With the A’s leaving Oakland, the Pioneer League B’s want fan investment in Bay Area baseball
Paul Freedman, a 45-year-old serial entrepreneur who has founded and sold five educational technology companies, decided last June he wanted a new type of venture: a baseball team.
When MLB’s A’s announced last year they planned to leave Oakland, California, for Las Vegas, Freedman was despondent. Freedman, born in neighboring Palo Alto, moved to Oakland when he was 15 after spending much of his early schooling in Chicago. Arriving as a new student during high school, Freedman had some initial trouble making friends, so he leaned on A’s games — particularly those on the Oakland Coliseum’s $2 Wednesdays — as a common activity to socialize with classmates.
“It helped me feel welcome,” Freedman said in an interview with CNBC. “Right field at the Coliseum made me feel part of a community again.”
Freedman has lived in Oakland for the past 30 years and in that time has witnessed one professional sports team after another depart the city. The NBA’s Golden State Warriors ditched what was then Oakland’s Oracle Arena in 2019. The NFL’s Raiders moved from Oakland to Las Vegas in 2020. And after this season, MLB’s Oakland A’s will pack up and move to Sacramento before eventually settling in Las Vegas in 2028.
Feeling discouraged for his city, Freedman sent a text last June to Bryan Carmel, a friend from those high school-era A’s games, with a provocative preamble: “I have a crazy idea.”
Freedman proceeded to brainstorm ways to keep baseball in Oakland. That gave birth to the Oakland Ballers, or the B’s — the Pioneer League team that debuted earlier this year, co-founded by Freedman and Carmel. The team, just getting off the ground with initial seed funding, faces an uphill battle to strike a successful business model in Oakland — a city with daunting crime challenges and nearly abandoned by professional sports.