How to Start a Professional Sports Team, Win Games, and Save the Town
New essay out in The Ringer
Hi all,
I’ve written A LOT over the last few years about the loss of major league baseball in Oakland and about how brutal it’s been on the city and fans. A year ago, however, two guys I didn’t know, Paul Freedman and Bryan Carmel, reached out to me with a different kind of story: they wanted to build Oakland a pro baseball team of its own. They didn’t have any experience in sports. But they were heartbroken former A’s fans themselves, and they were totally committed. They asked me if I wanted to tag along for the journey. I could write about it, if there ended up being something there.
I was skeptical, at first. The team they wanted to build would end up playing in the Pioneer League, an independent minor league representing a major step down, in terms of pedigree and scale, from the type of ball Oakland fans were used to. What’s more, Paul and Bryan were set on debuting the Ballers in the summer of 2024. That meant they needed to build a business, build a baseball organization, assemble and prepare a team, and construct a stadium—as well as convince the world’s most disillusioned sports market to be open to the magic of minor minor league baseball—roughly in a span of 9 months. “It's never been done before,” Mike Shapiro, the president of the Pioneer League, told me. “They came to me and said, ‘We're going to put a Pioneer League team in Oakland, the 10th largest market in the United States, a city that has had to live through heartbreak, and we're going to build our own ballpark.’ Anybody looking at that on paper would have gone, ‘Are you guys out of your mind?’”
Before it was over, Paul and Bryan would cede that maybe they had been. As Paul, sleep deprived and sunburnt, confided to me one afternoon in May, amid the clank and whir of stadium construction that he was not certain would be complete before Opening Day, “We had no idea what we were getting ourselves into.”
In June, the Oakland Ballers debuted before a sold-out crowd in a privately funded ballpark in West Oakland. Today, they’re competing for a Pioneer League playoff spot. Ballers merch is everywhere. Like the Roots before them, they’re legitimizing a new model for what pro sports teams can and perhaps should do and be about in America. They’re also, I think, evincing what exactly about pro sports ultimately matters to fans. At the end of the day, it’s less about prestige and scale than about representation and presence.
I loved writing this story. It also almost broke me. It’s a long read, encompassing more than a year of reporting, but I’m excited to finally be sharing it with the world. I’m grateful to anyone who spends some time with it, and to Bryan and Paul for letting me tell it. Hope it’s good. If you live in the Bay Area, make sure to go check out a game. Their next home stand starts tonight. Go Ballers.
Dan