The A’s are moving to Sacramento! Can you feel the energy? The excitement? The whole area is buzzing about having Major League Baseball in its backyard, even if it’s just for a few years before the team heads off to Vegas. But who knows? If the fan support is strong enough and the region proves the demand is there, then maybe, when MLB expands again, Sacramento will find itself with a leg up on getting its own team. And hey, A’s fans might not have their team in Oakland anymore, but they’ll just be a short trip up the Capitol Corridor away! There are truly nothing but upsides to this move!
. . .
I’m so funny.
Yes, the A’s, having failed to come to an agreement with Oakland to use the Coliseum until 2027, have decided to instead use Sutter Health Park, home of the Sacramento River Cats, starting in 2025. The A’s and River Cats will apparently split time there, which will be tricky for scheduling purposes, but both teams will be in Sacramento, representing the city.
Well, okay, actually they play in West Sacramento, which is a different city in a different county, but it’s just across the river from downtown, so that’s pretty close. Sacramento will get all the hotel revenue, at least.
And, uh, the A’s won’t actually be representing the city. Their jerseys will just say “Athletics,” which is neat. They’ll just have one name. Like Cher!
But the prestige! For three years, Sacramento will enjoy the prestige of hosting a Major League Baseball team, with all the hotel revenue and establishing shots of Old Sacramento during TV broadcasts it entails. And that will be a great springboard for the city to land another professional sports franchise to go alongside the Kings. You can see how this will work out for everyone.
Except…
Why would a bunch of fans come to the ballpark to see the A’s?
Sure, in the first couple months of 2025, you might get high attendance (relatively speaking) due to the novelty. But eventually, that will peter out. As someone who has been to Sutter Health Park during sellouts, I can assure you: that stadium is not actually set up for its 14,000 person capacity. It can physically fit all of those people, of course, which is what the word “capacity” means, but when it comes to getting them food, or getting them out of the stadium on time, or just walking around on the concourse, it’s a pretty miserable experience.
So maybe you’ll go once. But you’ll only go again if you don’t think there are going to be that many people there. When players talk about it not being a major league facility (and the Players Association is apparently extremely concerned about that), they mostly mean issues like not having enough batting cages or there not being bathrooms in the bullpens. But it’s also not a major league facility for fans, and there isn’t really a plausible way to get it there in less than a year’s time.
And then you get to the other part of it, which is that that team isn’t worth supporting. The team is awful, and it’s designed to be awful, and it’s not going to get better anytime soon. John Fisher owns the team, and he doesn’t want to win; he wants to make money. He will make money by spending as little as possible on the payroll, collecting revenue sharing checks from the other teams, and maybe getting a little TV money. They’re just going to lose all the time. Nobody wanted to watch a bunch of losers in Oakland, and nobody’s going to want to watch a bunch of losers in Sacramento.
But even if the fans could get past that — even if they thought, “We should come out and support our guys,” you run into the intractable problem that these are not their guys. The A’s are leaving. They are desperate to leave. There is no reason to get invested in them. When a team is young and bad, you can tell the fans, “When these guys are good, you’ll be glad you watched them grow.” If they literally will be in a different city when they’re good — also a problem that plagues the A’s now, by the way, since they immediately trade anyone good enough to make decent money — then why bother to show up?
The A’s are basically a AAA team, and Sacramento already has one of those. Their owner is a pathetic grifter whose game is glaringly obvious to everyone except for the Nevada legislators whose campaigns he donated to (legally! This is not an accusation of a crime!) and every city or organization that associates with him is worse for it. There is simple nothing there. This is not a man or a team that cares about the city of Sacramento, and there’s no reason for the city to care about them other than the basic fact of MLB saying, “Here’s a thing you should like.”
Why should anyone like it? Let’s not get bogged down in the details.
But probably the most glaring issue here is that Sacramento knows what it’s like when your team wants to leave. For years, there was a ton of drama with the Kings about whether they would leave town or stick around, and while they finally got a new arena built, the nerves that they touched during that whole process are still raw. And now those same fans are supposed to support their city stealing a team from Oakland? It’s just not right.
I don’t want to make it seem like no one will go to A’s games in Sacramento, because I don’t think that’s true. There will be people who go to see the A’s, and probably more who go to see whoever is playing the A’s. There are definitely Angels fans and Yankees fans and Tigers fans in the area, and when their team is in town, they’ll be fairly likely to check them out.
But there is no fanbase for the A’s in Sacramento and there won’t be. There can’t be. John Fisher destroyed all of the goodwill that the franchise ever had in Oakland, and his taint has absolutely reached the Central Valley. Moving to Sacramento is a ridiculous idea done in support of an awful one. Every part of this is embarrassing for everyone involved. No part of this had to happen. It’s another notch in John Fisher’s Belt Of Shame that we ended up here anyway.
John Fisher is a perfect symbol of the stage of capitalism we are in. A grifter, fail son whose incompetence and greed are enabled by the a commissioner whose job it is to enable grifter owners. They're all part of The Club and we're not in it, as George Carlin said. Instead, we're just the dopes they want to pay for it.
Pithy as usual, Maestro.
Who wants to root for carpetbaggers, or support their miscreant skeezy 'owners?'