From dead fish toss to Triple-A, Sacramento baseball has come long way with Athletics’ move

Sacramento Mayor Joe Serna stepped to the podium in May 1997 to announce plans to build a stadium in downtown Sacramento that could lure a Major League baseball team to the city.

At the time, Sacramento had been without professional baseball since 1976, when the Sacramento Solons departed, and Serna left little doubt that he was targeting the struggling Oakland A’s 85 miles down Interstate 80.

“I’m declaring it is time to play ball,” the mayor said as he pulled on a green and gold baseball cap before city business leaders and representatives of five area counties.

That quest by Serna, who died in 1999, took 27 years until Thursday’s announcement that the A’s are moving to West Sacramento next season for at least three years before a planned move to a permanent home in Las Vegas.

Since Serna’s effort began, the region has changed dramatically, with the construction of a minor league stadium in West Sacramento where the River Cats play — and will soon share playing time with the A’s — and the financing deal that saved the city’s NBA Kings with the opening of the Golden 1 Center downtown.

But the expected arrival of the Oakland franchise next spring has regional leaders abuzz with talk of economic development and the possibility of a permanent home for Major League Baseball that would make Serna proud.

‘This whole corridor is going to get hot’

“The Bridge District is going to take off,” said Barry Broome, president and chief executive officer of the Greater Sacramento Economic Council, referring to the growing urban area along the Yolo County side of the Sacramento River.

“There’s plans on putting a $1 billion life science investment here, top-end housing, hotels. ...This whole corridor is going to get hot.”

No in-depth studies have yet been done on how much the A’s coming to town could boost the economy, but Broome said Thursday there are estimates of up to $650 million in economic impact, “almost the economic impact of a university.”

And if the A’s are as successful at filling the stadium as officials expect, Broome said, Sacramento will be an obvious choice for sports team expansions.

“If I’m Major League Baseball or Major League Soccer, I’m putting a franchise here as soon as possible,” he said.

Will Sacramento get permanent MLB team?

After announcing Thursday that the Athletics are relocating to the River Cats’ Sutter Health Park in 2025, Kings and River Cats owner Vivek Ranadivé expressed the same optimism that Sacramento can show baseball that it deserves a permanent team.

Ranadivé said he had spoken with MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred about Sacramento’s future — if and when MLB expands.

“I’ve been in touch with the commissioner, and I’ve gotten to know him, Rob Manfred, and they will be creating a new team,” Ranadivé told reporters after the announcement at Sutter Health Park. “They want it to be on the West Coast. They’d love for it to be in California.

“And I think this is a great showcase for us. We can prove that there’s a market here, and we can make the team successful. I think we’re in full position to get the new franchise.”

“There’s no guarantee,” he added. “You know, we have to show what we can do, and I have complete confidence that if we set our mind to something, this is an incredible city.

“We have the best fans in the world. And at the end of the day, the best fans in the world will make it happen.”

Whether that actually comes to pass, area leaders say the impact of having the A’s playing in West Sacramento — and bringing in visiting teams from the Los Angeles Dodgers to New York Yankees — can only unleash economic growth as fans pack the stadium.

Ranadivé predicted a “renaissance” for West Sacramento, which already is seeing a building boom along the Sacramento River adjacent to the ballpark.

And West Sacramento Mayor Martha Guerrero predicted “the city is going to thrive” because of the A’s.

“This is going to bring an economic prosperity here for all of our restaurants...,” she said. “We’ve been waiting for this momentum.

“We’ve been building the riverfront for this moment.”

Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg predicted that growth would extend across the river, where the Kings and the Sacramento Republic FC soccer team offer the only major professional sports experience outside the River Cats, the San Francisco giants’ Triple-A team.

“Success leads to more success, even if it takes time,” Steinberg said Thursday. “Confidence positively attracts more investment, more sports, more entertainment and more opportunities.

“Our best days are still yet to come.”

Steinberg, who is in his final year as mayor, has been a relentless booster of the city’s potential, even as the pandemic dramatically slowed growth downtown and the city’s homeless population spread throughout downtown streets.

“We’ve been through some hard times these last couple years and we certainly are not alone,” Steinberg said.

But he added that the A’s can only contribute to growth for the region.

“I have no doubt that this is going to be a major economic impact,” Steinberg said of the A’s announcement. “And it also sends a signal to the rest of the country, to other professional sports leagues, to other industry leaders who are wondering where should they think about expanding their companies, sports or non-sports related, that this region, Sacramento, West Sacramento, the entire region, is a place to do business.”

Sacramento councilwoman Caity Maple expressed similar optimism, predicting that the arrival of Major League Baseball could help keep younger Sacramentans from leaving for other major cities.

“These are the types of things that we can do to not only bring those jobs, bring that economic vitality to our city, but also retain the young people that we want to keep in the city of Sacramento,” Maple said.

That trend has already been underway for several years, as the cost of living in the Bay Area and Sacramento’s growth as a hub for restaurants, brewpubs and live entertainment has helped bring transplants to the region.

A’s move could jump start downtown

One study found last year that the Sacramento region was ranked No. 1 in terms of people moving to a new area, with most of them coming from the Bay Area.

With the A’s now arriving, Broome said, “it’s a game changer” for downtown’s economic development prospects.

“We need to bring billions into our downtown,” he said as he spoke to reporters at the ballpark in the shadows of Tower Bridge. “And this is 100 yards from downtown.”

The A’s departure from Oakland marks the third big league team to abandon the city in recent years, with the NBA’s Golden State Warriors leaving for the Chase Center in San Francisco in 2019 and the NFL’s Raiders departing for Las Vegas the next year.

City relocations of professional sports teams are nothing new. The practice has repeatedly occurred throughout the last 100 years in all major North American sports leagues.

The day the team made the announcement, it filed for federal trademark protection for the “Sacramento Athletics” and “Sacramento A’s,” even as officials said they would just be called the A’s during their stay.

But a temporary relocation, particularly one of at least three years, is highly uncommon, according to multiple experts.

“It’s just a really unusual situation for them to move in for such a long period of time,” said Pete Schroeder, an associate professor of sport management at the University of the Pacific.

While a rare move, the relocation does provide Sacramento with multiple opportunities.

Schroeder said the Athletics in combination with the Kings will demonstrate if Sacramento can sustain multiple professional franchises.

He expects fans to show their support for the A’s while the team plays in Sacramento. Typically Schroeder said, city relocations have a “honeymoon period” with high game attendance.

There’s also a possibility that the Athletics need a stadium for more than three years. Schroeder said setbacks occur when constructing professional sports stadiums and the move to Las Vegas is not a “done deal.”

“It’s going to be a breath of fresh air because there was such a bad relationship between the A’s and Oakland,” Schroeder said. “So for them to come not too far away where there’s still a lot of A’s fans. I think it’s going to be a really good fit.”

Road to MLB team has been long

As rumors swirled for months that Sacramento could be a temporary landing spot for the A’s while Las Vegas starts work on a permanent stadium, Steinberg has insisted that he preferred to see Oakland keep its baseball team, that “these decisions were made separate and apart from anything to do with Sacramento.”

The fact that the Sacramento region finally will have a Major League Baseball team — even if only temporarily — highlights the long road the area has traveled in its bid to lure more teams.

In 1989, Sacramento made an unsuccessful pitch to lure the then-Los Angeles Raiders to town. And in 2019 the city was awarded a Major League Soccer expansion franchise, generating celebrations until investor Ron Burkle pulled out of the deal a year later during the pandemic.

But baseball was always a priority for Sacramento, which has produced great players and managers, including Dusty Baker, Greg Vaughn and Larry Bowa.

After Serna announced his goal of building a stadium and finding a baseball team in 1997, he and city leaders traveled to four big league cities to drum up support and elicit ideas for how Sacramento could pull it off.

Within 18 months, however, he faced the reality that he may have aimed too high, and the city began efforts to find a Triple-A team.

For a brief, one-year period in 1999, professional baseball in Sacramento was represented by the Steelheads, a member of the independent Western League that played one season at Sacramento City College before fleeing for Vacaville.

That team was best known for bringing Pete Rose to town to throw out the first pitch, and for a bizarre publicity stunt in which fans were pulled from the stands to grab a dead steelhead out of a bucket and see how far they could throw it across the infield.

Before that team played its one season, a West Sacramento group announced in 1998 it had purchased the Triple-A Vancouver Canadians and were moving it to a riverfront stadium it planned to build.

That team became the River Cats, which began play in May 2000 at what was then known as Raley Field as the Oakland A’s farm team.

The team later became a San Francisco Giants affiliate, and Ranadivé and the Kings bought the team in 2022 from the Savage family.

As speculation grew in recent weeks that the A’s were headed to Sacramento, River Cats general manager Chip Maxson emphasized that the River Cats “are not going anywhere.”

But the reality is that the A’s are now a major focus for the River Cats organization, with the team website on Friday selling River Cats gear and “Family Fun” packages and also offering “priority access to 2025 A’s tickets in Sacramento.”

“A’s season ticket members will enjoy first priority to seats at Sutter Health Park,” the website announced. “All other fans can secure priority access to purchase seats for A’s games at Sutter Health Park by joining The A’s List and placing a $100 per seat deposit on a Season Ticket Membership.”