The Abridged version:
- The Athletics first season in West Sacramento closes this weekend with mixed results — on-field promise and lingering fan disappointment.
- Attendance did not meet expectations, but some businesses saw benefits.
- Civic leaders are hopeful next year in the A’s three-year run will be better, and believe the Sacramento region could be a future Major League Baseball expansion site.
We’ve nearly reached the end of the Athletics’ first of three seasons to be played in West Sacramento, one of the more bizarre in Major League Baseball’s 150-year history.
On the field, it showed some promise: The A’s will avoid last place in the AL West and introduced some young potential stars. Off the field, not so much: Attendance has been abysmal and fan discontent is still high after the team’s messy divorce with Oakland, its home for 57 years. It seems only appropriate that the A’s will end with with a better record on the road than at home.
The team decamped up I-80 because of A’s owner John Fisher’s relationship with Kings owner Vivek Ranadive, whose portfolio also includes West Sacramento’s Sutter Health Park and its longtime Triple A tenant, the River Cats. Fisher was looking for a haven after the team’s widely criticized departure from Oakland, which culminated last September with a sellout crowd of 46,000 fans at the team’s final game at Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum chanting “sell the team” and other less polite things.
Needing to find a place for the A’s to play for three seasons while a 33,000-seat stadium is built in Las Vegas – funded in part by Nevada taxpayers to the tune of $380 million – Fisher turned to Ranadive, himself eager to audition the Sacramento region as a viable home for future MLB expansion. Ranadive supplied Fisher a landing spot with built-in regional familiarity that enabled Fisher to keep a TV contract with NBC Sports California, though for less money.
But Fisher’s actions in Oakland and the torrent of bad press made it curious that Sacramento’s leaders were keen to invite his team to town for an extended stay.
Just ask Jon Ortiz, perhaps the biggest A’s fan in Sacramento. Ortiz, sitting in his downtown office featuring about 600 pieces of team memorabilia, recounted how he came to fall in love with the team in 1972 after his father first took him to the Coliseum on Batting Helmet Day, where he watched A’s legend Reggie Jackson throw out a runner at third base from right field and hit a game-winning home run . (The helmet is on a shelf in his office in downtown Sacramento, a few blocks from the A’s temporary home.)
Ortiz, a former journalist working in public affairs, ran out of patience with Fisher and the team in 2019 and now describes himself as “a baseball widower.” He doesn’t mince words about Fisher: “The ineptitude, the inability to do even mediocre PR, the imperiousness with which he has dealt with public officials and fans has just been disgusting.”
It’s not just fans. Even former A’s owner Wally Haas has described Fisher’s conduct as “unforgivable.”
Ortiz says that Fisher “is not committed to this community” – even in his short-term stay where the team is incentivized to make up for lost revenue with construction costs rising in Las Vegas.
The Sacramento Athletics
The Sacramento region’s business community and elected officials had high hopes the A’s would usher in an economic boom. The $665 million in economic impact that Golden 1 Center generated during the Kings’ 2022-23 season was commonly referenced. A commentary in The Sacramento Bee suggested that there could be “almost a million additional visitors to the region on a seasonal basis.”
The windfall didn’t happen. The A’s can hold 14,000 fans in Sutter Health Park but are averaging about 9,500, trailing only the Tampa Bay Rays, who are playing in an even smaller minor league stadium after a hurricane destroyed the roof of Tropicana Field.
Perhaps the single biggest point of contention has been that Fisher has, so far, refused to formally call the team the Sacramento Athletics. The only sign of the city where the A’s will play until 2028 is a patch on the sleeve of the team’s jerseys picturing Tower Bridge with Sacramento in small cursive print underneath. However, a patch on the other sleeve promotes Las Vegas tourism.
Sacramento’s new mayor, Kevin McCarty – who alongside West Sacramento’s mayor, Martha Guerrero, threw out the first pitch at an A’s game in June – spoke up on behalf of his constituents on Sactown Sports 1140 AM in late August. “We’ll step up more and support you, (if you) maybe throw us a bone and call us the Sacramento A’s,” he said. “Come on now, you play here.”
Aaron Laurel, West Sacramento’s city manager, said: “There’s a lot of pride here, especially when it comes to sports, so I see it as a great opportunity for the A’s to do that. How they respond to that is out of our control. Obviously, we’re going to be focused on continuing to be the best host city we can and really show the region, the league, the world, that we can be a great host for Major League Baseball.”
Local businesses see mixed results
The lower-than-expected attendance has disappointed some local business owners.
Two restaurants in lower foot traffic areas of West Sacramento – the Tree House Cafe and the West Sac Sports Bar and Grill – went all in on the A’s and lost their bets.
“Because of all of the exposure and all of the hype, we thought it would be standing room only,” Fro Davis, owner of the Tree House Cafe, told KTXL-TV. “We’re getting a trickle of some customers.” Shawn Mason, who ran the West Sac Sports Bar and Grill for 11 years, told CBS 13 that he sold to a new owner after A’s business failed to materialize.
Other businesses near the ballpark report a solid uptick, Bia Hoskins, general manager of Drake’s: The Barn in West Sacramento has been happy with how things have played out so far.
“We made sure we staffed up extra,” Hoskins said. “We opened up our bars for more hours. We opened up earlier for lunch to accommodate the day games, things like that. The structure was what we expected, but the volume definitely was an increase this year.”
It’s unclear whether the first year of the A’s experiment attracted meaningful numbers of tourists to Sacramento, though it certainly didn’t result in “almost a million additional visitors,” seeing as the team won’t finish the season having sold one million total tickets. The River Cats, for their part, saw their attendance drop by 22% and were forced to play six of their home games in Tacoma to accommodate the A’s.
While the River Cats were down about 80,000 total tickets sold from last year, fans bought nearly 800,000 tickets to A’s games this year – at MLB prices – adding up to more than 600,000 more fans at baseball games in 2025 than in 2024. Some of them came from out of town, making tourism officials happy.
“It’s been really fun,” said David Eadie, Visit Sacramento’s chief of sports and entertainment. “We don’t have specific visitor data right now, but obviously there’s been an impact, I think especially when some of those higher profile teams were in town.”
But every dollar that came into Sacramento this year was a dollar that didn’t go into Oakland. That takes on extra psychic weight considering that Sacramento played the “don’t let our only team leave us” card to great effect 12 years ago when the Sacramento Kings were on the verge of leaving for Seattle.
Will Sacramento get an expansion team?
Based on recent comments by Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred, the league is poised to select two expansion teams by around 2029, one in the East and one in the West. Nashville appears to be a lock in the East, which leaves Sacramento to fight with Portland, Salt Lake City, San Antonio and others for the last slot.
“There was a little bit of a warming up period, but I think Sacramento absolutely has the population and passion to support an MLB team,” said Visit Sacramento’s Eadie.
West Sacramento’s Laurel agrees: “The analysis of whether Sacramento can be a long-term market for Major League Baseball is not defined by these few seasons of hosting a team temporarily.”
A’s fan Ortiz sings a different tune: “Vegas can fall through and I think it will, yeah, but (the team isn’t) going to stay here in Sacramento. If anything, this year has proven that Sacramento is not a Major League Baseball town. (Or rather) it is a Major League Baseball town, but the team it loves is the Giants.”
An up-and-down season on the diamond
The controversy over the relocation hasn’t been lost on the players.
The A’s prized free agent signing, pitcher Luis Severino, has been blunt in his assessment of Sutter Health Park, saying in May: “This just is not a big league park.” He lost his first nine home starts of the season.
Severino has been irritated by the condition of the mound, as have other pitchers, including Minnesota’s Joe Ryan, who blamed it for a shoulder injury suffered by his teammate Pablo Lopez. The state of the batter’s box and the fact that both clubhouses sit past the outfield fence, disconnected from their respective dugouts, have also drawn the ire of players.
Through all this, the A’s had playoff hopes early in the season. Had it not been for a brutal stretch in May and June when they went 1-20, the team’s season would have been respectable.
The most hopeful sign is the play of the team’s two blue-chip rookies, first baseman Nick Kurtz, 22, and shortstop Jacob Wilson, 23, and who will likely finish first and third in AL Rookie of the Year voting, respectively. They are at the center of the organization’s remarkably talented nucleus of players 25 and under, which features MLB’s No. 3 overall prospect, Leo De Vries, as well as Jamie Arnold, Luis Morales, Tyler Soderstrom, Denzel Clarke, Max Muncy and Lawrence Butler.
“They have a really exciting core young group of players that, looking at these next few seasons, I think (the team’s winning percentage) could definitely change, and I think that will have a corresponding impact on stadium attendance,” Laurel said.
For his part, Ortiz finally went to a game. He was drawn back in by Wilson and Kurtz.
This week, ESPN gave the A’s an overall B grade for this season.
There’s always next year
The A’s first season in Sacramento will end this weekend, with the team hosting Kansas City – where the A’s played from 1955 to 1967 – for a three-game homestand dubbed Fan Appreciation Weekend. But fans face the cruel reality that the team may not peak until after it leaves for Vegas.
“What’s going on with the A’s is a kind of a reflection of what goes on in life,” Ortiz said. “People hurt us, people leave us, people give us good times and disappoint us. They don’t live up to our expectations.
“I think there’s even an opportunity to say to a kid, ‘Hey, this is fun. Enjoy the moment, live in the moment, and let tomorrow take care of itself.’”
Robert Ohman is a freelance journalist in Sacramento.
(Due to an editing error, the first version of this story misstated the amount Las Vegas taxpayers are expected to contribute to a new stadium there. It is $380 million. Corrected 7:25 a.m. Sept. 26, 2025.)