Watch Out For Sacramento in MLB Expansion?
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The A's decided to flee Oakland for a three-year stint in Sacramento because they needed to get away from the nightly "Sell the team!" chants that echoed around the Oakland Coliseum 81 times a year. They also needed to start rebuilding the team's brand for their arrival in Las Vegas, and that was going to be hard to do while playing three lame duck seasons in a city they'd just spurned.
The A's landed in Sacramento for the 2025 season, and are planning on staying through at least the 2027 campaign, for their planned arrival in Sin City in 2028.
Sacramento has been welcoming to the A's, because they see this as their opportunity to prove that they're worthy of landing a Major League Baseball team of their own.
Earlier this week, Mayor Kevin McCarty continued to express his desire to land an expansion franchise in Sacramento. According to the Sacramento Bee, he and West Sacramento Mayor Martha Guerrero will be launching a campaign for an expansion team in the spring.
McCarty added, "We are 100% in the mix."
Can Sacramento land an expansion franchise?
As of right now, Major League Baseball isn't formally looking to expand from 30 to 32 teams just yet. They still have a labor fight with the MLBPA to go through next winter before officially moving forward with their expansion plans, and they'll likely want the Tampa Bay Rays ballpark situation figured out beforehand as well.
MLB commissioner Rob Manfred has previously said that he would like to be the one to choose which cities end up getting the expansion franchises before he retires in 2029, which is an interesting wrinkle.
While there are a few cities that have been more vocal about their progress towards a potential expansion team, Sacramento is doing the commissioner a huge favor by allowing the A's a place to crash for three seasons at no charge to John Fisher.
There have been no reported deals that have been made where if Sacramento hosts the A's, they get an expansion team in return, but the fact that Manfred wants to choose the location could bode well for Sacramento having its own team in the future. He may be able to tip the scales in Sacramento's favor, if they're putting together a solid business plan to land a team.
The real answer will depend upon the details that are in the plan that is now expected to be released this spring. The financials of how a ballpark would work in Sacramento, the public's appetite for any public funds being used, and who they end up tapping as the potential owner of the club for their pitch are all going to be important points, too.
Back in October, McCarty mentioned that he'd talked to the League, and they told him that the only way to dramatically increase the city's odds of landing an expansion team is to support the A's while they're in town.
The A's drew just 9,487 fans per game in a ballpark that fits roughly 12,500, and announced just seven sellouts all year. Upping the average attendance and the sellout numbers would likely do wonders for the city in their expansion efforts.
The A's are doing their part too, lowering single-game ticket prices at the beginning of the season, with select games even costing just $8 to attend. Last year, the cheapest ticket to get in was typically around $100 for the first month of the season, and when fans that wanted to go to a game saw that, they didn't come back to check prices again.
The hope is that things will be different this season, as ticket prices are lower, and the A's will be donning a gold jersey with "Sacramento" across the chest in 2026 as a way of reaching out to the local fans. With their combined efforts, perhaps the A's see more filled seats in 2026.
Other cities in the mix
The general consensus with MLB expansion is that Nashville is seemingly guaranteed one of the two potential franchises, leaving one location in the West as the other future home of Major League Baseball.
With Sacramento yet to assert themselves into the mix, Salt Lake City has become the frontrunner out West, with Portland, Oregon also making a push of their own. Utah has seen a large growth as a sports market recently, landing the relocated Arizona Coyotes (now the Utah Mammoth) of the NHL, to join the Utah Jazz. The 2034 Winter Olympics will also return to Salt Lake.
Big League Utah is the group that "believes Utah is the future of America's pastime." The Larry H. Miller Company and his coalition are redeveloping approximately 100 acres in the heart of Salt Lake City’s westside at a site now known as the Power District.
Utah has also already approved $900 million in public funding for the "development and
construction of a qualified stadium following the initiation of a project area plan" according to the language of HB562, which passed in 2024. That is Utah's big advantage right now. We'll have to wait until the spring to see what Sacramento has prepared.
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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