Welcome to Paradise? Billie Joe Armstrong Buys Stake in Minor League Baseball Team (Exclusive)

Over a 35-year musical career, Billie Joe Armstrong has often walked the empty street, but has he ever run the loaded bases?

The Green Day icon is joining the ownership group of the Oakland Ballers, the new (and as of this coming season) only professional baseball team in Northern California’s East Bay. Armstrong and legendary Oakland rapper Too $hort are climbing aboard the independent Pioneer League team ahead of the 2025 campaign, giving a celebrity boost to a club that in its first season already attracted plenty of grassroots interest.

“This is all about bringing families to a ball game,” Armstrong said in an email to The Hollywood Reporter. “After the A’s left, the town was heartbroken. The Ballers are going to bring good vibes back to Oakland and the broader East Bay.”

Playing in newly constructed Raimondi Park, the team was an object of local and media fascination in its debut season as a salve to the open wound of the A’s planned departure. Baller devotees regularly packed the 4,000-seat park — volunteers even showed up to get the venue built — as the club attracted attention for its unusual initiative to let fans buy a share of the team and occupy a seat on its board.

The privately owned club — it was founded by former head of comedy at Fusion Bryan Carmel and his Oakland boyhood friend and edtech entrepreneur Paul Freedman, with the help of outside investors — offered fans a chance to join a $1.2 million financing round last year. Some 2,200 of them signed up. A round targeting $2 million has been opened for this year.

The pair’s goal is to give Oakland residents a spiritual stake in the players they root for — “to break down the wall between teams and fan bases,” Carmel says — after years of being tuned out by the area’s mogul owners. In addition to the A’s, the Raiders recently decamped for Las Vegas and the Warriors moved across the bay to San Francisco.

Adding $hort and Armstrong, the founders say, fits that pattern.

“Oakland doesn’t want to be put in a box and these guys don’t want to be put in a box,” Carmel told THR.  “They live the values.”

$hort, the Oakland rapping pioneer who made his name with tracks like “Blow The Whistle” and “The Ghetto” (and also uncommonly collabed with both Biggie and Tupac), says he thinks the team represents the best of what his city has to offer.

“Oakland is the connection, it’s the diverse city of all walks of life and cultures. We respect each other’s originality, you can be you and with your people. It’s  ‘I fuck with you regardless.’”

He says he’s particularly enamored with the team’s nickname. “If I can’t brag on a big-league franchise I can brag on being a Baller.” (The “B” name was chosen, in part, as an ironic counter to the A’s.)  $hort says he worked as a vendor at Oakland Coliseum in high school, giving his ownership a full-circle feel. The size and dollar value of the new owners’ stakes were not disclosed.

Oakland baseball has traveled a ways since the nights when Tenace, Eck and the Man of Steal haunted the Coliseum. Don’t sleep on the Pioneer League’s history, though. Founded in 1939, the league has had as many classic games as it’s had weird team nicknames, and if you don’t believe that, just ask the infielders on the Idaho Falls Chukars or the bullpen of the Missoula Paddleheads. As a current “partner league” of MLB, no Pioneer team is formally affiliated with any big-league club, though already a number of Ballers players have signed with MLB organizations.

Celebrities buying into scruffy teams became something of a headline when Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds acquired the lower-tier Welsh football team in Wrexham and proceeded to bring some rizz to it; their moves of course also became the subject of the FX show Welcome to Wrexham.

But Carmel says the Ballers have a different idea in mind. “This isn’t a case of celebrities coming in to save the day. It’s a local team, and Billie Joe and Too $hort are just some better-known locals.” He says his relationship with Armstrong began when the singer and his wife happened to turn up to a game.

“I looked over and there they were, sitting in front of my parents,” Carmel says. “And then I looked again and they were at the merch stand and Billie Joe was buying a T-shirt. It was crazy because we were playing Green Day songs earlier — not because he was there but just because we’re an Oakland club so we play Green Day songs.”

Armstrong even stealthily spray-painted the team’s “Oakland B’s” moniker over the Oakland A’s logo at the Rogers Center in Toronto last year in an IG post that went viral.

The gesture comes with some cultural context. Minor-league sports have become popular as an antidote to the moneyed juggernaut of global franchises, which can seem disconnected from the intimacy that made so many of us fans in the first place. If rooting for a major-league team can feel like going to a really upmarket McDonalds, minor-league sports give that beloved local pizza joint.

The Ballers in particular are living up to their democratic billing, holding an open tryout last year that led to the signing of three players, including female trailblazer Kelsie Whitmore. Now the possibility of the new owners playing hometown-hero shows for fans at games is on the table.

Other celebrity affiliations could also be on tap for the Ballers — the city, after all, claims a slew of Hollywooders, like Ryan Coogler, Zendaya, Tom Hanks and MC Hammer.

For now, though, the focus is on the fans. The owners want to try to get as many of the city’s 430,000 residents to turn out — to see the “home team that Oakland deserves,” as Armstrong puts it. They’ll hear them crying loud, all the way across town.