The A's settled into their new home in Sacramento. The result was familiar
Fans arrive at Sutter Health Park for on Monday for the team's home opener.
Photograph: Godofredo A Vásquez/AP
It could have been worse for the Athletics. Before they headed west to Oakland in 1968, their characterful former owner, Charlie Finley, threatened to move them from Kansas City to a cow pasture in the tiny town of Peculiar, Missouri.
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Now they are in a place you might call Limbo, California – also known as the home of the Pacific Coast League's Sacramento River Cats. It's a staging post for Major League Baseball's most contentious franchise after the burning of their Bay Area bridges left them needing somewhere to play ahead of a planned relocation from Oakland to Las Vegas.
The A's evoke 70s nostalgia thanks to three successive World Series titles from 1972 to 1974, their distinctive green and gold colours and icons such as Reggie Jackson, Catfish Hunter and Rollie Fingers. And they are admired by analytics obsessives for the Moneyball innovations in the 2000s under the front-office leadership of Billy Beane.
Now they are symbols of executive dysfunction and geographical confusion. The brand plays on – but don't call them the Oakland Athletics anymore. They're not officially the Sacramento Athletics, either. Just the Athletics or the A's. Players don't have a city name emblazoned on the front of their shirts but wear a patch with an image of Sacramento's Tower Bridge on their right sleeve and a Las Vegas emblem on the left arm. With an outfield hoarding promoting Las Vegas near a banner hailing the team's nine World Series championships dating back to 1910 – when they were the Philadelphia Athletics – and a handful of fans in suddenly-retro Oakland gear, it feels like this is a franchise in flux, its identity addled by ownership's wanderlust.
Related: Baseball's last dive bar: Farewell to the crumbling Oakland Coliseum
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Sutter Health Park is the site they will share for at least the next three seasons with the River Cats, the Triple-A affiliate of the San Francisco Giants. The River Cats are run by Vivek Ranadivé, who also controls the NBA's Sacramento Kings. Sacramento, an often-overlooked city that was close to acquiring an MLS team but brought down in 2021 when seemingly clear on goal, would like another major-league outfit to boost its profile.
Though the A's do not want to stick around for long, the 25-year-old venue has been upgraded, with bigger dugouts and clubhouses, better video and sound systems and facilities in the bullpens so that relievers can, well, relieve themselves. But it clearly remains a minor-league stadium, pleasant but petite, with its low-slung stand, grassy tree-lined picnic slope, kids' playground and clubhouses accessed via the outfield.
Still, the buzz from crowded concourses and crammed seating areas in Monday's home-away-from-home opener was palpable; and, for this team, unusual. With a capacity of about 13,000 and evident enthusiasm in the Californian capital, an 80-mile drive from Oakland with a regional population of about 2.5m, the A's are very likely to better last year's league-worst average attendance of 11,528.
In 2028 the A's intend to move to a new $1.75bn ballpark on the site of the former Tropicana Hotel on the Las Vegas Strip. The club released renderings last year of a 33,000-capacity ballpark. With the razzle-dazzle the location demands, the design boasts swooping silver curves and shimmering green illuminations, resembling the Gateway Arch on St Patrick's Day or the Sydney Opera House if it were slathered in pesto.
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The MLB commissioner, Rob Manfred, has made progress in speeding up games but stadium negotiations roll at their own pace: however long it takes billionaire team owners and property developers to persuade politicians to fork out taxpayer funding for new venues.
Or not: this transfer completes a devastating triple don't-play for the city of Oakland: the NFL's Raiders left for Vegas in 2020 and the Golden State Warriors relocated across the water to San Francisco in 2019.
The A's are not the only MLB team in a minor-league park this year, with the Tampa Bay Rays borrowing the New York Yankees' spring-training facility because Tropicana Field was damaged by Hurricane Milton. While that was a natural disaster, this problem was man-made.
The club has been owned since 2005 by John Fisher, heir to the Gap retail fortune and accused of wilfully making the A's unfashionable in order to make the switch to Nevada more palatable as their 60s-era multi-purpose stadium in Oakland, the Coliseum, crumbled and no deal was reached with city officials. He denies that claim and has insisted that 'we worked as hard as possible for six years to find a solution in Oakland.' Fisher asserted to reporters on Monday that his hand was forced because 'our lease was ending … and there was not really a legitimate offer on the table to extend'.
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Still, last year the A's payroll was $66.5m, the lowest in MLB by more than $20m. The New York Mets led the league with $333m. The A's last made the playoffs in 2020 and have endured a losing record for the past three seasons. This year's payroll is $75m, above only the Chicago White Sox and Miami Marlins.
The club hopes to begin ballpark construction by the middle of this year. Until the new palace is finished, what happens in Vegas stays in Sacramento. A short walk from downtown, Sutter doesn't have under-seat cooling like the planned new climate-controlled arena. That feature would surely be appreciated in Sacramento in July when the average daily high is 35C (95F). Monday, though, was chilly and blustery, and the A's were embarrassingly crushed 18-3 by the Chicago Cubs following a tribute to the late Hall of Famer, Rickey Henderson. This was the most runs allowed by a team in a home opener for a hundred years, according to Sportradar.
Many fans left long before the end, though the atmosphere remained upbeat. A man hawking 'F*** Fisher' T-shirts on the sidewalk seemed to find few takers; nor was much dissent evident inside the ballpark save for a 'sell the team' chant that briefly erupted after the contest became a blow-out. Most attendees were more interested in celebrating the team's arrival in Sacramento than mourning its exit from Oakland. Among the loudest cheers were in praise of the bat boy when he thwarted a drone.
Some 175 years ago, fortune-seekers flocked to Sacramento to chase the gold rush. These A's are only passing through in the hope of finding more glittering rewards elsewhere. But for the next few years the city with a landmark bridge may prove an adequate home for a club in transition.
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'I think we recognise the need for a temporary home until we get to where we're going and I think we are fully ready and fully prepared to embrace this as our home for the next three years, both this stadium and this city, and to make the very best of it. It's going to be a unique environment,' outfielder Brent Rooker told reporters.
'I thought the energy [from fans] was great,' A's manager Mark Kotsay said after the game. A sustained run of bad performances, however, would surely curdle the mood. 'Not a good showing on our first night,' Kotsay conceded.
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