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

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.