WEST SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Two of baseball’s lowest revenue teams, the former Oakland Athletics and teetering Tampa Bay Rays, opened their season this past week in what amounts to minor league ballparks. It’s an unprecedented predicament for Major League Baseball.
The sport has done one-offs before in different venues that are historic and charming, like last year’s San Francisco Giants-St. Louis Cardinals game at ancient Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Ala., to honor Willie Mays and the Negro Leagues.
Baseball played two games to much acclaim in successive seasons at a makeshift ballpark at the Field of Dreams site in Dyersville, Iowa. But like a carnival, once the games were over the dugouts and clubhouse came down along with the entire ballpark. Baseball moved on and is not coming back any time soon.
But this year the A’s and Rays are slated to play 81 games each at Sutter Health Park and Steinbrenner Field, respectively. The A’s are also sharing their facility with the Triple-A River Cats, who are playing 75 games there.
“It’s a little bit different,” Colorado Rockies manager Bud Black said before his team played the first series last weekend vs. the Rays at Steinbrenner Field, the spring home of the New York Yankees.
“It’s still baseball,” added Erik Neander, the Rays president of baseball operations.
The deteriorating Oakland Coliseum was left behind by the A’s for the Sacramento area as an interim move before their planned arrival in Las Vegas in 2028, and the Rays had no choice but to move when the roof was blown off Tropicana Field last October by Hurricane Milton.
And not to worry.
Both teams will receive about $75 million each in revenue sharing this season, mostly from the bigger market clubs. And in the A’s case, they can add $60 million from their local San Francisco Bay Area television contract, which is the reason they are playing near the state capital to begin with.
They are being hosted at Sutter Health rent free as a gift from Vivek Ranadivé, the owner of the NBA’s Kings, the River Cats and the local ballpark because he’s hoping that MLB looks kindly on the Sacramento area for a future expansion franchise.
Forget that no one—not the city, state or Ranadivé—can afford to build a $2 billion stadium with a retractable roof to draw an expansion franchise.
In St. Petersburg, the Rays need a $55.7 million reconstruction of the Trop before approaching the matter of where they might play beyond the next three years.
It’s a horrible situation. The minor league ballparks in most cases are cozy and well appointed. And one or two nights of playing in them would be a fun experience for the host teams and perhaps even the visitors. But any more than that will be a burden as the summer drags on and the heat and inclement weather make it difficult to play in both places.
In 50 years of covering baseball, I have been to 66 venues around the country and world where a Major League game that counts has been played, including the Tokyo Dome in Japan and Hiram Bithorn Stadium in Puerto Rico.
By far, Sutter Health Park is the worst.
At the end of last season I visited as the River Cats concluded their home schedule. I found a clean, cozy, 14,014-seat ballpark with great concessions, plus an outfield view of downtown Sacramento and the old yellow bridge that connects it with West Sac across the Sacramento River, I wrote at the time.
But I was comparing it to the Coliseum. And I must say that at least so far I’ve found no feral cats, rodents or possums here as once inhabited the former A’s home of 57 years.
But unlike Steinbrenner Field, which is a well-equipped MLB spring training facility—“and one of the best in baseball,” Black said—Sutter Health has a decided minor league feel that’s not going change with any upgrades.
The press facilities are woefully inadequate and will be taxed to the max when the Yankees come in with their huge media contingent on May 9-11. The same thing with the Mets on April 11-13.
“But it’s our home and it’s going to be our home for the next three years,” A’s manager Mark Kotsay said.
While the Rays and A’s have been told they must make the best of it and act accordingly, the players traveling to these venues figure to file a myriad of complaints to the MLB Players Association about conditions and logistics, particularly the cramped visiting locker rooms. At Sutter Health, they are beyond the left-field fence and can only be accessed through gates on the field or walkways around the ballpark.
In both places, millions of dollars were spent building and upgrading the home clubhouses. At Sutter Health, the visitor’s clubhouse is the smallest in baseball, smaller than those at Fenway Park and Wrigley Field, the oldest ballparks in the league.
At Steinbrenner Field, where the Yankees spent millions of dollars upgrading their clubhouse and training facilities, the visiting clubhouse is antiquated and tiny, what you might expect in a typical spring training or minor league facility.
Right now, everyone is trying to make the best of it.
“We take it for granted where we are and what the stadium we’re in is like,” Cubs shortstop Dansby Swanson said. “That’s how I look at it. From my perspective, … it’s a beautiful day to play a baseball game wherever it is.”
