Getty Images/Ringer illustration After the A's announced they were leaving Oakland, a pair of lifelong fans set out to do something audacious: start a beloved pro baseball team of their own. Remarkably, they pulled it off. Now the Oakland Ballers need to survive. 1. In 1972, the Portland Beavers, Oregon's minor league baseball team of 69 years, relocated to Spokane. Fans grieved, but they assumed nothing could be done. Depressed sportswriters declared baseball dead in Portland. Then a swashbuckling former television actor decided to resuscitate it. His name was Bing Russell. He'd achieved semi-fame in the 1960s playing Deputy Clem Foster on a show called Bonanza. Before that, he'd spent the 1948-49 baseball seasons playing pro ball with the Carrollton Hornets, of the Class D Georgia-Alabama League. The Hornets were an independent outfit, meaning they were not affiliated with a major league club, as most teams in baseball's lower castes were in 1948—and as all would be by 1972. But independent baseball had once flourished in America, and Bing thought it could again. In Portland, he sought to prove it. He paid $500 for an expansion spot in the Class A Northwest League, relocated...