With the announcement of a new baseball team coming to Oakland next spring, the Oakland Ballers have much to do before they step up to bat next year, including crowdsourcing, outfitting Laney’s College Baseball Field and building a roster.
The Oakland Ballers, an expansion independent club in the Pioneer League, represent a community-led effort to keep baseball rooted in Oakland after the Oakland A’s all but guaranteed their move to Las Vegas earlier this year.
Co-founders Bryan Carmel and Paul Freedman have been focused on getting a management team together and are now looking at outfitting Laney’s baseball stadium with more seats.
“Laney stadium does not have that many seats at the moment, maybe a couple hundred. We have plans in motion [for] much more capacity in the matter of a thousand,” Carmel said.
The Oakland Ballers, nicknamed the Oakland B’s, are backed by 50 local investors, with $2 million in funding behind them, and founders say they will begin crowdsourcing early in the new year.
