How to Start a Professional Sports Team, Win Games, and Save the Town
August 14, 2024 at 03:47AMAs has been reported ad nauseam, Oakland has been hemorrhaging its major-league sports franchises. The Warriors moved across the bay to San Francisco; the Raiders relocated to Las Vegas; the A’s, after this season, to Sacramento, and then ultimately to join the Raiders in Vegas. Yet, city residents have responded by embracing community-minded teams like soccer outfit Roots FC—and two Oakland natives had a dream to do the same with baseball. This is the very long, very charming story of how the Oakland Ballers went from idea to Opening Day in less than a year.
They came, first, as volunteers—hundreds in the final 48 hours before first pitch, there to help Paul and Bryan and the many other staff members, contractors, vendors, and city employees now present pick up trash, assemble furniture for the clubhouses, power-wash the walkways, paint crosswalks on the streets that had been fully repaved only the day before. Then, on Opening Day, they came as fans, this time by the thousands, a sold-out crowd of 4,200 clad in forest-green Ballers gear.
It was surreal arriving at Raimondi Park that afternoon to find so many people assembled there, milling about the freshly paved roads, strolling past street vendors frying vegetables and selling wares, pregaming in the gated dirt lots that Paul and Bryan had recently cleared of toxic soil. Fans were making signs on the hoods of their cars and drinking beer; dads and sons were playing catch. The airspace was charged with a festival mix of mariachi music and Mac Dre. It felt a bit as if fans had lopped off a wedge of what I’d loved most about baseball at the Coliseum and transplanted it 8 miles west, like pirates.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/08/13/how-to-start-a-professional-sports-team-win-games-and-save-the-town/
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