansen told me. “This is worth us investing in as a city.”
Fans seem to agree. After Carmel and Freedman announced their plans to debut the Ballers at Laney in 2024, my social media feeds—which for months had hosted little other than frustration and fury—sparked and fritzed with new excitement. Within hours of the initial announcement, fans were committing to ensuring the first Ballers game in 2024 draws more than the A’s home opener.
“Let’s pack the house for every B’s game,” wrote one former A’s fan account.
“Damn excited that tradition and history of baseball will continue in Oakland with the Oakland Ballers,” wrote Will Macneil, aka Right Field Will. “Can’t wait to get this going!”
“I think, in the end, folks are going to realize how similar the Ballers are going to be to the Roots,” Leon told me, looking ahead. And that will be enough because, after that, “they’ll fall in love.”
This, at any rate, is the hope. It’s Carmel and Freedman’s hope, of course. But it’s also, perhaps deep down, Oakland’s. No other American city understands more viscerally either the potential of pro sports to benefit a place or the pitfalls of granting team owners too much leverage over its leaders. Would it not be resonant, very Oakland, and not a little bit romantic if the way Oakland punched back against those owners was with the clenched fist of a new pro team—inspired by protest, guided by community—all its own?
It would, in fact, should it happen, call back to the early days of professional baseball, when independent professional teams—representing unions, factories, small towns and growing cities, and functioning not just as teams but as homegrown expressions of their communities’ sense of individuality and pride—dominated the American landscape. Oakland included. Forming such teams was a way of participating in the nascent American project. So, too, would forming such a team and seeing it flourish, now, double as a way of engaging in a very Oakland kind of protest. Two years ago, I interviewed a series of A’s fans for a story about the prospect of losing the A’s, and with them major league sports. Leon was among them. “Look,” he told me then. “People from here are resilient. It would be heartbreaking if the A’s left. But we’ll be OK. We’ll keep doing our thing no matter what.”
The potential of the Ballers is, in a sense, to make that resilience manifest—to prove how compelling and worthwhile in its own right “our thing” has always been, and will continue to be.
The Ballers see it this way, too. “I’ve always been drawn to stories that track paradigm shifts and challenge core beliefs,” Carmel told me. “The most Oakland thing to do is not to beg the A’s to stay. Instead, let’s do our own thing.”
Whether the Ballers can match the Roots’ success—be it economic, emblematic, or experiential in nature—return to Oakland a sports scene befitting the passion of its fans, or otherwise succeed in helping Oakland overcome its abandonments past all very much remains to be seen. Much work on Carmel and Fredman’s part remains to be done.
But they have plenty of people rooting for them; as Simon, the congressional candidate, put it to me, “I don’t even like sports. But I can’t wait for that first Ballers’ game.”
Correction: we misspelled Pablo DeProto’s name and have updated the story with the proper spelling.
