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.
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.
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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 ...
