For nearly a quarter century, Yeshayah Goldfarb approached each workday with a singular aim — moving the San Francisco Giants closer to a World Series title. In his 24 years as a member of the Giants’ front office, Goldfarb achieved his goal three times, while also helping to construct a team that won a franchise-record 107 games.
These days, Goldfarb’s work goals are a bit different. He still has championships on his mind, but as the first team president in the Oakland Ballers’ franchise history, his goals extend well beyond wins and losses. He is also working to advance the team’s efforts to help revitalize the city of Oakland and make the Ballers a sustainable business that has a lasting impact on the Bay Area sports community.
It may seem like an unusual career choice to go from being one of the top executives in an MLB front office to running an independent league team, but for Goldfarb, the Ballers and their mission are personal. The Berkeley, Calif., native grew up going to Oakland A’s games at the Coliseum. He played high school baseball in Berkeley and parlayed that into a spot on the UC-San Diego pitching staff before joining the Giants as a baseball operations intern out of college.
Over the next 24 years, Goldfarb worked in several areas of the Giants’ baseball operations department, eventually rising to vice president of baseball operations and later vice president of baseball resources and development. He gained a reputation around MLB as a key member of the Giants’ analytics and player development efforts. But although he loved his time with the Giants, he felt that after more than two decades in a baseball operations role, he was ready for a new challenge. He left the team before the 2025 season to explore new opportunities.
“I had a good relationship with (Giants president) Buster Posey and a good relationship with Zack Minasian, the GM, and so many people in baseball ops and on the business side, but I wanted to challenge myself and see what else was out there,” Goldfarb said.
Though Goldfarb didn’t immediately join the Ballers full-time — taking on his new position roughly a year after he left the Giants — he was already connected to the franchise before he made his career change. Bryan Carmel, one of the Ballers’ co-founders, is a childhood friend of his and, with the Giants’ permission, Goldfarb had been consulting for the team since it was founded in 2023. After leaving the Giants last January, Goldfarb was able to attend many Ballers games last season as they raced to the best record in Pioneer League history and won their first league title.
He came away convinced that baseball fans who haven’t been to see the Ballers will fall in love with the experience if they go to a game. Now he’s ready to sell the Bay Area on why they should make Oakland Ballers games a regular part of their recreation schedule.
“It’s not the same as going to a major-league game, but it can be as enjoyable and special. It’s just a slightly different experience,” he said, noting that the cost for a family of four to attend a Ballers game is roughly the same as a night out at the movies or one ticket to a major sporting event.
“That affordability is real, but then what you’re getting out of it is three-to-four hours of an entertaining experience that’s also in a community, and getting the energy from the rest of fans, and ideally creating some individual memories.”
Some of those memories come from interactions with the players, who are much more accessible to the fans at the indy ball level than they are in the big leagues. Though players come and go much more frequently in independent ball than they do in the major leagues, Goldfarb says fans developed deep connections to Ballers players over the past two seasons. He hopes to lean into that dynamic even further, “blurring the lines a little bit between players and the community, where you actually get a chance to be shoulder to shoulder with some of these players and see them in real form, as regular people, in a way, rather than on this pedestal.”
Yeshayah Goldfarb, left, and Bryan Carmel at MLB’s Winter Meetings in 2023. (Courtesy of the Oakland Ballers)
In the two years since the Ballers debuted in the Pioneer League, the franchise has renovated historic Raimondi Park in West Oakland, set league records, opened up its ownership group to fans through a community investment round that includes a fan representative on the team’s board of directors, and created a game-day atmosphere that is uniquely Oakland. Now, with the additions of Goldfarb and vice president of marketing Gervis Cash, the franchise is taking the next step toward becoming a profitable business while doubling down on its commitment to the community.
“We’re proud of ourselves that we are at the stage of our business after two years where we’re ready to bring in a president, especially somebody of Yeshayah’s caliber,” Carmel said. “We’ve been doing everything all at once for so long, really, since we started. It’s like we’re sprinting a marathon and building multiple businesses at the same time, and it’s a relief to get to the moment where we can bring in somebody who we think has a lot of operational experience, but also potential even beyond operational experience.”
One of the biggest selling points for the Ballers is the atmosphere at their home games and the energy that the team’s origin story of emerging from the loss of Oakland’s three major sports teams — the A’s, Raiders and Warriors — has engendered. Carmel regularly stands outside the gates of Raimondi Park on game days to thank fans for coming and he says they often give him hugs and tell him what an amazing experience they’ve had.
“I can see they’re not just saying that to be nice — people genuinely, authentically, really connect with the experience of coming to a Ballers game,” he said. “And so the question is, how do we bottle that, and how do we spread that to more people?
“We brought 110,000 people to the ballpark last year and so there’s room to grow there, and I think Yeshayah comes in with a lot of really good ideas and tactics for how to get there.”
Goldfarb believes the Ballers’ game-day experience will resonate with fans all over the Bay Area.
“You can feel it when you walk in there, and I know that it may seem cliche, and maybe you have to experience it, but even if you’re a lifelong Giants fan and a season ticket holder, it will be a very different experience, and you will feel the smaller, intimate community element that it represents and that creation story lives on,” Goldfarb said. “I would expect and hope it continues to grow and spread.”
In his new role, Goldfarb is leaning on his decades of experience traveling to hundreds of minor-league stadiums and spending time scouting in Japan, but he’s also focused on the business side of baseball more than he has been at any point in his career. Increasing attendance is one of his first main tasks. Carmel says the veteran executive is a keen observer of the fan experience.
“He has an unquenchable appetite to keep observing and iterating on every aspect of an organization, and so that’s something that Paul (Freedman, Ballers co-founder) and I are really excited to infuse and mix in with our energy,” Carmel said. “Paul and I are two and a half years into our professional sports careers, so it’s really exciting to bring somebody in who’s been doing this for a long time and has really seen a lot, and brings a lot of those relationships to the table.”
Goldfarb sees the Ballers’ home — Raimondi Park — as a big selling point, much like Oracle Park is, by itself, part of the gameday experience for Giants’ fans.
“It’s not as giant or expensive (as Oracle), but it is a deeply historical park, and it’s got kind of a grit to it. And it’s very Oakland,” he said. “People that walk through the gates have really never seen anything like it probably. It has energy and heart.”
The kid who forged his love of baseball playing street ball in Berkeley and watching games at the Coliseum knows the impact professional baseball can have on someone’s life. Goldfarb wants the Ballers to be part of the foundation for future area fans. They have a Little Ballers program and open up Raimondi Park to rec leagues, and Goldfarb sees potential for building more programs to benefit youth baseball, like an academy that develops youth players at a lower price point than travel baseball. And he sees opportunities for the Ballers to partner with organizations that cater to youth sports beyond baseball.
“I think there is a longer-term vision to have some of the giants of the game — the Rickey Hendersons and Frank Robinsons — come out of Oakland again one day,” he said. “That’s the long-term, bigger picture, but the foundational pieces have to be there. And a lot of it in baseball, in my personal experience, is … building an opportunity for players of all ages to get repeated reps, and making it fun.”
And, perhaps, making lifelong Ballers fans in the process.
For all of that to come to fruition, the Ballers need to be a stable business. That is the goal that motivates Goldfarb at the start of every workday, and one that could have a more lasting legacy than even a World Series trophy. He’s confident it is attainable.
“The foundation and all those spaces are absolutely there, and it’s just like, how do we build on that and continue to grow and be able to scale it up to a level that we want to be at so that we can sustain this forever?” he said.