The Faustian Bargain of the “Sacramento” Athletics
The A’s three-year stay in Sacramento is a potential coup for the proud underdog sports town. It’s also a mess. What’s the price of big league dreams?The Faustian Bargain of the “Sacramento” Athletics
The A’s three-year stay in Sacramento is a potential coup for the proud underdog sports town. It’s also a mess. What’s the price of big league dreams?
Twelve months ago, when reviled Athletics owner John Fisher formally announced his plan to relocate the team from Oakland to West Sacramento—ahead of a more permanent move to Las Vegas in 2028—the sky behind him darkened. The clouds twitched. Rain fell. It was a surprise press conference, called only that morning, and the crowd at Sutter Health Park was small, a polite smattering of local press, but the 63-year-old billionaire seemed nervous. He spoke for only 90 seconds, his speech a stack of platitudes. At one point, he tried describing how excited he was to watch A’s players launch home runs out of “the most intimate ballpark in major league baseball,” but it seemed he couldn’t remember any A’s players’ names, so he reached clammily instead for Aaron Judge.
Last month, at the A’s inaugural home opener in Sacramento, it rained again. Technical difficulties—disruptions to the radio broadcasts, delays for a wayward drone—dogged the proceedings. On TV, the facilities at Sutter Health looked fragile and small, kitschy and very minor league, and it diminished the A’s in both esteem and effect. The space in left center that the team had set up for pre- and postgame press conferences turned out to be a garden shed. At one point, a bat—the mammalian kind—got caught in the netting behind home plate and died. And the A’s got trounced, losing to the Cubs 18-3, the worst loss suffered by a team at their home opener in MLB history.
As far as portents go, these weren’t exactly subtle. The baseball gods seem to have uttered them directly into Fisher’s microphone, crammed others into the box score, and summoned still more in the sky: Beware, baseball fans of Sacramento. Something about this isn’t right.
But doing what the baseball gods consider “right” has never landed any aspirant city a major league sports franchise. Historically, some compromise has been required—cunning, too. The question for such cities becomes: How much compromise can you stomach? How much pride can you swallow?
When Vivek Ranadive, the owner of the Kings and de facto Don Corleone of Sacramento sports, first offered Fisher the chance to use Sacramento as a way station last winter, he turned the city overnight into both the setting and subject of a strange civic experiment. On the surface the experiment seemed to revolve around questions of agency and leverage. For the past 40 years, the American sports industry, insulated from either government regulation or free-market competition by antitrust exemptions and nigh-impregnable walls of cultural clout, has been able to take basically whatever it wants from the cities it does business with. Cities, loath to lose the teams residents love, have been left to compete with one another to curry teams’ favor. In sheltering the A’s, it seems that Ranadive saw an opportunity to strike a more strategic stance. He’d allow the A’s to use Sacramento as a way station. To what ends might Sacramento be able to use the A’s in return? “Our hope is this leads to a permanent MLB team,” Ranadive said last April.
Many in Sacramento embraced the vision. “We’ve always fancied the dream that maybe one day we can get a baseball team,” Kevin McCarty, current mayor of Sacramento and a former outfielder at nearby El Camino High School, told me over beers in a bar near City Hall on Opening Day. “This is a big moment for us. Who knows where this leads us down the road.”
At its heart, however, the experiment of the “Sacramento” A’s is a gut check—and a uniquely poetic one, centering precisely these questions of civic compromise and pride. Sacramento is a dignified underdog sports town that’s always had to scrap and claw not to be overlooked, and it understands well everything that sports can do to elevate a place. Fisher, on the other hand, is the most destructive owner in sports. He subjected A’s fans to multi-edged misery in Oakland, and already he’s embarrassed residents in the team’s new city, most notably by refusing to include “Sacramento” in the A’s official team name. (The A’s will wear a “Sacramento” patch on their sleeve, but that’s the extent of the team’s association with the city. The team doesn’t even sell any apparel with the word “Sacramento” on it.)
Not long after, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred announced that, in the event that the A’s somehow make the playoffs over their three seasons in town, they would likely not play any of their playoff games in Sacramento—rather, they would head to some more definitively major league city, like San Francisco, or even, appallingly, Oakland. Finally, in February, the A’s put out a glossy promotional video revealing that, although they wouldn’t be wearing “Sacramento” on the front of their jerseys for the next three seasons, they would be wearing a snazzy “Las Vegas” patch opposite the “Sacramento” one and plastering signs with the Vegas design all over Sutter Health. (“This patch is more than a statement,” Ken Korach’s voice-over throatily intones. “It’s a promise.”)
All of this—combined with the A’s obscenely high ticket prices, which, in spite of the team’s total competitive irrelevance over the past half decade, were inexplicably revealed to be the most expensive in pro baseball—pissed a good many Sacramentans off.
Carmichael Dave, a popular local radio host, told me back in March that the A’s are “insulting people” by not representing Sacramento. “John Fisher, in his ongoing saga of having the worst PR he possibly can, keeps stepping on Legos,” he told me.
Such indignities scan as even more insulting when you factor in the red carpet Ranadive rolled out for Fisher last spring. Aside from an undisclosed amount of revenue and expense sharing, Fisher’s A’s will not be paying Ranadive or Sacramento anything in the way of rent over the next three some-odd seasons. The A’s will be allowed to keep a “significant portion” of their $67-million-a-year local television contract. And they will not have to pay for any of the major upgrades that’ve been made to Sutter Health Park. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Ranadive’s Kings footed the bill for all of it. (Ranadive, through a spokesperson, declined to be interviewed for this story.)
These indignities also begin to contextualize Sacramento’s moral predicament. How would you feel, placed in Sacramento’s shoes? Excited about finally getting an MLB team or guilty that this is the team you’re getting? Would you dwell on the indignities or focus on the future? Further, what does it say about the state of the relationship between fans and franchises in America that it’s necessary to make such calculations? And how does it divide the people having to make them?
Back in February, I began making regular trips up to Sacramento to see whether I could get a sense for all this myself. I stayed through Opening Day and into the first few home stands of the season. I spoke with sportswriters and bartenders, politicians and parking lot attendants, casual sports fans and the biggest baseball diehards I’ve ever met. I spent time at Sutter Health. I hadn’t particularly wanted to do any of this. Perhaps because I grew up a fan of Oakland sports, I’d come to view the relationship between sports and place as special and the potential of sports teams as civic objects—emblems of civic style, engines of community, participants in the life of a place—as important, indeed, the thing about sports that makes them most worthwhile.
The “Sacramento” A’s struck me as an abrogation of all of that, emblematic of an alternative version of sports that sees pro teams purely as mercenary vehicles, designed not for representation or pride but for profit and plunder. It was for this reason, I imagined, that the baseball gods had so showily protested Fisher’s Frankensteinian designs. It was also for this reason that I’d been fairly certain his plans would fail. The resultant baseball product, I presumed, would feel too diminished and compromised and confused, smaller and less lovely than it deserved to be and more disorienting than fans could stand.
“This is a big moment for us. Who knows where this leads us down the road.”Mayor Kevin McCarty
But then came the home opener.
Many of the reports that would later be written about the A’s debut in Sacramento would focus on everything about the game that had made it feel surreal and unserious and offensive: the production mishaps, the presentation on TV, the score. What those reports would miss—what I had failed to anticipate—was that, inside the park, as well as in the streets before the game, none of that seemed to matter. In Old Sacramento, just across the Sacramento River from Sutter Health Park, hours before the game, fans clad in green and gold moseyed in groups up and down the wooden sidewalks, listing off the players they were excited to be cheering for that night: Lawrence Butler, Brent Rooker, Mason Miller. Inside Finnegan’s, on the corner of 2nd and K Streets, plastic yellow A’s pennants had been strung from the ceiling, and by noon patrons were already availing themselves of the pub’s two-for-one game-day drink specials. On the other side of Interstate 5, in front of Tom’s Watch Bar, a makeshift batting cage had been installed, gold and green balloons twined to the railing, and on flat-screen TVs above the bar, pixelated bunting glowed, patriotic and stirring. At Drake’s, a brewery down the river from Sutter Health Park, throngs of fans in green drank beer before firepits and beside cornhole boards, music pumping, air heavy with the grunge of smoked meat. News crews bumbled about, and on tables by the entrance to the park, green and gold foam fingers had been splayed out hopefully, like party favors or fliers for time-shares.
Walking into the park, meanwhile, felt a bit like walking through a portal. There is a magic inherent to baseball, in particular baseball played on a pretty field before a packed crowd, and the unexpected prettiness of this field—the lush greens, deep browns, and sharp whites of the diamond, framed by the twinkle of tea lights strung from the trees on the berm in right field, and by the chiming glasses in the beer garden in left field, and by the glimmering view of the city skyline above the batters’ eye in center field, and by the packed stands alive with baseball sounds—cast a spell. When you looked around, it did not seem to matter that the A’s had refused to wear “Sacramento” on the front of their jerseys or that Fisher had done various bad things in the past. What mattered was the present and the fact that in it, baseball was being played, and it was beautiful. And it was in fact made more so by the setting, which was intimate, yes, but also vivid—pretty and serene in that way only baseball can be, but captured personally and up close, like baseball inside a postcard. Coupled with the intensity of the crowd—which the fans had summoned in spite of the loveless owner—it was a picture of pro sports’ innate, bewitching utility. Standing back at the edge of it, you could easily see how a baseball team—even this baseball team—could become something a city would consider selling its soul to obtain.
In “Notes From a Native Daughter,” her essay on growing up in Sacramento, Joan Didion wrote that the city is, at heart, a “Valley town.” By which Didion meant a city of and by California’s Central Valley, the most intensively cultivated agricultural region in the country, and a place out of time with both the jagged, dramatic beauty of the California coast and the romantic cultural convulsions of San Francisco. There are, in Didion’s telling, many Valley towns, places found like dropped things up and down the lonely U.S. Route 99, towns composed of “Fosters Freezes,” “tract houses,” and “shopping centers,” a world away from “the California tourists came to see.” Sacramento was the largest and most interesting, according to Didion, but it maintained in its heart “the Valley character … the Valley virtues … [and] the Valley sadness.”
In many ways it still does. Didion was writing in 1965, and Sacramento is much larger, more dynamic, and hipper now than it was then. It is a very pretty city—by some accounts it boasts the largest urban tree canopy in the world—and is by all reports a great place to raise a family. Soccer games in the suburbs, bike rides beside the rivers. But a kind of pastoral melancholy insulates the place still. It manifests in the sense of isolation and stillness that settles over all U.S. cities that are hot and dispersed and flat, where the horizons stretch on forever, front porches sit empty in the summer, and it can be easy to imagine that you and your neighbors are alone in the world entire. It also manifests in the quiet resentment and cultural yearnings harbored by cities that are places other people mostly just pass through—which, to many from the Bay Area, Sacramento has basically always been. In Lady Bird, Sacramento native Greta Gerwig’s cinematic love letter to her hometown, the titular Lady Bird spends much of the movie angstily dreaming of going someplace else—anyplace else. “I want to go where culture is,” she tells her mom. “Like New York, or Connecticut, or New Hampshire.” Sacramento, she laments, is “soul killing … the Midwest of California.”
About its reputation, Sacramento is self-aware and insecure. “Sacramento is a two-dollar town,” R.E. Graswich—a former journalist for The Sacramento Bee; the author of Vagrant Kings, a history of the Sacramento Kings; and a former assistant to former Mayor Kevin Johnson—told me. “It’s a government town. It’s not a rich town. There are no corporate headquarters. You don’t have a Silicon Valley presence. Really no media presence. It harbors this inferiority complex. It always has.”
If it has long harbored an inferiority complex, however, Sacramento has harbored for much longer something else: a maniacal love of sports.
Anyone who’s ever watched a River Cats game, or cheered for Republic FC, the city’s popular USL Championship soccer team, or helped Light the Beam at a Kings game has felt it: that Sacramentans not only love their teams but also seem to recognize at a spiritual level the tangible civic and cultural benefit of having teams, the alchemy by which athletic glory is transposed into civic glory, civic glory into identity and pride.
This started in the early 20th century with the city’s various minor league sports teams, including the Solons of the Pacific Coast League. But it bloomed in earnest with the arrival of the Kings in 1985. “There was an almost overwhelming feeling of disbelief around the NBA coming to Sacramento,” Tim Keown, a senior writer at ESPN who covered the Kings for The Appeal-Democrat, told me. “At that time, it seemed almost too good to be true. Larry Bird is here? Magic Johnson? They played in a warehouse that was the smallest building in the league, it sold out every night, and the fan base built an identity out of the ‘Cowtown’ image.”
“[Sports fandom] has been ingrained in our identity pretty much forever,” Matt George, a sports anchor at the local ABC affiliate and a host of the Locked on Kings podcast, told me. “The people that live here carry a tremendous amount of pride because they recognize their reputation. Sacramento has proven it supports every sports opportunity that comes through here because residents recognize it’s an opportunity for the city.”
It was natural, then, for many in Sacramento to assume that the city would recognize the potential of this new sports opportunity that had been dropped into their lap. In the bar by City Hall before the home opener, Mayor McCarty predicted that the A’s would bring more foot traffic downtown, spur new development, and even help the city land other major league sports teams, such as a Major League Soccer team, and that Sacramentans would come together to make it happen. “We think that we can support major league baseball here,” he said. “We’re all excited.”
There was reason to believe that he might be right. Although not everyone in Sacramento, in the weeks and months leading up to Opening Day, cared much that the A’s were coming to town, a majority of people I spoke to on the street or in bars and restaurants around town told me that they were at least intrigued by the prospect of having MLB across the river. Others, meanwhile, were unabashedly pumped.
“I have been an A’s fan since I moved to NorCal in 1988 from Colorado at the age of 7,” Chris Petterson, a software salesman in his 40s, told me back in March. Petterson was one of many Sacramento-based A’s fans I spoke to that month. He moved to Granite Bay, a suburb of Sacramento, with his wife and three children in 2016. He coaches his son’s Little League team there now. This season, their team name is, naturally, the A’s, and when the league had jerseys designed, it made sure that Petterson’s read “Sacramento” on the front. His kids can’t wait to go to games. When season tickets were released to the public last fall, Petterson was among the first in Sacramento to scoop them up; before long, they’d sold out. “I'm just happy to have them 30 minutes from my home,” he said. “It’s a dream come true.”
Underneath the intrigue and excitement, however, unease crept in. It was felt most strikingly by those most aware of who Fisher was. “It’s a shame we’re sort of rolling over to this carpetbagger who doesn’t care at all about Sacramento,” Graswich, the former journalist for the Bee, told me. “Fisher is everything that’s wrong with the world of sports business,” Dave, the radio host, said. “Now he’s parking his team here, and it’s beneath us.”
But the unease had to do with more than just Fisher. It also stemmed from a haunting sense of complicity that was compounded by fears of hypocrisy. Only 12 years ago, Sacramento almost suffered the very same fate as Oakland, when the Kings were nearly sold to an ownership group with designs of relocating the team to Seattle. “The fans in Sacramento supporting this team are very hypocritical,” Jorge Leon, president of the Oakland 68s, an Oakland sports supporters group, told me. “They went through it with the Kings. And to now be supporting a team that got ripped from the Oakland community because of greed is sad to see.”
George, the Locked on Kings host, remembers the anxiety of almost losing the Kings well. “It was terrifying,” George said. “The identity of the city is so ingrained with the existence of this team. My identity was tied to the team.”
Sacramentans fought hard to hold on to the Kings. The ownership group angling to buy the team was formidable; it was led by Steve Ballmer, former CEO of Microsoft. Sacramento worked hand in glove with then–NBA commissioner David Stern to line up local buyers and make a last-minute business case for keeping the Kings in town, including by rustling up $255 million in public funds to be put toward a new arena. Fans, led by Dave—a large and exuberant presence—organized rallies at City Hall, conducted advocacy campaigns on social media, and even embarked on a nationwide, rabble-rousing RV tour. It worked. In 2013, NBA owners voted down the deal to sell the Kings to the Seattle group. A short time later, they were sold to Ranadive. In 2016, the partially publicly funded Golden 1 Center was opened. It became the centerpiece of a larger renovation project known as Downtown Commons, complete with luxury condos, new bars, and high-end hotels; it is pointed to now as a model for public-private partnerships in sports. The efforts of Kings fans, meanwhile, were championed locally as a kind of hero’s tale.
“Thank you to Sacramento Kings fans for their unwavering commitment and loyalty to myself and this organization,” Ranadive said in a statement after he officially committed to buying the team. “Without them, this success would not have become a reality. At the end of the day, this team belongs to the people of Sacramento, and our mission is to support them."
George lived through it all. Then he became a journalist. He covered closely—and without pulling any punches—Fisher’s turbulent, cynical tenure in Oakland, including the impact it had on fans there. He recoiled when Ranadive struck his deal with Fisher; it felt to him just slightly short of backstabbing. George was born and raised in Sacramento, but he grew up loving the A’s; his grandma, who lived in Oakland, used to take him to games. He dreamed of one day doing the same with his son. He hadn’t imagined doing it like this. “I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t exciting to have a baseball 20 minutes from my house and to be able to bring my son to games,” George said. “But there’s definitely a feeling of being hypocritical. I was ashamed of our city, in a sense, for getting involved.”
“As a Sacramento native, I am both excited about having MLB baseball in the city, and empathetic to the pain of A’s fans,” Mirann Lolani Tsumura-Hughes, an engineer who also writes for The Kings Herald, a Kings blog, told me. “I can’t imagine how heartbroken I’d be for something like that to happen to the Kings and to have to watch them play down the street.”
Still others were even more conflicted. A few weeks before Opening Day, I met with Robb Roberts. Roberts is a down-to-earth 45-year-old real estate appraiser from Galt, a city of 26,000 on the edge of Sacramento County. He’s been an A’s fan since he was a boy. Although it feels inadequate to solely describe him as a fan. In office space he rents in downtown Galt, he stores what is almost certainly the world’s largest collection of A’s memorabilia: bobbleheads, signed worn jerseys and cleats, broken bats, cracked helmets, old team travel bags, even rusted old pieces of the Coliseum, including the old home plate. His collected treasures take up the whole of his office. When you step inside from the street, they glimmer with ancient significance, like jewels piled high in a pharaoh’s tomb.
Roberts despises Fisher for what he’s done to the A’s as an institution and for what he did to Oakland as a community. He had been a key figure in the protests against Fisher, custom building many of the protests’ most memorable icons, including a walking, talking bobblehead of former A’s president Dave Kaval and a tombstone that fans from Last Dive Bar—a group that sells A’s-related apparel—had carried with them inside the Coliseum for the final A’s game in Oakland last September. He hadn’t been planning on supporting the A’s if they succeeded in leaving Oakland for Las Vegas, he said. But he also hadn’t considered the possibility that the team might temporarily relocate practically to his backyard in the interim. He anguished over whether he could stomach going to games while they were there.
“Objectively, Fisher’s a piece of shit,” Roberts told me in his office.
I asked whether Roberts would be going to see the A's while they played in Sacramento. Would he be a "Sacramento" A's fan?
“I don’t know,” he said, taking a breath. The light in the office, filtered through drawn blinds, was hazel and dim. Behind him, hundreds of A’s bobbleheads looked on from their shelves; the light made them seem cast in amber. “That’s a loaded question. I don’t know.”
I arrived in Sacramento around 1 p.m. on the afternoon of the home opener, still possessed of my doubts about how the game would feel and to what extent Sacramentans would rally around the “Sacramento” A’s. By the time I entered Sutter Health Park, those doubts had faded away. It felt as if the whole city had crammed itself inside, the mayor in a suite, Ranadive on the field, Petterson and his family in the stands, George and practically every other sportswriter in the city spilling out of the press box. And around me in the stands, not a single person wasn’t jazzed. Their excitement felt primal, the passion of a people determined to make an impression. The A’s promptly went down four, but fans cheered with gusto anytime the team gave them an excuse. The shared sense of purpose felt palpable and intoxicating. “This might be the best stadium in baseball,” a guy behind me down the third baseline huffed excitedly to his buddy, over beers, in the top of the second. In right field, on blankets out on the lawn, families were bragging to one another about how they’d managed to score season tickets before they sold out.
Around the bottom of the third, I ran into Roberts. He’d decided, finally, to grab a ticket. He assuaged his guilt by displaying his allegiance on his chest—he was wearing a kelly-green shirt that read, I’d rather be at the Oakland Coliseum—but he, too, seemed taken by the scene. We were standing behind the third baseline, in the concourse, looking out at the field. He shook his head, speaking over the music and the crowd. “It’s … really nice,” he said. He smiled, shook his head some more. “I almost … I almost hate that it’s so good.”
Things would turn: the A’s play from bad to worse and the mood in the stands from warm and exultant to cold and indifferent, with many fans leaving around the sixth, when the run differential grew to double digits and the temperature dipped by the same—around which time the loudest chant of the night, a ragged “Sell the team!,” rose up like a zombie from the seats behind home plate. Critics online and in the papers would harp on happily about all this the next day. But for those who’d physically been in attendance, something more important had been accomplished—or proved. "Could have been 180-3,” Scott Moak, VP of the Sacramento Republic FC, who was in attendance, said after the game. “Didn’t matter. Fantastic night for our region, for baseball fans … and for lovers of Sacramento. Just more proof points about how awesome the Sactown sports fanbase is."
More on the A’s Journey to Sacramento
As I walked out of the park that night, toward downtown, I tried making sense of what I’d seen. I thought of how divided the city had felt in the weeks and months leading up to Opening Day. I had imagined that the home opener would proceed like a collision, all the city’s conflicting perspectives and anxieties smashing into one another like electrons inside a particle accelerator. I’d thought that the revelations they’d provide would be cautionary. Yet here the experiment’s variables had assembled less in a collision than in a kind of collaboration. It suddenly seemed at least possible that Sacramento’s experiment could work.
There’s precedent for it. In August of 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. The hurricane wrecked, among other pieces of civic infrastructure, the New Orleans Arena. This meant that the New Orleans Hornets needed a new place to play. Oklahoma City—which had, in a long-shot bid to lure a big league sports team, built a publicly funded sports arena downtown several years prior—offered to help. OKC, at the time, occupied no place in the national sports imagination. It had failed to secure a big league sports team. Its downtown, hollow from decades of urban renewal, sat largely unused and abandoned. Its population was in decline. As Sam Anderson writes in Boom Town, his kaleidoscopic history of OKC, “In the larger economy of American attention, Oklahoma City’s main job was to be ignored.”
By sheltering the Hornets, however, OKC’s new mayor, Mick Cornett, saw an opportunity to change that. He offered the new arena to the Hornets. They were received rapturously, and attendance at every New Orleans/Oklahoma City Hornets game was always very solid, energy always through the roof. By the time the Hornets went back to New Orleans, OKC possessed a new kind of cultural momentum. Just a short time later, OKC businessmen, led by venture capitalist Clay Bennett, leveraged it into the Seattle Supersonics, which they turned into the Oklahoma City Thunder, who, as Anderson writes, became the “international face of the city” and changed it forever.
It was not hard to see the parallels. As I approached the Tower Bridge that night, I noticed that its spires had been lit up Athletics green. Against the Tower’s gold paint, the green looked natural and pretty. Off the surface of the river, it shimmered eerily, like a vision.
But then came Games 2 and 3 of the home stand, and the vision seemed to shatter. What endears a team to a city? Apparently, it takes more than civic will. At the second game of the Cubs series, attendance flagged; the next night, it fell further. Ahead of the first pitch each night, what had been the most expensive tickets in baseball a week prior were selling on the secondary market for $20 a pop. During the A’s next home stand, against the Padres, the team averaged an announced attendance of 9,676. Over the following weekend, in games against the Mets across three beautiful spring days, attendance averaged just below 10,000. And every night, with the exception of two, the A’s got smoked. The Cubs swept their series with a run differential of 35-9.
The vibes inside Sutter Health changed, too. Every home game since the home opener, fans in opposing teams’ colors—Padres brown, Mets orange, Cubbies blue—have outnumbered those in green by about two to one. They’ve also outmatched A’s fans in volume and verve. During the last game of the Padres series, on a Wednesday afternoon, there were only golf claps when the A’s starting lineup was announced, and there was more applause when Manny Machado came up to bat in the top of the first than when Butler did in the bottom. And in between, there was a curious and haunting absence of baseball sounds. To experience it in person, in particular with knowledge of what A’s games in Oakland used to feel like, was disconcerting, like happening on a wounded animal in the wild.
“Moneyball is not for the weak of heart. I don’t think that’s hit yet.”Robb Roberts
Some of this seems by design. Heading into the season, Fisher banned the drums, the vuvuzelas, the large signs, and even the outlandish costumes that were hallmarks of A’s games in Oakland. Those A’s games may have been sparsely attended, especially after Fisher desecrated the team’s reputation in Oakland, but they were always spirited and raucous and heartful—you always knew you were in Oakland, and you always knew you were at an A’s game. A’s games in Sacramento have lately felt the opposite: antiseptic, anodyne, anonymous, small.
Still, some of the stiltedness has stemmed from the fans, who seem sedate and unsure at the park, outnumbered and on guard, apprehensive and anxious, as if they’ve walked into a party where they don’t quite feel comfortable. The only chants that ring out from the stands are the occasional rebellious “Sell the team!” and “Let’s go, Oakland!”
“Excitement’s really died down,” a young man, possibly stoned, who works for Lids, the apparel shop across the pavilion from Golden 1, told me one recent afternoon. He gestured at the A’s gear in the front window. “No one’s really buying this shit. They ask for jerseys that say, ‘Sacramento.’ Plus, the team’s ass.” Outside Tom’s, the batting cage is gone. Balloons, too.
The center, it suddenly seems, might not hold.
To some, to be sure, all this has read as evidence that the Sacramento experiment might already be in jeopardy.
“I don’t think it’s a sure thing the A’s are going to be in Sacramento this whole three-year stretch,” said Chris Biderman, a senior reporter for The Sacramento Bee, on the Foul Territory podcast. “It wouldn’t surprise me if this Sacramento thing was a one and done. You do have a major league park in Oakland.”
What went wrong? On this, finally, most in Sacramento seem to agree.
“It seems like the Sacramento crowd has been a little more turned off by that than anyone expected,” George, the Locked on Kings host, said. “They’ve only sold out one game, and it was the home opener. That’s very unlike Sacramento. Major league baseball has made it very clear that Sacramento is temporary, that you're a side piece, you're a couch.”
“Myself and other season ticket holders I know are feeling the pain. The prices of the tickets at resale are far below what we paid,” Petterson, the Little League coach, told me recently in an email. “The folks I've spoken with are not too pleased that ‘The Athletics’ have refused to represent Sacramento in name, instead have a Tower Bridge arm patch as the sole way to ‘represent’ the city. At first, I thought it wouldn't bother me, I understand the situation and that it's short-term in nature, but now I've changed my stance.”
“There’s no way playing major league baseball for three years in a minor league park was going to be perfect,” George said. “But the soul of the organization is gone. What has made the organization unique, with the drums and the mystique, they’ve killed that. … That’s very opposite of Kings culture. It’s very different from the Oakland fan base. But it feels like an early preview of what a Las Vegas A’s crowd is going to look like.”
Of course, it’s still possible that things will turn around. The A’s could start winning; Fisher could begin to invest more in the team’s relationship with Sacramento. The experiment could still work. The pieces are all still there. MLB commissioner Rob Manfred still wants to expand from 30 teams to 32; one of the two cities chosen for expansion very well could be Sacramento. And Fisher’s plan to build a stadium in Vegas could be in peril. The most recent cost estimate was $1.75 billion, and there’s a political action committee—representing the Nevada State Education Association—seeking to challenge the public funding he’s already secured. And though Mayor McCarty voted against subsidizing Golden 1 back when he was on the City Council, he suggested to me that he’d be open to reconsidering that stance for the A’s, if the terms were right. If Fisher were soon in the market for a new new permanent home, Sacramento could very well be among his top choices. And if he were forced or obliged to sell, Ranadive almost certainly would make an offer to buy the team.
Still, fans will need to show up, and that’ll be difficult if everyone in town ends up hating the team, and it’ll get even harder as the season wears on and as the summer heat arrives and as fans begin to realize how truly taxing rooting for a team owned by Fisher can be. Fisher’s scarcely marketed the A’s since arriving in town. “I don’t think these people understand the turmoil of what being an A’s fan puts you through,” Roberts told me, back in his office, surrounded by ghosts of the A’s past. “Moneyball is not for the weak of heart. I don’t think that’s hit yet.”
And things could in fact get far worse from here. Summer temperatures in Sacramento semi-frequently scream past 110 degrees, and Sutter Health is an open-air ballpark. And while major league teams have spent time in minor league stadiums before—notably, the Toronto Blue Jays spent the COVID-shortened 2020 season at Sahlen Field in Buffalo, New York, and hurricane-inflicted damage to Tropicana Field has forced the Tampa Bay Rays to spend 2025 at George M. Steinbrenner Field, the home of the Yankees’ Single-A affiliate—no team has spent three full seasons at a minor league stadium. If Sutter Health is empty and eerie all summer, it could have the unintended consequence of blowing the city’s audition for a team of its own in the future.
Plus, it’s imminently possible that if Sacramento fans do show out for the A’s, the city’s experiment could still go belly-up, and at great cost. Consider what might happen if Sacramento falls in love with the A’s, Fisher barrels forth with his stadium plans in Vegas anyway, and MLB chooses not to award Sacramento an expansion team—and if Sacramento’s interest in the A’s cannibalizes interest in the River Cats. Sacramento could very well sell its soul to Fisher and end up with less than nothing in return.
If you ask baseball fans in the Bay Area, they’ll tell you that this is in fact probably what Sacramento fans should have expected from the jump. As longtime Bay Area sportswriter Tim Kawakami put it after the home opener, “You snuggle up with John Fisher, you usually don’t end up for the better.”
On my drive back home to the East Bay the night of the home opener, I thought a lot about what it might mean if the “Sacramento” A’s found success similar to the kind that OKC did when it sheltered the Hornets. I thought about the requirements and realities of the competition for pro sports teams among cities, about the true nature of the relationship between team and town in America and the relevance of representation and community. Bennett had been able to bring the Thunder to OKC only because he’d stolen the Sonics from Seattle. The cost of OKC’s civic transformation had been Seattle’s civic heartbreak. Is a willingness to inflict or abide by such grief a part of the price of big league dreams? Or are ideals such as representation and connection and community mere privileges that cities like Seattle and Sacramento and Oakland simply can’t afford? “This team belongs to the people of Sacramento,” Ranadive said of the Kings the day after he bought them. Had that ever really been true?
Since the last “Sacramento” A’s game I attended in mid-April, however, I’ve wondered instead what it would mean if this in fact is how Sacramento’s experiment ends: in debasement, anger, empty seats, and angry fans—effectively as the gods had foretold. Perhaps, in the relationship between sports and place, things like representation and rootedness in fact do still matter. Maybe there are consequences when a team severs its connection with the community that loves it, then rejects the community it’s moved to. Maybe there’s not only still a place in sports for representation and rootedness, but also an enduring business need for those qualities.
Ultimately, though, what meaning you derive from the “Sacramento” A’s depends on what you see when you look at the team. The experiment so far has been a Rorschach test. Casual fans might see nothing strange at all; as Mayor McCarty put it to me, “I would guess most people who’re going to see the A’s don’t know who owns the team.”
Alternatively, you might see what people like Mayor McCarty and Ranadive seem to: a city presented with a complex opportunity to elevate its station and status, engaging with the sports industry not as it wishes it was, but as it knows it to be.
Perhaps you see the thing Roberts was moved by at the home opener: a proud community coming together over baseball in the rain and cold—ironic proof of the very things about pro sports that we proudly sacralize.
Or, indeed, you might see a cautionary tale. Although if you’re rooting for Sacramento’s comeuppance, it’s worth asking yourself, again, what you would do if put in the city’s shoes. If you’ve ever lived in a place like Sacramento, you know how beguiling the prospect is of using sports to become, either for the first time or once again, a place people recognize and think about, alluring on a map and alive in the mind. There’s no playbook for how cities should go about doing that or for how fans caught in the middle should comport themselves.
“I'm not in the business of yucking anyone's yum,” Dave, the radio host, told me. “I don't begrudge anyone for buying season tickets and going and enjoying the games. Go with your heads held high. And for those who absolutely refuse, be proud that you're standing on your morals. I don't think it's a binary situation. There's nuance everywhere.”
Relevance, too. From Sacramento to Saint Petersburg, Oakland to Seattle, politicians across the country are today proclaiming that their city is a “major league sports town.” They’re prepared to continue fighting for big league recognition and will likely continue doing whatever it takes to acquire it. Sacramento is a microcosm of how thankless that fight is—how fraught, morally dubious, and, much of the time, futile. Maybe, then, it’s ultimately as Didion elegiacally put it when she considered the possibility that hers was “a story not about Sacramento at all, but about the things we lose and the promises we break as we grow older.”
Still, the story isn’t over. A few weeks before Opening Day, at a cafe in Old Sacramento, I met an A’s fan named Anthony Hardin Jr. A buzzing and bifocaled 21-year-old screenwriter, Hardin was born in nearby Auburn and now splits his time between Sacramento and Southern California. He grew up making the trip from Sacramento to Oakland for A’s games and palling around River Cats games in the time in between. He’s an encyclopedia of arcane A’s trivia, but his connection to the A’s was never tied to the team’s connection to Oakland; he’s always loved them from afar. He was prepared to continue loving them after they moved to Vegas. And although he saw the moral hazard in it, he could not contain his excitement that the team was relocating temporarily to Sacramento.
He was most excited about attending games with his dad, Anthony Hardin Sr., a talent acquisition analyst at the California Public Utilities Commission who works as a bartender on the side. Growing up, he made the trip down to Oakland most often with his dad. It’s who he inherited his love of the A’s from. Hardin Sr. and his wife split up when Hardin Jr. was young. Hardin Sr. had grown up without a dad himself, and love of the A’s became a shared language between him and his eldest son, something they at once relished and relied on. They’d attended every A’s Opening Day game together since Hardin Jr. was a boy, Hardin Sr. scrounging up money to pay for the trip. Hardin Jr. told me that the only person more excited about the A’s coming to Sacramento was in fact his dad, who was so thrilled to find out that they would be playing at Sutter Health that he applied for an open bartender position at the park; in his cover letter, he quoted Moneyball.
Over sandwiches, Hardin Jr. told me that he was planning to attend as many home games as he could over the upcoming season, and he had arranged to attend Opening Day alongside friends who lived close to the ballpark downtown. “I wish the A’s would have stayed in Oakland,” he said. “But I feel like the best thing I can do now is support them while they’re here. And for my friends who’ve been followers of the A’s our whole lives, we’re like, ‘Holy shit, we’re going to be at A’s games all the time.’ It’s sort of the dream.”
I met Hardin Jr. again about an hour before first pitch on Opening Day. We met at Drake’s, the brewery down the river from Sutter Health Park. We sat at a picnic table with a view of the Tower Bridge. Anthony was wearing a game-worn kelly-green Tommie Reynolds jersey. He was antsy, as if managing performance anxiety. He picked up and put down his beer. He brainstormed chants that he planned to start come game time. Every once in a while as we spoke, he paused and thoughtfully surveyed the crowd, sizing it up, as if preparing to lead it personally into the ballpark. He seemed concerned. The place was packed, but most everyone around us was rocking jerseys that read “Oakland” on the front. “It’s sort of a mess,” he said. “But in a way it’s far more interesting for me. I'm like, ‘What is going on here?’ This is the humble beginnings.”
“For my friends who’ve been followers of the A’s our whole lives, we’re like, ‘Holy shit, we’re going to be at A’s games all the time.’ It’s sort of the dream.”Anthony Hardin Jr.
I met with Hardin Jr. one more time at the Wednesday afternoon game against the Padres. We sat on the berm in right, practically atop Butler’s shoulder. The air was warm and pleasant, perfect baseball weather. This time Anthony was wearing a gold throwback Rickey Henderson jersey. We sat with our elbows wrapped around our knees. Around us, kids with baseball gloves and hot dogs bounded scruffily like off-leash puppies. The sunny scene clashed discordantly with the cynicism that had come to dominate online discussion about the A’s. Hardin Jr. seemed annoyed but undaunted by this, still prepared to put what remained of the A’s fan base on his back—or go at it alone, if he had to. “The marketing’s been a mixed bag,” he said. “I think it's a matter of the ticket prices being so crazy. I think it's the Sacramento thing, but also just not really doing enough to involve the city leading up to the season. … Vibes. I mean, I feel like no one knows what to do with their hands.” He told me that he and his friends had tried out the chants he’d been brainstorming at the brewery. None had caught on.
Still, Hardin Jr. hopes the team will build a connection with the city. “That's the reality I would like to see. Will that happen? Time will tell,” he told me. “We got two seasons and change to see where it goes.”