A's New Gold Sacramento Jersey Captures Team's Strange Reality
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At the very end of the 2025 campaign, the A's extended an olive branch to the people of Sacramento, announcing that in 2026 they would be donning brand new gold jerseys with "Sacramento" across the chest. This came after the club had said that they will be going by just "Athletics" or "A's" during their stint in the capital city at the beginning of the previous offseason.
Those jerseys will now be worn at every Saturday home game for "Sacramento Saturdays" which will include some pretty cool giveaways all season long.
For the first celebratory event, the A's were handing out replica gold Sacramento jerseys, and the fans were wearing them proudly in the stands. Yet, there was still something a bit off about the promotion.
A tale of two cities
The biggest issue that the people of Sacramento have had with the A's is that they have felt like an afterthought for the team's tenure in their city. Of course, the plan for the A's is to only play for three seasons at Sutter Health Park before opening up their brand new ballpark in Las Vegas, so there have also been advances made toward the people of Sin City to get them ready for the A's arrival.
That is to be expected due to the reality of the situation, but there is a pretty glaring imbalance in the amount of attention the A's are giving their current home and their future one.
That balance has been heavily geared towards Las Vegas, while the expectation has still been that the fans in Sacramento will come out to support the club. When the fans don't feel appreciated, they stop showing up. It happened in Oakland, too.
There is also the dangling carrot over the city's head that showing up to support the A's during this time in Sacramento could lead to a favorable outcome when Major League Baseball officially decides to expand in the coming years.
These two factors combined make it seem as though the A's are relying heavily on this looming threat of "no support, no future team" while they focus on the future of the club. At some point this team will have to start servicing the fans they do have, instead of continually chasing the ones just around the next corner.
The big design flaw
The one huge design flaw for this giveaway is that they made them perhaps too authentic. On the field, the A's have a three-year sponsorship deal with the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority for the "Las Vegas" patch the team wears on the sleeves of all of their jerseys.
The on-field "Sacramento" jerseys also have this patch, which is odd, but to be expected given the sponsorship money the A's get from that Vegas deal.
seeing green & GOLD 💛 pic.twitter.com/O7lQtRmlKI
— Athletics (@Athletics) April 4, 2026
The jersey giveaways also came with that Las Vegas patch on the sleeve, which turned this from a cool promotion that could be a personal memento from the brief period the A's spent in Sacramento, to another reminder that the team has always had one foot out the door.
Even the small percentage of the team's attention that Sacramento receives has Vegas on it.
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Jason has been covering the A’s at various sites for over a decade, and was the original host of the Locked on A’s podcast. He also covers the Stanford Cardinal as they attempt to rebuild numerous programs to prominence.
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