Despite a tumultuous history with past teams and a failed attempt to charm the Angels away from Anaheim, Long Beach will once again pitch the idea of a professional baseball team in the city.
The Long Beach City Council on Tuesday will vote on whether to study how feasible it would be to host a pro team — dubbed the Long Beach Baseball Club, for now — at the 3,200-seat Blair Field, home of Cal State Long Beach’s baseball team. Under the plan, the two teams would share the field as early as LBBC’s 2026 season, which starts in May.
The professional team would be the 13th team 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.
Ena Patel, head of soccer operations at Angel City Football Club, would be the president of the club, Freedman said, adding that the ownership group will include people born and raised in Long Beach.
Discussions to bring a team to the city began last year, Freedman said, based on the success of his team in Oakland.
“Once we recognized what was working in Oakland could probably work elsewhere, Long Beach was the very tippy top of the list,” he said. “Long Beach actually is the largest city, to our knowledge, the largest city in the country that doesn’t have its own pro baseball team.”
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.
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.
This wouldn’t be the first time Long Beach has had its own baseball team.
The city’s last venture into minor league baseball, the Long Beach Armada, lasted only four seasons after the city pulled the permits of the team and league in 2009 to lease Blair Field exclusively to Cal State Long Beach, according to a 2010 article in the Uptown Gazette.
Prior to the Armada, two other minor league teams played, with one ending its maiden season in 1996, having played under three names — Long Beach Barracuda, the Long Beach Franchise and Long Beach Riptide. The team’s players, according to an L.A. Times column, infamously wore practice uniforms borrowed from Cal State Long Beach after they were forced to drop the Barracuda logo.
The Long Beach Breakers played in 2001 and 2002, averaging 55,000 attendees a season and ending one season as champions and another in second place. Despite their success, the team relocated to Mission Viejo in Orange County.
And between 2014 and 2022, the city vied for the Anaheim Angels, meeting with the owners on several occasions and even floating a $1.1 billion waterfront ballpark built partly on the 13-acre “Elephant Lot” near the Convention Center. But the team stayed put.
Freedman said Long Beach remains bullish on the sport, with high schools and a college team that produce numerous pro draftees along with a college team that’s one of the best on the West Coast.
This would be a brand new team in a longstanding league — 86 years old — with momentum to capitalize on any disaffection with big-league baseball by offering a low-cost, small-town variety of the national pastime.
The league, one of four partner leagues to the MLB, is a Class C developmental league with a 96-game schedule from May to September. It has a dozen teams split into two divisions, with two other clubs fielded from California. Each team is limited to a roster of 25 active players, and no player on the active list has more than three years of prior professional baseball experience.
“Long Beach is a baseball town,” Freedman said, adding that the city’s Armada ball team was among the most attended in the now-defunct Golden Baseball League. “The league didn’t work. That’s not necessarily about Long Beach. That’s about the league.”
In a call Wednesday, Long Beach Mayor Rex Richardson said he welcomed the idea and was confident that Blair Field could juggle the limelight of two teams.
“The discussions have been had, now it’s time to make it official that we’re looking into this,” Richardson said.
A CSULB spokesperson said Thursday the university welcomes “conversations with the city and others about additional uses that complement our longstanding Dirtbag baseball program at the stadium.”