Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong Urges A’s to Stay in Oakland

The team’s fans got a glimmer of hope on their boulevard of broken dreams.
Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong Urges A’s to Stay in Oakland
Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong Urges A’s to Stay in Oakland /
In this story:

They are both unlikely Northern California success stories—one a nomadic baseball team turned world champion four times over, one a hardscrabble punk band turned Rock & Roll Hall of Fame act.

Given their shared underdog origins, it only makes sense that Green Day would oppose the Athletics' expected departure for Las Vegas. In attendance as Oakland fans staged a “reverse boycott” at Oakland Coliseum on Tuesday night, frontman Billie Joe Armstrong made his feelings on the subject abundantly clear.

“Oakland forever. Vegas never. #selltheteam,” Armstrong wrote on his Instagram story, with a sea of Athletics fans as a backdrop.

In front of Oakland’s largest home crowd of the season — 27,759 in all—the Athletics defeated the Rays, 2-1, as fans chanted “sell the team” throughout the contest.

Armstrong was born in 1972 in Oakland, and Green Day’s origins are in the East Bay region of the Bay Area.

On Wednesday, the Nevada Assembly formally passed a bill to provide public funding for a new Athletics stadium on the Las Vegas Strip.


Published
Patrick Andres
PATRICK ANDRES

Patrick Andres is a staff writer on the Breaking and Trending News team at Sports Illustrated. He joined SI in December 2022, having worked for The Blade, Athlon Sports, Fear the Sword and Diamond Digest. Andres has covered everything from zero-attendance Big Ten basketball to a seven-overtime college football game. He is a graduate of Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism with a double major in history .