About 13,000 hats purchased, 33 new tattoos inked on fans, four players sent to the major leagues, one playoff run and 100,000 fans streaming into the ballpark.
Those are the results Bryan Carmel, a co-founder of the Oakland Ballers, said came during the inaugural season of his Bay Area minor league team in its first season. It’s the same results Carmel and the rest of his ownership group hope to bring to Long Beach as early as next May.
“Once we realized this was something we could replicate, the first place we thought of was Long Beach,” Carmel said.
The Long Beach City Council voted unanimously Tuesday in favor of pursuing an agreement that would bring a minor league team, preliminarily named the Long Beach Baseball Club, to play its three-month spring season at Cal State Long Beach’s Blair Field on the edge of Recreation Park.
Negotiations among the city, the club and CSULB have already begun, touching on potential investments into the ballpark’s field and facility, as well as commitments that prioritize the schedule of the university’s baseball team and public access.
Blair Field’s amenities, central location to the city and its “potential to be a good complement to Long Beach State’s Program” were all factors that went into the decision, said Long Beach Mayor Rex Richardson.
Third District Councilmember Kristina Duggan, who represents the area around the park, said she has been in discussions with the university for the past several years about the field. Duggan has also met with the team’s ownership group to shape an agreement she says works with the university and the surrounding neighborhood.
“I’m so excited about the possibility of bringing a professional baseball team to Blair Field,” Duggan said. “They’re bringing new energy, new resources and entertainment to our community.”
With any deal, the group would help pay for improvements to the park, including the addition of a batter’s eye, padded walls and renovated visitors clubhouse, to meet league standards.
The city will also look at the added noise, traffic and any headaches a professional program could bring to the park and the surrounding neighborhood.
The team would be the 13th in the Pioneer Baseball League. Its ownership would include Paul Freedman, a co-founder of the Oakland Ballers, a team in the same league that was launched last year following the exit of the Oakland Athletics.
Investors pulled together about $10 million for Freedman’s Oakland team, staged at a pop-up ballpark around an existing Little League field in Raimondi Park.
The team would be started from scratch, Carmel said, far and apart from the three independent minor league teams that have come to the city in the past 30 years. The last team, the Long Beach Armada, folded in 2009 after its league disbanded.
Carmel said the team will be “specifically tailored” to the city, highlighting the blue-collar and homegrown parallels between Long Beach and Oakland.
Chase Darnell, a former MLB player of 12 years and a Long Beach local who runs youth baseball camps, said that once the CSULB Dirtbags’ season ends in May, the city has a lull period until the following spring.
“And there’s nothing for local families and kids in Long Beach to watch live,” Darnell said.