When Bryan Carmel closes his eyes, he can hear the sound of the drums beating, smell hot dogs on the grill and start to envision what the Oakland Ballers are going to look like when they play their first game at Raimondi Park on June 4.
“It has to feel Oakland,” the Ballers co-founder said. “To me, the basic idea is a block party.”
A block party at a baseball game, 48 nights each summer.
It’s not quite the vibe of the Savannah Bananas, the fun-loving, carnival-like group of ballplayers that travels the country like the Harlem Globetrotters. Those guys are performers first, ballplayers second.
Like the Bananas, the Ballers are an independent team, unaffiliated with Major League Baseball, and they hope to incorporate some of the Bananas’ silly spirit into what they’re doing. They also hope to maintain an identity as a professional baseball team in Oakland, capitalizing on the emptiness local baseball fans might be feeling when the A’s leave town for Sacramento at the end of this season.
“It feels like your heart is getting ripped from your chest,” Carmel said, contemplating the end of the A’s 56-year run at the Coliseum after this season. “That’s how it has felt to me.”
Carmel and Paul Freedman, who first met as students at Oakland’s College Preparatory School, started the Ballers last November with a dream: to make baseball in Oakland mean something again.
And they haven’t been shy about mocking the A’s. It’s right there in the name: They call themselves the B’s. They’re using a similar logo and have the same green and gold colors. The A’s used the slogan “Rooted in Oakland” for years before announcing they were moving to Las Vegas; the Ballers have already vowed to never leave town.
And while the Ballers’ $2 million in initial funding isn’t anything close to what’s needed to fund an MLB expansion team – no ownership group has publicly expressed interest in expanding in Oakland as yet–- it’s enough money to start a professional baseball team in the Pioneer League, a nearly century-old independent league whose teams were once affiliated with Major League Baseball but now serve primarily to provide testing grounds for potential MLB rule changes.
And to provide a home for players who have been overlooked.
“Every player, they’re trying to live a dream,” said Don Wakamatsu, the former Seattle Mariners manager who is the Baller’s general manager. “It’s been a tough road for these players, whether they didn’t get signed out of college, or they were released, and they were still trying to fill that dream. We want to be quasi dream-makers.”
They certainly aren’t in it for the money. Ballers players will make an estimated average monthly salary of only $2,000 during the season, which runs from May through September. They’ll also be given housing.
Why would Wakamatsu, the first Asian-American manager in MLB history and a well-respected big league coach, want to work for an upstart Pioneer League baseball team in Oakland?
“It has a lot to do with the A’s leaving,” Wakamatsu said.
Once a three-sport star at Hayward High School, Wakamatsu remembers going to his first A’s game as a 9-year-old and feeling like the A’s were giants in the sport.
“I have a lot of roots here, and I’d like to be able to pay some of that forward,” he said. “Can we find a kid out of Skyline High School or Hayward High and give them an opportunity to live the dream that I was able to live?”
To help him, Wakamatsu hired Micah Franklin as his first manager. Franklin is a San Francisco native, a former MLB scout and a coach who worked in the Nationals system. Ray King, a former big league pitching coach, will join his staff, along with J.T. Snow, the longtime San Francisco Giants first baseman who will operate as the bench coach.
The Ballers initially hoped to play at Laney College, which was something of a twist. It was less than seven years ago that the A’s announced plans to build a privately funded, $500-million stadium near the college, set to break ground in 2021 and open in 2023.
Of course, that never happened.
“It was done incorrectly,” said John Beam, Laney College athletic director, in a phone interview in January. “You need to shape the narrative. But it got shaped by other people. The faculty wasn’t open-minded. The whole community should’ve looked at how to make it happen.
“But you’re always cognizant of the feeling of multimillionaires pillaging the community in some way. I think that stops people from thinking about it. It might’ve been the best thing to happen.”
But in February, there was another twist. Talks between the B’s and Laney fell apart over the team’s request to build several thousand more seats to expand the current capacity of about 250 at the school’s scenic baseball field.
The Ballers found a home at Raimondi Park in West Oakland. There’s plenty of Oakland baseball history tied to the field. It’s where Frank Robinson, Curt Flood and many others got their starts.
The Ballers will make their debut May 21 in Kalispell, Montana, against the Glacier Range Riders. They’ll spend the first two weeks of the season on the road before the home opener on June 4 against the Yolo High Wheelers.
“As the Oakland Ballers, our mission has always been to revitalize Oakland’s ballparks,” Carmel said in a team release announcing the Ballers’ home field as well as a $1.6M revitalization effort for the park. “We are honored to be part of the next chapter of baseball at Raimondi Park and eagerly anticipate collaborating with the city and local residents to showcase the potential of our city.”
Carmel envisions Ballers games will be a nightly block party with a beer garden, food trucks and drums. And among the Ballers’ many goals is this: to be “hella Oakland.”
“Build it together with us,” Carmel said. “We make the canvas. Fans paint the picture.”