The Oakland Athletics are set to call Sutter Health Park home from 2025-2028. (Photo Illustration by Joseph Bianchini)
The Oakland Athletics have been a stalwart in both the baseball and sports world for a very long time. However, with an abysmal roster and a move to Las Vegas in 2028 being almost certain, the team’s future has gone downhill in an instant.
The A’s have played at the Oakland Coliseum for over 50 years, and with their lease with the stadium coming to an end after the 2024 MLB season, it was announced by the team that they will play three years of baseball in Sacramento until their Vegas stadium opens.
The A’s will play at Sutter Health Park (formerly Raley Field) until they’re ready to move to Vegas.
If you are a part of Sacramento and its surrounding areas, you do not want this to happen.
Sacramento sports fans are one of a kind. Throughout the very long streak of the Kings being the joke of the NBA, the city still endlessly supported them. They’ve shown similar support to the Sacramento Republic Football Club and even Sacramento State’s sports teams.
With the A’s move to Sacramento, you’d best believe that Sacramento would pull out the red carpet treatment for the team. Do the A’s deserve that red carpet treatment though? Absolutely not.
The people of Oakland have given the A’s the same treatment that the people of Sacramento will. In the A’s successful years during the mid-2010’s, they were playing in front of sold out crowds constantly.
It wasn’t until the teams’ ownership stopped paying good players to come to Oakland that the team started playing badly, leading to a drop in fan attendance. Last season the A’s set record lows in terms of their attendance, and this was because of a boycott from the fanbase.
However, the A’s ownership and the MLB are using this as a reason for the A’s to make the move to Vegas. The fans of Oakland are still there and still eager to support the team, but not under this ownership regime.
The team’s owners and higher-ups are using the fans and using the city of Oakland to just move onto Vegas. There’s no reason to believe that they won’t do the same to the city of Sacramento.
All majority owner John Fisher and the higher-ups in the A’s organization have done in the last 3-4 years is put a poor product on the field and scapegoat other factors for the teams’ lack of attendance and success.
Sacramento will welcome the A’s with open arms. They will give the A’s three supportive years at Sutter Health Park before moving onto Vegas, and the A’s will act like Sacramento never existed.
As fun as it will be to have another professional sports team in the city, the A’s don’t deserve to play in a diehard sports city like Sacramento.
Unless the current A’s ownership sells the team and the new ownership decides to either keep the A’s in Sacramento or move them back to Oakland, this is a bad move for Sacramento.