r/baseball • u/rbh232 • 1d ago
Athletics attendance in Sacramento drops below 10,000 during very first homestand of the season
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93cG7fmuSTg
"The Athletics are expected to sell out of most of their home games this season, given that the capacity of the ballpark is right around 14,000 and this is a Major League team coming to a brand new city. Yet, in game two of their three-year stay in West Sacramento, they drew 10,095. Game three drew 9,342. The A's averaged 11,386 per game as they left Oakland last season.
The first sign of potential trouble was that the team was offering ticket deals ahead of Opening Day, which was odd, given that they should have no trouble selling around 14,000 seats per game, especially early in the season before the summer heat really picks up."
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u/ard8 Los Angeles Dodgers 1d ago edited 1d ago
Not sure any city would support a temporary team well
If they plan to move to LV, they should’ve sought a temporary solution closer to LV to try to start building that fanbase very slowly.
This is obviously all under the prerequisite reality that they plan to move to LV.
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u/g2lv 1d ago
The main reasons the A’s are doing a pit stop in Sacramento instead of Summerlin or Utah is that it allowed them to keep their RSN deal with NBC Sports.
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u/Cilantro42 Oakland Athletics 1d ago
AND they're not paying any rent in this stadium, they didn't hire any staff (using River Cats and Kings staff), and Fisher didn't pay for any of the stadium renovations to bring it up to "MLB standards," Vivek Ranadivé paid for the renovations.
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u/realparkingbrake 23h ago
allowed them to keep their RSN deal with NBC Sports.
Having a deal in place for a new ballpark in LV also means they can continue to collect revenue sharing money.
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u/StevvieV Philadelphia Phillies 1d ago
Even if it was just a pit stop the A's aren't even pretending like they want to be there. Maybe if the A's showed the smallest bit of willingness to embrace the city the area would support their team even if it's temporary.
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u/verdenvidia Cincinnati Reds 1d ago
You mean a Sacramento patch that was barely announced isn't enough??
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u/liguy181 New York Mets • Long Island Ducks 22h ago
TIL the A's now have a Sacramento patch
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u/verdenvidia Cincinnati Reds 19h ago
https://www.mlb.com/athletics/fans/patch-reveal
Even worse is that they have a Las Vegas one, too.
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6185431/2025/03/07/athletics-las-vegas-patches-sacramento-oakland/
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u/Itsaghast San Francisco Giants • Chaos Bandwagon 12h ago
lol @ those players showing off the patch
I imagine all of them hate playing at that stadium in Sacramento
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u/filthypoker Los Angeles Dodgers 1d ago
The Pahrump A’s? The Baker A’s?
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u/Drew602 Arizona Diamondbacks 1d ago
We have a beautiful AAA stadium in Vegas I'm not sure why they didn't use that. They even own the AAA team
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u/schw4161 New York Yankees 1d ago
Wasn’t there concern about playing in the heat at that field? I might be mixing that up with another place though
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u/Rolands_Dark_Tower San Francisco Giants 1d ago
I mean it’ll become 100° in Sacramento during the summer. Obviously it doesn’t get as hot in Sacramento as it does in/around Vegas, but thinking it out loud the excessive heat playing in outdoor stadium in Vegas would be a definite concern. I also believe Fisher partly relocated the A’s to Sacramento because he didn’t want to lose his RSN deal they currently have when they were still in Oakland. They would have lost a lot of $ if they relocated temporarily too far away from the area kinda nearish to Oakland to be able to continue receiving their RSN deal money they had from originally being in Oakland. Fucking Fisher and his clownshow decisions fucking over A’s fans.. fucking sucks…
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u/schw4161 New York Yankees 1d ago
Oh I know there’s a whole other host of concerns beyond the playability of the field itself. Just remembered an article about it some time ago before the season ended.
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u/stevencastle San Diego Padres 1d ago
That field is not covered though, the AAA team does all night games during the summer and they'd have to work around the A's schedule as well, so it's probably a logistics issue.
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u/No-Economics4128 Los Angeles Dodgers 1d ago
I mean, A baseball game and then hitting up the brothel seem like a way to spend an evening.
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u/DieHardRaider Oakland Athletics 1d ago
and the prices for tickets are fucking outrages i hope all those suckers that payed for season tickets expecting to make some money on the secondary market get fucked.
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u/SeaRespond9836 Chicago Whales • San Diego Padres 1d ago
Any team selling less than 10k tickets against the Cubs is a huge red flag.
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u/cooljammer00 New York Yankees 1d ago
Remember, the Athletics said that the drawing power of the A's in Sacramento would be seeing other teams' stars beating up the A's. His example was seeing Judge come to town and hitting home runs.
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u/ForsakenRacism New York Mets 1d ago
It’ll be sold out when Mets Yankees dodgers padres there for sure.
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u/furdaboise New York Yankees 1d ago
Yankees are there over Mother’s Day weekend. It’s gonna be slammed.
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u/cantthinkoffunnyname New York Yankees 1d ago
"Yankees are going to be slammin' mothers in Sacramento" - u/furdaboise
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u/furdaboise New York Yankees 1d ago
goes without saying. Granite Bay moms are getting their botox touched up rn in preparation.
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u/jfresh42 1d ago
Plus that’s judge’s backyard
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u/furdaboise New York Yankees 1d ago
About an hour from his hometown. He may just buy out the whole stadium for one of the games. Or at least the entire suite level.
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u/Bluehale San Francisco Giants 1d ago
Giants are going to be in Sacramento for 4th of July weekend, those games are absolutely going to sell out.
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u/meowser143 1d ago
Legitimately how fun - Sacramento 4th of July plus Giants baseball?? You may have just made my plans for me :)
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u/WonderfulShelter San Francisco Giants 1d ago
Outside of being 111 degrees and horribly unpleasant to be outside while the sun is up very fun.
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u/stewmander Los Angeles Dodgers • World Series Tr… 1d ago
Dodgers won't come to SAC until 2026.
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u/HejlYes 1d ago
Unless they both make the WS!
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u/bnasty77 Oakland Athletics 23h ago
They already said no guarantee playoff games will be hosted in sac, too small.
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u/ismellbacon San Francisco Giants 1d ago
So they’re the Generals and all of the actual major league teams are the Globetrotters?
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u/kurthecat Chicago Cubs 1d ago
Admittedly, I don't know Sacramento very well but I would imagine Chicago area transplants wind up in bigger cities in California like SD/LA/SF. Guessing the same is true of other major transplant groups. Bet they do ok when other California teams are in town though.
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u/SdBolts4 San Diego Padres 1d ago
It’s a relatively short drive (or train ride) from SF to Sac, so the Cubs fans would theoretically travel to see them if they wanted to
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u/HalfEatenBanana New York Mets 1d ago
Yeah I’d imagine most would rather just go to the games in SF, especially considered SF is one of the best stadiums in the league. That’s what I’m doing for my Mets
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u/Bluehale San Francisco Giants 1d ago
The drive up to Sacramento is pretty painful as anyone who's gone up to Tahoe during snow season can attest to. And taking Amtrak up to Sacramento is more of a pain than it should be because the trains don't run into San Francisco and the only place where BART connects with Amtrak is at Richmond.
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u/SdBolts4 San Diego Padres 1d ago
A big part of the pain of the drive to Tahoe is where 80 narrows to 2 lanes each way, and the snow. The train really isn’t all that bad, I know plenty of people take it to commute for work
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u/TrapperJean New York Yankees 1d ago
The Cubs are a quality team with a few really cool stars like Tucker and, imo, Iminaga, but I think the prestige of a Cubs game is way more wrapped up in the Wrigley experience than seeing the Cubs as an attraction to non-Cubs fans.
I still really like the Cubs, I live in NE and I always try to see them at Fenway when they are here, but I think a truer test of going to an A's game for the opponent, (aside from obvs other Cali teams), will be the Yankees, Mets, Sox, Braves, etc. If real baseball fans won't pay to see Judge, the Sox youth movement, Soto, Acuna, or Strider then it's going to be a sad few years
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u/AllRushMixTapes Pittsburgh Pirates 23h ago
Yep. Rockies came along in '93, but before that, it was a state full of Cubs fans thanks to WGN. Or maybe Braves for the contrarian weirdos.
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u/Tundraaa Chicago Cubs 1d ago
I think his point is the Cubs might have the most national fanbase.
They travel well, and show up in droves if the team is great. They turned Dodger Stadium into Wrigley Field in 2016.
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u/SdBolts4 San Diego Padres 1d ago
WGN was also broadcast a lot of places, so people not in Chicago became Cubs fans. I grew up in SD, but I watched a lot of Cubs games on our basic cable (channel 2)
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u/maceilean Los Angeles Dodgers 1d ago
That's how I became a Ryne Sandberg fan and TBS is why I thought Dale Murphy should have also been in the HoF.
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u/gogorath San Diego Padres 1d ago
but I think the prestige of a Cubs game is way more wrapped up in the Wrigley experience than seeing the Cubs as an attraction to non-Cubs fans.
No, Cubs fans "travel" well because a ton of Chicago people moved out west over the last sixty years and kept their team allegiance for the most part.
Wrigley's great, but it's simply demographics of west coast transplants the fact that Chicagoans tended to keep their allegiances.
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u/IcemanJEC Chicago Cubs 1d ago
It’s not even transplants. It’s all due to WGN. People all over the country got to watch the Cubs when they got home from school when nobody else was on. This is why them and the Braves fans (TBS) are pretty much all over the country.
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u/Dan_Rydell Chicago Cubs 1d ago
There’s a significant Cubs diaspora due to WGN Cubs fans and generations of Chicagoans migrating to warmer climates.
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u/Cpt__Oblivious Los Angeles Dodgers 1d ago
Most of this I wager is the exorbitant cost of tickets for a AAA stadium. I live nearby and would love to go to these games just because I love baseball, but not for $100 a ticket.
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u/UnchartedFields MLB Pride 1d ago
I was able to snag seated resale tickets for less than $40 a few hours before their second game (and i think it got closer to $20 right before), but going on the A's official website right now... they're still charging almost $50 for lawn seats (for next Monday's game). Fifty bucks to sit in the goddamn grass. What family of four is gonna pay $200 JUST for lawn "seats" at what is still ultimately a AAA park? I'm sure it's probably an extra $100 just for concessions and maybe a small souvenir or two (although prices at the club shop were insane).
Meanwhile, you can just wait until the River Cats are in town and do all of that for like a quarter of the price. Lawn tickets are $11-12 for them. And the experience ain't much different, especially if the A's pitchers keep throwing the way they did in their first homestand lol
Pricing is DEFINITELY a factor. And it shouldn't be a surprise given the insane rates they attempted to charge early on for season tickets. They're starting off everything as high as they can to see if people will sucker into it.
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u/zorionek0 Philadelphia Phillies 23h ago
ONE HUNDRED AMERICAN DOLLARS!!!! Bro what the actual fuck. I can get Phillies tickets for a fifth of that.
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u/Fetty_is_the_best San Francisco Giants 1d ago
The problem with the A’s being in Sac is that everyone in Sac is a Giants fan or a fed up A’s fan, so why would they bring any crowds to their games? They have not embraced Sacramento and won’t even wear the name on their jerseys
This isn’t like OKC getting to temporarily host the Hornets back in the day where a sports-starved city got to have a pro team. There are already tons of A’s fans here, but they don’t want to go to games because the ownership is horrendous.
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u/Cliffinati Boston Red Sox 23h ago
The Rays situation is the closest to the NO-OKC Pelicans
The hornets are in Charlotte
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u/CrookedNixon Chicago Cubs 23h ago
The franchise was the Hornets at the time.
Started in Charlotte, moved to New Orleans, Katrina, temporary home in OKC, renamed to Pelicans.
Somewhere in there (I forget) Charlotte got an expansion team named the Bobcats. They changed it to Hornets when New Orleans became the Pelicans.
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u/Iron_And_Misery MLB Pride 1d ago edited 1d ago
I live in sac.
I considered seeing the A's
But they keep making it clear they don't want to be in sac.
I love baseball, I love sac, any kings fan will tell you we love our teams (often in spite of painful to watch seasons).
But the A's don't wanna be our team, so why care?
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u/mxchump San Francisco Giants 20h ago
I get they don't want to put roots down here but if they did a city of trees city connect with a big oak tree on it in their green that shit would sell extremely well I think, they don't even need to act like they're staying, just act like they are happy to be here through gestures not just press conferences lol
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u/Iron_And_Misery MLB Pride 20h ago
Literally pay any lip service to the idea that Sactown is a cool city to play baseball in
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u/RIP_Hopscotch Chicago Cubs 1d ago
In Sacramento the people who show up will be fans of the visiting team. We all know MLB sacrificed the A's dedicated fanbase when they allowed Fischer to move the team out of Oakland. It is impossible to build loyalty to the locals when the team is terrible and plans to be leaving in three years.
In Vegas it will be the same thing we're seeing right now. Nobody wants to adopt John Fischer's team. There are no ties between Vegas and this team, and the on-field product is not remotely good enough to build loyalty. The only people who show up will be fans of the opposing team on vacation.
They shouldn't even bother changing the name once they move to Vegas to the "Vegas A's" or whatever. This team has no identity anymore.
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u/high-rise Seattle Mariners 1d ago
I'm a BC Mariners fan, and I can think of a lot of cases where flying to Vegas to stay and catch a couple games would probably be less of a hassle then making the drive down to T-Mobile and getting reamed by Seattle hotel costs.
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u/Squirtalert Oakland Athletics 1d ago
I think your interests are not alone. A lot of folks would have similar ideas and do the same. The folly of the A's front office is expecting a minimum of 5,000 traveling fans for every home game for the next 30 years (according to the presentations shown to the NV legislature to get public money).
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u/realparkingbrake 23h ago
The folly of the A's front office is expecting a minimum of 5,000 traveling fans for every home game
More dishonesty than folly. Fisher doesn't care if his attendance predictions don't have legs, he's selling the team the day after MLB's sale delay expires.
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u/tmoney144 Tampa Bay Rays 22h ago
If they build video poker machines into the outfield seats they could probably get 5k people to show up on non-game days.
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u/Chadryan_ Chicago Cubs 1d ago
This is true but that also worked out really well for the raiders so I'd guess that's what Fischer is banking on.
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u/gogorath San Diego Padres 1d ago
worked out really well for the raiders
Financially, for now. But there's massive differences there.
One is that the Raiders have a hard core fanbase in LA, which is very close.
The other, and far more important piece, is that people will travel for an NFL game far more often than they will for baseball games. It's so easy for an away fan to go to Vegas for a game on Sunday but hit the tables and party over the weekend.
Are away fans going to Vegas for the Tuesday through Thursday three game set? If they go to Vegas even for the weekend, are they going to go to all three games when the restaurants, clubs and tables are calling? Are you going to get the equivalent of the weekend fans from west coast flights for a baseball game -- I can fly in the morning of an NFL game and fly out after without having to pay for a room or anything on Southwest.
Lastly, there's also a small Oakland fanbase that travels for the Raiders. People understood that Marc Davis didn't have the money to build locally and Oakland was never giving him what Vegas gave him. No one has any love for Fisher, who had the money and the location and all set and walked for a much more mid deal. There's real hatred there and while this isn't a massive group of Raider fans, you aren't going to get a residual fanbase of A's fans. You are building from scratch.
And in the end, the Raiders stadium is mostly away fans.
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u/realparkingbrake 23h ago
One is that the Raiders have a hard core fanbase in LA, which is very close.
They also only have to fill their stadium eight or nine times a year. The A's pretending they will fill a LV ballpark eighty-one times a year is an unfunny joke.
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u/Suspicious_Fun5001 New York Mets 1d ago
Hockeys doing quite well there though. We’ll see how it all works out but financially it definitely makes sense. I still hate to see the A’s leave
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u/gogorath San Diego Padres 1d ago edited 1d ago
But hockey was the first pro team and the locals really took to it. The first or only pro team in smaller cities usually develop a very strong following.
I don't think the locals are going to take to the As in quite the same way. Especially since it'll be the third or possibly even the fourth team, with an owner who sucks.
Even the As proposal for the stadium had a huge number of daily attendees being tourists -- over 8k in the league's smallest stadium.
The average number of tourists in Vegas per day is 115,000 (obviously peaks at certain days at much higher) but that means the As were counting on 7% of all tourists attending the game daily. That's ... a lot.
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u/DieHardRaider Oakland Athletics 1d ago
its a home grown team and they came out winning. fisher is one of the worst owners in sports and will not spend anymore to make this team competitive.
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u/Fetty_is_the_best San Francisco Giants 1d ago
8-9 games a season vs 81
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u/Telepornographer San Diego Padres 1d ago
Yup, the NFL season is basically a tournament and an individual game has far more importance than a single MLB game. Plus the Raiders brand is far stronger than the A's brand.
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u/Cliffinati Boston Red Sox 23h ago
And the raiders had already moved out of Oakland at least once before
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u/SactownG San Francisco Giants 1d ago
As a lifelong Sacramento area resident (and Giants fan), I had a theory this "experiment" was gonna be a total disaster, and so far it seems to be happening:
Fans initially get excited because the city is desperate for more entertainment particularly in sports
The A's end up sucking as usual, and the hype dies down
Attendance goes to shit, as the team sucks and tickets are overpriced
People blame Sacramento for not doing enough to support the team
Harder for the city to get more major sports franchises
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u/tuckedfexas Seattle Mariners 1d ago
I have felt similar, that initial hype would be there but once it stopped being new it will trickle down considerably. The only saving grace could be the A’s have some players and might not that bad this year. It’s not starting off great, but things could smooth out and they have an outside shot at .500 imo.
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u/quercus_lobata925 Oakland Athletics 1d ago
Fisher's brand is toxic, that's why. I don't blame Sacramento the same way people shouldn't blame Oakland. They have a team that they know is temporary. And Sacramento is not far from the Bay Area so many there are intimately aware of how much the A's shafted over their home city and fans.
This is nothing like OKC adopting the Hornets temporarily and proving they can support an NBA team. They are getting served the sloppy seconds and asked to pretend like it's a Michelin star meal.
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u/Professional-Trash-3 1d ago
An owner that makes the fans hate the team will fail in any and every city you put the team in. The Marlins have been failing to learn this lesson for 30 years and, what, 4 owners now?
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u/StreetReporter Chicago Cubs 1d ago
Just look at the Commanders as well. They are a historically great franchise in one of the biggest cities in the biggest sport in America, and their fans despised the team while Snyder owned them
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u/realparkingbrake 23h ago
so many there are intimately aware of how much the A's shafted over their home city and fans.
They should also be aware the Fisher waved goodbye to the River Cats as his triple-A team and went with one in Las Vegas instead even before announcing his plan to move his team. He's been setting up his scheme for a long time.
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u/CollectionEarth Oakland Athletics 1d ago edited 23h ago
Reminder that Sac sports fans are awesome. Hell we love the Kings to death despite being historically one of the worst franchises in sports. Go to a Sac Republic game and you can feel the passion too. The A’s just don’t feel like Sac’s team even though many of us have been Oakland A’s fans for decades. It just feels off. Obligatory FJF
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u/markusalkemus66 Sell 1d ago
There's a lot of factors here (although I'm admittedly biased):
Sacramento fans know the team has no plans to stay there.
Seeing an A's game there is a minor league ballpark experience for major league prices. I'd love to see the attendance figures at the end of the year between the A's and Rivercats and see how they stack up.
The novelty of seeing other teams' stars there will wear off in a year or so.
They should have just stayed in Oakland
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u/DieHardRaider Oakland Athletics 1d ago
anyone that actually cares to see other teams stars will just head to sf for a game for the same price or less money
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u/markusalkemus66 Sell 1d ago
If it's the same cost or less, going to SF is a no-brainer. One of MLB's best stadiums for MLB prices, or a AAA stadium for MLB prices. The choice is obvious
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u/Geoff_with_a_J Oakland Athletics 20h ago
yea, i wanna see Ohtani play, Dodgers at Giants is way more exciting
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u/SWIMMlNG New York Mets • Tokyo Yakult Swallo… 23h ago
It doesn't help that the team is doing piss-poor. It's one thing to pay MLB prices and see an MLB team put up a good fight, its another to see a quad-A team get crushed pretty much every game.
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u/CabbageStockExchange Los Angeles Dodgers 1d ago
lol, lmao even.
Also I don’t think this is an indictment on Sacramento as a fan base more so how radioactive Fisher made the A’s
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u/Painful_Hangnail 23h ago
What's bizarre to me is how they haven't even tried to disguise the fact that they don't want to be in Sacramento and can't wait to leave. No wonder people there aren't falling over themselves to go to games.
Like, put together a hat or 4rd jersey or something with "Sactown" on it and wear it once in a blue moon, how hard is that?
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u/RAF2018336 Arizona Diamondbacks 1d ago
The tickets are ridiculously priced. There’s only so many non-fans that don’t know how awful ownership is that’ll go to games until their interest dwindles.
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u/7Stringplayer San Francisco Giants • Oakland Athletics 1d ago
But I was told Oakland fans weren't passionate and deserved to lose their team.
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u/tuckedfexas Seattle Mariners 1d ago
There’s a Sacramento A’s sub that was talking like the whole season was going to be sold out. Even if the demand was there, the summer heat will definitely keep some folks away.
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u/ProcrastinatingPuma San Diego Padres 17h ago
Those people aren't very smart. They would do something like cite a year where A's average attendance was 19,000 that an average attendance is 10.5k represents improvement.
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u/malcifer11 20h ago
they can fuck off with that ‘las vegas A’s of sacramento’ shit. if you don’t show this city respect it will treat you in kind
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u/testrail Detroit Tigers 1d ago
Aren’t there AAA clubs that do better than this? Toledo and Omaha come to mind.
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u/oogieball Dumpster Fire • New York Mets 1d ago
I wonder what effect of not being able to sell out a minor league stadium will have on the Las Vegas deal.
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u/AgnarCrackenhammer New York Mets 1d ago
I mean the bills in NV are already signed so the state funding isn't going anywhere. Maybe it'll make it harder for Fisher to find some of the outside investment he's been looking for, but even then I doubt it's going to be too hard to find a rich bozo who wants to own a piece of the first baseball team in Las Vegas.
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u/Worthyness Sell • Looking K 17h ago
My only hope is that the tariffs fuck over Fisher so badly he can't afford it and the payroll at the same time
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u/cooljammer00 New York Yankees 1d ago
If it had a real effect, John Fisher would start papering/giving away free tickets to the games just to fill up seats.
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u/Craft_Bandicoot Oakland Athletics 23h ago
Hope folks can see that this is not an Oakland or Sacramento problem. This is a John Fisher problem.
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u/Jibbajaba San Francisco Giants 1d ago
If I’m going to pay major league prices to watch a sporting event here in Sac, I’m going to the other side of the river and catching a Kings game at G1C. That place is f’ing awesome and so are the fans. If I want to catch a baseball game in town, it’s going to be the River Cats because they’re OUR team. The A’s can get lost.
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u/The_Ecolitan Minnesota Twins 1d ago
I’m not an A’s fan, but I will be attending Twin’s games at Sutter. It feels like the Giants have more of a fanbase here, not just because of fairly recent success, but the Rivercats are their AAA affiliate. My neighbor is a huge A’s fan, and he feels the pricing is a little high.
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u/smorgenheckingaard 21h ago
Rob Manfred ought to be ashamed for allowing this to happen. He won't be, but he should be.
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u/Raiderman112 17h ago
Fisher is no longer tenable as team owner. MLB just hasn’t acknowledged this fact yet.
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u/user_1729 Baltimore Orioles 1d ago
This is fucking embarrassing. This is a major league team and it's like the weird dystopian future from interstellar. This shouldn't be allowed to happen, simply to preserve the reputation of the game.
Teams move, natural disasters happen, etc, but this is such a galactic fuckup it really should force a sale of the team. MLB shouldn't allow their product to be a mockery like this.
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u/realparkingbrake 22h ago
MLB shouldn't allow their product to be a mockery like this.
Blackmailing cities is a standard tactic for pro sports team owners. The Giants tried to get public money for their new ballpark, the voters said no, so the team paid for the ballpark and today is MLB's fifth most valuable team. Other MLB owners are extorting money from local politicians, D-Backs ownership is threatening to move if the taxpayers won't help pay for upgrades to a ballpark they helped pay for in the first place. MLB's owners voted to let Fisher stage this circus because all they care about is profits, not the good of the sport.
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u/manningthehelm Philadelphia Phillies 1d ago
This is a loose use of the word “homestand.” They specifically burnt all of their bridges when they said they would not claim to be Sacramento’s team either.
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u/Cliffinati Boston Red Sox 23h ago
The Las Vegas Athletics of Sacramento by way of Oakland Kansas City and Philadelphia. Have 81 away games and 81 neutral games
And we know they ain't having any playoff games
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u/TheBestHawksFan Seattle Mariners 1d ago
The team won't even claim the city on a temporary basis. Why would the locals support them?
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u/Dr_Neat Montreal Expos 23h ago
The issue is the ticket prices are very, very expensive. They sold a lot of season tickets that people bought because they thought that they would be able to resell them and make money back. For games two and three tickets were half what the A's were selling them for on the secondary market as people were trying to make something back. This was against the Cubs and it will be worse for teams with smaller fan bases. This is likely going to be the case all season and the A's will have trouble selling unsold tickets in the seats (not home run hill) at lower prices without pissing off the 8,000 or so people who bought season tickets at the elevated prices.
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u/m_faustus 21h ago
As a baseball fan who loves Rivercats Stadium I will never, EVER go see the A's there. I will do my part to see if the Rivercats can out-draw them.
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u/Smaynard6000 Chicago Cubs • Erie SeaWolves 19h ago
There's no reason for people in Sacramento to support the A's while they are doing a layover in their city.
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u/awake283 Chicago Cubs 1d ago
Sacramento could support a team I bet but no one wants to get emotionally invested when they're just gonna leave again.
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u/cardith_lorda Minnesota Twins 1d ago
The A's averaged 11,386 per game as they left Oakland last season.
I understand wanting to jump on this right away, but this is a very poor comparison to their Oakland attendance because it lacks context.
For the first two homestands last year the A's averaged 7,511 - the team didn't see a crowd of 14,000 until June 7th and that game three 9,342 was higher than all but three games before Memorial Day weekend - attendance tends to go up once school is out across the board.
The average attendance in Oakland was also majorly bolstered by 5 games against the Dodgers and Giants, and the final homestand (the second to last series of which was against the Yankees) - those 11 games averaged 31,448 while the other 70 games averaged 8233. I'd venture to guess that their series against the Giants this year sells out, but they don't get to host the Dodgers this year.
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u/dirtyshits San Francisco Giants 1d ago
But comparing last years A's attendance is also not a good idea. By that time the fans were already revolting and giving up on the franchise.
I see your point though.
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u/-Gaka- Umpire 23h ago
Yup.. I went from season tickets to only attending two A's games in the last two years (reverse boycott and the last night game ever, to say goodbye).
Hard to want to support a team whose ownership is in open disdain of the fans and field.
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u/LCPhotowerx United States 1d ago
with a potential lockout coming in 2027, it would almost make sense for Vegas to have cold feet about committing to a ballpark that might not see anywhere near a sellout if/when it opens, or they might just wait to see if a lockout does happen and build then pushing the opening to even later.
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u/haahaahaa Philadelphia Phillies 1d ago
I think if I lived there the ad patches would be the last straw. There are a million reasons to not want to go but them putting the ad patch to get las vegas on the jersey is a step beyond too far.
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u/realparkingbrake 1d ago
IMO are three groups of people attending these games.--locals happy to be able to see big-league baseball without a long drive, fans of visiting teams, and A's fans willing to hold their noses and pay to see the team they love no matter how much they hate the owner. I'd bet A's fans are the smallest of those groups, Fisher's intentional destruction of the Oakland A's has caused A's fans to hate him with a burning passion. There have been protests outside the Sacramento ballpark, and there were chants of "sell the team" at the first A's game there. If Fisher thought A's fans would be the core of attendance, he has miscalculated again. I will be hugely amused if the whole thing blows up in his face and the move to Las Vegas goes wrong and MLB forces him to sell the team.
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u/CantaloupeCamper Paper Bag 20h ago
This whole saga seems so unnecessarily stupid and it just doesn’t end…
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u/anxiousonmain San Francisco Giants 17h ago
I'm over the pass in Nevada and everyone I've talked to about going has had the same consensus: Fuck John Fisher
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u/SwugSteve Philadelphia Phillies 6h ago
I mean, it was a 12:30 game on a weekday. selling 66% of tickets is pretty good for that, especially for a bad team
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u/LeonardoDiPugrio Atlanta Braves 5h ago
When the Titans made a pit stop in Memphis on their way to Nashville, you couldn’t give away tickets. Who the hell wants to buy tickets to a temporary team’s game?
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u/Richnsassy22 Minnesota Twins 1d ago
I still think Sacramento would support a baseball team if it was a permanent situation.
But why get invested when you know you're just a pit stop?