Oakland-area fans start Ballers, an independent baseball team - ESPN

If the Oakland A's leave for Las Vegas, the East Bay will still have a baseball team to root for.

The Oakland B's.

A consortium of dozens of Oakland-area fans, led by a pair of high school friends, banded together to start the Oakland Ballers — also known as the B's — who plan to play in the independent Pioneer League starting this summer wearing the same green and gold as the A's.

The team's co-founders, Paul Freedman and Bryan Carmel, told ESPN they've hired former Seattle Mariners manager Don Wakamatsu, who went to high school in nearby Hayward, California, as executive vice president of baseball operations. Micah Franklin, a former St. Louis outfielder who is from San Francisco and has coached in the minor leagues, will manage the team.

The plans for the B's came together, Freedman said, after the A's — who have played in Oakland since 1968 — announced their move to Las Vegas. The A's will play at Oakland Coliseum, their dilapidated home, for the 2024 season, but plans beyond that are unclear until their new stadium in Las Vegas opens for the 2028 season.

Freedman and Carmel didn't want to wait for the A's to leave for the East Bay to know it would have professional baseball. During discussions to create the team, they made it clear they wanted to start playing in 2024.

«We just felt like our hearts had been ripped from our chests, like all East Bay sports fans,» Carmel said. «Oakland is a city that has seen the Raiders leave town, the Warriors move across town. There was a lot of chatter that maybe Oakland isn't a pro sports town. We reject that completely.»

The ownership group has raised $2 million, Freedman said, to help fund operations and expand the seating at the stadium of Laney College, an Oakland junior