A's Home Opener in Sacramento Not Sold Out

When the A's decided to unleash a flash sale for lawn seats that included two tickets for $30 for the home opener on April 3, that set off alarm bells that the entire game was not sold out yet. These flash sales popped up early on in the 2025 season when tickets weren't moving as much as the club had hoped, and helped get more fans through the gates of Sutter Health Park.

Lawn seats for this game had been selling for $66.20 each, after fees. The fact that they're offering two for $30 signals that they're not selling at all.

So with the alarm bells ringing, we went through each and every section, and counted each and every available seat throughout the ballpark on Monday morning. The final tally we had in our unofficial process was 1,391 available seats. There are 10,624 fixed seats at Sutter Health, which means roughly 13% of the seats are still left open. There are also plenty of lawn seats left.

Some sections had as few as one seat available, while others (section 121) maxed out with 141. The majority of the sections had somewhere between 20-60 tickets remaining. The sections behind home plate were the most full, but the further you get out from there, the more available seats there are.

Tickets are still expensive for families

Part of the reason for this is that the prices for these seats are still fairly high. Section 104, down the first base line, has tickets in the second row for $157.20 after fees.

For the River Cats home opener a week prior, seats in the same section but in the front row are $39.05. This is the same exact market and the same swath of people the A's are trying to capture. Sacramento is also seen as more of a Giants town.

That means that patrons can either pay $39 to see the prospects of their favorite team, or $157 for a big league team that they don't care about that will also be gone after the 2027 season. The A's haven't done much to really embrace Sacramento either, with most of their public focus on what's next in Las Vegas. They'll be donning "Sacramento" jerseys once a week, though.

Cause for concern?

The club doing a flash sale roughly a month before the home opener is an indication that they're a little worried those tickets weren't going to move on their own by the time game day rolled around. Lawn tickets to the following game on Saturday afternoon are a little more reasonable at $54.45, a savings of nearly $12 per ticket to sit on the grass.

Given that there is still time to pack the park and the A's are already pushing to move tickets, the likelihood here is that they will sell out on Friday, April 3 against the Houston Astros. If they don't that's obviously not great news for the rest of the season's sales, given that even last year when they averaged 9,487 fans per game they still sold out the opener.

There is also some belief that one way to land Sacramento an expansion franchise would be to pack the park for the A's night in and night out. The problem is that the franchise hasn't done much to motivate the fans to come out to a game, and there is no guarantee that if the fans pay these high prices that they'll actually get a team of their own.

Heading into last season, we expected sellouts every game. That didn't happen. Now we're interested to see how Sacramento chooses to embrace the A's, whether they do at all.

For more A's news and insights, follow Jason @ByJasonB on X, or the site @InsideTheAs!