AA little more than a decade ago, it felt like the whole sports vibe around Sacramento, the idea of this area as a place where professional sports should be taken seriously, was circling the drain. It felt terminal. The Kings were on their way out. The remaining highest-level pro entity was a min or league baseball club. The region had, over the decades, been the often-too-willing host of every unfit, half-wit, two-bit sports minnow that’d ever dreamed of swimming with the big fish. If you’ve lived here long enough, then you have witnessed a caravan of fly-by-night leagues and teams, rather than real, dug-in franchises and solid top-of-the-industry operations. You had seen your pro roller hockey and your indoor soccer, your United Football League, your Canadian Football League (two seasons before the local franchise folded, for those keeping score), your arena football and your pro rugby (one season apiece). You had seen a few serious tries that crashed upon takeoff; the rest were mostly frivolous. And through all of that, Sacramento had evolved into this weird standing in the sports world. It had become like the place McDonald’s would go to float a trial of a new product—a test market, and not a major one. I’m not saying that’s how it was; I’m saying that’s how it felt. But having lived through it, I am pretty sure I’m right. Years of being invaded by third-tier grinders striving for second-tier status certainly took their toll—and the second half of the Maloof family’s 14-year adventure as majority owners of the NBA’s Kings was essentially one extended exercise in trying to move the franchise and right their own listing ship. By 2013, when the Maloofs announced plans to sell to a group in Seattle, the mood in the city was burnout-plus. Pure exhaustion. So look closely now. Bring the story of sports in Sacramento forward to the current moment. Not only are the Kings still here, but they’re working on year nine in a tricked-out downtown arena that is among the best venues in the NBA. Though civic leaders have had their guts dislodged a couple of times in their flirtations with Major League Soccer, the city’s candidacy for a franchise and its dedicated fan base are both legitimate. The region itself is dynamic and growing, not receding. And this: The Athletics are settling in for a multiyear run in the same minor league ballpark where, for decades, Sacramento fans sat and ruminated on what it’d look like if Major League Baseball ever got serious about coming to town. There can be no question that this is not how those fans imagined it. That’s not the same as saying it doesn’t count. • • • • It’s nontraditional, sure. The overlords of MLB have never before approved a plan like this, wherein a franchise decamps from the place it called home for 57 years and then travels not to its new residence, but to the pro sports equivalent of a way station. Will there be three seasons in Sacramento? Four seasons? Five? Look, you’d first have to prove that the Athletics are actually going to consummate their deal in Las Vegas at all before you could begin plotting a timeline for their departure from Sutter Health Park. For now, they’re here. There’s no tomorrow until there is. You know Sutter Health Park. It sits there on the West Sacramento side of the river, a quick Tower Bridge walk to Old Town. It was Raley Field when it was opened in 2000, and it stayed that way for almost 20 years, most of those spent as the Triple-A affiliate of the A’s. Since 2015, the River Cats have been the Giants’ top affiliate, so it is properly twisted that the Athletics should be the team now moving in and sharing space. Vivek Ranadivé, owner of the Sacramento Kings and the Sacramento River Cats, speaks at Sutter Health Park on April 4, 2024, during a press conference announcing that the Athletics will be relocating to the Sacramento region before moving on to the team’s planned permanent home in Las Vegas. (Photo by Hector Amezcua/Zumapress/Newscom) This arrangement is a little too convoluted, and its future far too opaque, to be considered the culmination of anything. But neither is it a tryout, which is a concept you may have heard trotted out from time to time. At least, it’s not a tryout for the fans—they led all of minor league baseball in attendance for nine years straight when the River Cats began their run, and even with a gradual downturn that became more dramatic after the pandemic hit, Sacramento ran fifth in the Pacific Coast League in attendance in 2024. It isn’t much of a stretch to imagine the area supporting a major league team in a minor league park. Instead, think of this the way that I believe Vivek Ranadivé thinks of it: a showcase. Ranadivé rarely misses a trick. His group, which owns majority control of the Kings, is paired up with Arctos Sports, a Dallas-based private equity firm that counts the Warriors, Giants, Dodgers and Padres among the franchises in which it holds a partial ownership stake. The Kings and Arctos combined to purchase majority ownership of the River Cats in 2022, over a decade after the passing of Cats founder Art Savage. His widow, Susan—who is still part-owner of the team—and their sons had worked valiantly in the ensuing years to keep the enterprise growing and thriving. But with the Ranadivé-Arctos group comes a completely different level of financial wherewithal, and different horizons. Though he’s been dinged over the years for his inability to stop playing in the Kings’ front office sandbox (he’s run through eight head coaches in 12 years, for starters), Vivek has an outsized vision. He shouldn’t be underestimated. Ranadivé was partially drafted into the Kings ownership business in 2013 by the late David Stern, then the NBA commissioner, who similarly and famously liked to think big. Ranadivé was a minority partner in the Golden State Warriors’ operation at the time, but when the Sacramento opportunity presented itself, he was intrigued. Stern encouraged him to think larger, tossing around global expansion for the NBA, including to Ranadivé’s native India. Vivek didn’t need much prodding. But Ranadivé did not assemble his NBA ownership group in order to be called a savior. He bought the Kings as a business. Set at $534 million at the time of the sale, the franchise’s valuation has since soared; it was placed by Forbes  last year at $3.7 billion, and the Kings maintain operational control of the Golden 1 Center, which is owned by the city of Sacramento. In that same spirit, Ranadivé did not offer Sutter Health Park to the A’s on a whim, nor did his group commit to spending millions to upgrade the place because he thought it’d look cool. It is clear that Vivek values this interlude as a means of building relationships with Major League Baseball’s leadership and, crucially, its individual franchise owners, who ultimately decide everything. This is a future play, even if no one right now can see exactly what that is going to look like. Sutter Health Park will be home to both the River Cats and the Athletics during the A’s Sacramento years. (Photo by Kirby Lee/Getty Images) Putting 14,000 or so fannies into the seats and the available lawn space in West Sacramento is the easy part. Back in January, the A’s announced that they’d sold out of 2025 season tickets. (The team was careful not to reveal how many thousand seats that entailed; for whatever it’s worth, the A’s averaged 11,528 fans per game at the Coliseum last year.) The rest will presumably get snapped up. That’s not the thing. Instead, Ranadivé is focused on delivering a major league experience in this minor league ballpark. That involves dramatic upgrades in facilities, lighting, clubhouses, weight rooms, bullpens and batting cages—the things that his crew can control, but also the things that MLB players, their union and the other owners all prize, insist upon and talk about regularly. They compare notes, ballpark to ballpark and city to city. Baseball gossip. Again: This is not about attendance. It is about helping MLB recognize that Sacramento has a sports ownership group that understands how to put on a big league show. How might that ever matter? Here’s a scenario: The A’s continue to labor on the Vegas ballpark, but eventually, for one of any number of still-plausible reasons, it falls through. At that point, the franchise’s heart and soul—its players, coaches, staff , support crew, broadcasters—have been working and living in Sacramento for a while. They’ve seen a Triple-A park successfully host seasons’ worth of MLB games, not just a couple of exhibitions, and while it certainly isn’t perfect, it’s not bad at all. Ranadivé, Arctos and company then formally pitch a new major league facility somewhere in Sacramento, knowing that the franchise could remain at Sutter Health Park while it’s being constructed—and if not the A’s, then some team. After all, MLB still wants to expand from 30 franchises to 32, and the league’s commissioner Rob Manfred has said he’d like to have such plans in place by 2029, when his current term ends. A couple of years ago, a paragraph that ludicrous would get you blood-tested. But since MLB opened the door to this bizarre arrangement and the A’s stepped right through it, there no longer is reason to think that any of this is beyond possibility. Sacramento as a sports safety net? That is definitely not how baseball fans around here would have imagined it. It doesn’t have a ring to it—at all. On the other hand, greater roads have been built upon shakier foundations. The renovated stadium will feature upgraded lounge areas like the Solon Club, named after our city’s original Pacific Coast League baseball team. (Rendering courtesy of Sutter Health Park) Sacramento has a long history of getting its heart broken by sports. The Kings’ arrival from Kansas City in the 1980s was heralded as a sort of miracle, and the people who brought the franchise here—Gregg Lukenbill, Bob Cook and Joe Benvenuti—should be remembered by name for making it happen. But, you know, the Kings were just terrible forever. Upon arrival, they commenced 13 consecutive seasons of losing, most of them played in the second of two Arco Arenas, which lay amid open fields and (I’m not making this up) grazing sheep in what was then the underdeveloped Natomas area north of downtown. The franchise finally broke that gloomy seasonal pattern by hiring Geoff Petrie as general manager and Rick Adelman as head coach, and for a time the Kings were a Sports Illustrated  cover and a Western Conference powerhouse. But after eight straight years of playoff appearances, the Maloofs pushed Adelman out in 2006 and ushered in 16 more seasons of losing, albeit usually in front of near-capacity crowds. (Paying fans have rarely been an issue.) Too, this region has been played before by leagues and owners whose true hearts lay elsewhere. Al Davis famously came close to moving the NFL’s Raiders to the area in the late 1980s, or at least that’s what Davis wanted folks to believe. In reality, Davis had also been flirting for years with the Southern California industrial town of Irwindale, all part of his larger desire to force the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum to spend tens of millions on stadium upgrades. In the end, Sacramento was left in the dust, Irwindale lost an estimated $20 million (between a nonrefundable $10 million “good will” check, legal fees and other costs) and got bupkes, and Davis trucked out of L.A. and back to Oakland a few years later, lawsuits flying in every direction. The Raiders currently call Las Vegas home. In 2019, Major League Soccer walked right up to the line of awarding Sacramento a franchise—complete with an official announcement—ultimately choosing elsewhere amid ongoing investor issues here. The city had a Women’s National Basketball Association team, the Monarchs, who were not only a founding franchise but a WNBA champion. Alas, they were shuttered by the Maloofs after a dozen years. I’ve said in the past that Sacramento sports fans exist in a state of perpetual acid reflux when it comes to their teams. It feels a little less true today than it did before. Ranadivé’s Kings are not without their challenges, but they’re clearly a financially solid franchise—not going anywhere—and they play in a great downtown building. The purchase of the River Cats by Ranadivé’s group was astute; he waited until Major League Baseball essentially asserted control over almost all minor league operations in 2021, cutting 25 percent of affiliated teams but improving pay and working conditions for the rest. MLB’s deep operational stake in the minors will make it much easier for Ranadivé to work with it on current and future projects. Could come in handy. Considering the unprecedented nature of the Athletics’ arrangement at Sutter Health Park, it is hard to declare too loudly what it means. This isn’t the first time that MLB has needed to lean on a minor league facility—the Toronto Blue Jays played in Florida and Buffalo because of Canada’s pandemic-era restrictions in 2020 and 2021, and Tampa Bay will use the Yankees’ Single-A ballpark this year, its own stadium having been heavily damaged by Hurricane Milton. But prescheduling a multiyear office-sharing arrangement with a minor league club? That’s a new one. To further emphasize their temporary status, while the A’s are sporting a uniform patch that depicts the Tower Bridge, they won’t be using the city’s name in their title. For now, they’re just the “Athletics.” Dipping a toe in the Sacramento River, as it were. Not too many people should lose sleep over that. As the 20th-largest broadcast market in the country, the Sacramento region can hold its own—the size of that market is one reason the A’s chose it and not, say, Salt Lake City or Las Vegas itself, which has its own Triple-A park where the A’s-affiliated Aviators now play. Aligning with Sacramento allowed the franchise to negotiate a TV rights deal that could help it remain profitable. Its contract with NBC Sports California was worth a reported $67 million last year, when the franchise resided in Oakland, so even with a financial haircut for moving, there’s still money to be made off the broadcasts. In December, the Athletics signed two-time All-Star pitcher Luis Severino—pictured here at his introductory press conference with the team’s GM, David Forst—to a three-year, $67 million contract. (Photo by AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli) Still, it’ll be awkward. Count on that. There’s a real chance that fans’ discretionary baseball money that would normally flow to the River Cats will instead get hoovered by the A’s, who offer a big league product and big league opponents. (Cubs and Padres in April, Yankees in May, Giants themselves in July.) Among the people you should be rooting for, meanwhile, are those who comprise the grounds crew at Sutter Health Park. Between the A’s and River Cats, the field is set to absorb more than 150 games’ worth of pounding, with very few days off—and MLB will not tolerate a substandard playing surface. But there isn’t really a downside here. If the arrangement doesn’t work, well, baseball’s ruling class tried something that had never been done. If the A’s play their season more or less uneventfully in a sold-out little park, then everybody wins. And by the way: There’s a chance the A’s could be pretty decent. The team played plus-.500 baseball from July through September last season despite being achingly young at several key spots, and they spent money during the winter to add some veteran talent, including former longtime Yankees pitcher Luis Severino, a two-time All-Star. Any harm in all this to a city whose sports soul has been squished a thousand times over the years? Sacramento didn’t invent the Oakland problem; neither is it the franchise’s thief. It’s a baseball town dating to the creation of the Pacific Coast League in 1903, a city that has demonstrated its love of the game through decades of dropping dollars at the Coliseum, Candlestick and Oracle, to say nothing of the place the River Cats call home. What is Sacramento right now? Fully simplified, maybe this: The right place at the right time.   ...read more read less