How to Start a Professional Sports Team, Win Games, and Save the Town

This article was originally published by Dan Moore for The Ringer. To read the full article, please visit: https://www.theringer.com/mlb/2024/8/13/24216407/oakland-ballers-pro-sports-startup-athletics

"We want to go about this very differently than the A's," Paul told me once. "If we're taking this from the community interest perspective, what can a bunch of people willing to work really hard and have access to networks and in some cases capital, what can we do to bring something that actually makes the most sense for the community?"

I was also curious—about what starting a professional sports team requires; about whether it's actually possible. This curiosity was a product, I thought at first, of too many hours spent playing "owner mode" on MVP Baseball 2005 or watching Moneyball one too many hundred times in college. But I've wondered lately whether it's something many of us think about, perhaps passing by an old stadium or glancing up at the owners' box during a game or sitting at the bar after a bonehead signing or bad loss. You wonder briefly what it'd be like when your friend flicks his eyes from the TV and suggests daringly over his pint: Fuck it, what if we just started our own team?

Well, what if? What would it take? Is it possible? Paul and Bryan were about to find out.

Oakland's been a sports town for about as long as it's been a town. "Our Hopes and Prides Win the 1912 Pennant," read the headline in the October 28, 1912, edition of the Oakland Tribune, after the Oakland Oaks won the Pacific Coast League championship for the first time. "It would be an understatement to say … the joy was unconfined," Tribune columnist Ray Haywood reported 36 years later, when the Oaks won their final PCL pennant. "The crowd began to fill the stands at 11 a.m. … The influx discommoded several people who, it was said, had slept in the right field boxes all night."

The enthusiasm stems from an original striving. Oakland boosters always dreamed of turning the city not just into a satellite of San Francisco, but its economic rival and cultural antipode. In its early sports teams—not just the Oaks, but the various independent, minor, and Negro league teams that played in the city throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, such as the Commuters and Larks—such dreams found expression. In the mid-20th century, when Oakland deindustrialized, lost its tax base, and rammed freeways down the middle of its most historic neighborhoods, the dream faded. Then the major league teams arrived—the "Just win, baby" Raiders and their demonic Black Hole; the "Swingin' A's" and their Mavericks-esque mustaches—and they brought back to Oakland glory and status. They created raucous community spaces and supported productive youth leagues. And through their magnetic, marauding swagger, they articulated all the coolest parts of the East Bay ethos. The East Bay was a place with a chip on its shoulder and a clenched fist on its chest. The same seemed true of its teams. Fans loved them for it.

Popular culture credits the Raiders of the 1970s with being the best example of this effective symbiosis, but in truth, the high-water mark of Oakland sports might have come with the A's dynasty of the late '80s and early '90s, when the Oakland Coliseum hosted the MLB All-Star Game and three World Series. This was the Oakland sports scene Paul inherited. Small, brainy, a little awkward, Paul moved to Oakland in 1992, at 14. The move was tough on him, and he was lonely. But he met Bryan—as well as his future best friend Bobby Winslow, a charming and athletic kid who lived close by—riding BART to A's games after school. They burned summers in the Oakland Coliseum bleachers, watching Rickey Henderson steal bases. (When they weren't at the Coliseum, they were playing pickup near Paul's house, Bobby usually throwing down.) For Paul, his affinity for the A's morphed into a sense of affiliation. He attended college in Chicago, but he came back after graduation, raising his family here, even headquartering a few of his companies in offices across the 880 from the Coliseum, off Oakport Street—in part so he could more easily get to games. "Being an A's fan was a big part of me starting to identify as an Oaklander," Paul told me at the bar last fall.

It was the threatening of that identity, 30 years later, that inspired the Ballers. Paul had been among the thousands of A's fans who'd fought back vigorously against A's owner John Fisher when he first angled to uproot the A's to Las Vegas in the early 2020s, and he was among the 30,000 who assembled in the Oakland Coliseum parking lot for a "reverse boycott" of Fisher's betrayal in 2023.

What Fisher sought to dispossess Oakland of, in Paul's mind, was far more than just a business or even a beloved team, but a cornerstone of the East Bay's self-conception, and its importance to Oakland felt well-evidenced by the reverse boycott. The boycott had been designed to prove that Oakland remained a vociferous sports town deserving of teams that loved it back. Paul left convinced and inspired. He texted Bryan, who was in L.A. (Bryan, a member of the WGA, was on strike.) "I have a crazy idea," Paul wrote. "I like crazy ideas," Bryan replied.

The first thing they decided on was the name. It came from Bobby. Back on the Oakland blacktops where Paul, Bryan, and Bobby had played pickup basketball, Bobby had made a bit of referring to himself, triumphantly, as "a baller." Bobby died unexpectedly at 22 due to a heart complication. Paul and Bryan had been thinking of him throughout the A's relocation attempt. Bobby had loved Oakland sports the most out of all of them; he was the reason Paul had become an A's fan. It only felt right, now, that Paul and Bryan's attempt to save baseball in Oakland included him. They imagined honoring Bobby with the name, but also by mentioning him at the Ballers' inaugural home opener, should their "crazy idea" advance that far.