A’s Opening Day in Sacramento brings fans, but shine wears off quickly

WEST SACRAMENTO, Calif. — If you cruised through the Sutter Health Park concourse in the early innings Monday night, if you moved past all the A’s jerseys on the just-a-bit-too small walkways and then sat with the picnickers on the lawn in right field, you could start to see it: The vision the A’s are selling in Sacramento. 

A’s fans were everywhere in a stadium never meant for Major League Baseball. And at the start of the game, few people seemed ready to riot over the team’s exit from Oakland. For a time, the fans seemed to be doing what people usually do at ballgames: enjoying themselves.

“It’s the Athletics against the Chicago Cubs in front of 14,000 people,” owner John Fisher said before what turned into an 18-3 shellacking of his team at the hands of those Cubs. “Which people would say, ‘Oh, that’s a minor-league ballpark.’ I’m like, this is the most intimate, positive experience that anybody can have in Major League Baseball today, to be this close to the action, to be able to see our team.”

The chaos of the A’s has probably skewed things a bit in recent years. Positive moments that should be routine — excitement on Opening Day! — take on an outsized glow.

The trouble with this Opening Day is that the glow of normalcy got walloped away, inning after inning, by the Cubs, and by so many other details in the park.

The A’s were embarrassed in their home-field debut. The Cubs had a player record a cycle for the first time in 32 years in Carson Kelly, and he was but a fraction of the trouble. The A’s were down 4-0 and surrendered back-to-back homers before they even had a chance to bat. In a stadium built for minor-league use, the Cubs looked like a barnstorming team just stopping by to delight the locals.

Of course, even the best baseball teams sometimes have terrible nights, and the A’s are talented. But there is a longer-term risk that Sutter Health Park could turn the A’s into a carnival attraction. If the ball is flying this way in March, imagine what happens when it heats up in June. 

“Look, if the wind blows out in any stadium, that’s a big deal,” Cubs manager Craig Counsell said. “If the flag’s going to be pointing out, it’s going to be an offensive park. There’s no question about it. Big-league hitters are too strong.”

Just because a ballpark is different and small does not mean it’s desirable for three or four years, the time the A’s plan to spend here. Novelty can be conflated with legitimacy. There’s a much longer list of details at Sutter Health that were noticeable Monday, some easier to fix than others.

Unlike every other major-league park, players here cannot travel from their dugout to their locker room directly. Both teams’ clubhouses are located in the outfield.

“The only thing that is not great is how far the dugout is from the clubhouse,” A’s pitcher Luis Severino said. “You have to walk all around the fences to get here. So if you have a bad game, some fans can let you know right away. But that’s our reality, so we have to just embrace it.”

Added Justin Turner of the Cubs: “The last park that didn’t have a clubhouse behind the dugout was Candlestick (Park in San Francisco), right? So we’re making history here again. Going the wrong way.”

The Athletics’ two-story home clubhouse seems to be generally well-regarded. But the visitors’ clubhouse is instantly one of the smallest in the majors, somewhere in competition with the oldest ballparks, Fenway Park and Wrigley Field, although Cubs players praised its modernization.

But the stadium just doesn’t feel like it belongs to the A’s (and it doesn’t). In the early afternoon, the A’s held several news conferences in a metal-sided shed with a soft roof with the wind whipping around to make loud noises as A’s players spoke. Only one accidentally referred to the team as still being the Oakland A’s.

It rained early Monday, and that soaked the ground inside the makeshift news-conference shack, to the delight of any reporter who placed a bag on the ground. The physical backdrop to the players’ podium here also carried the team’s name and that of Las Vegas, the team’s eventual destination, but had no mention of Sacramento.

Mark Kotsay surveying the field and warning track, which is very swampy in the left-field corner. pic.twitter.com/uLwPWkCHKr

— Janie McCauley (@JanieMcCAP) March 31, 2025

There were technical issues, as well. The A’s radio broadcast dropped out at points, and in a moment of levity, a drone hovering low in the outfield had to be retrieved by hand.

Then, in the sixth inning, when the Cubs were pulling away, chants for Fisher to sell the team briefly cropped up, a staple of the final seasons in Oakland. 

But people did show. Carnival or not, that’s often what matters most in baseball.

“It was a fun atmosphere,” Counsell said. “You embrace it, you enjoy it. It’s a new baseball experience. … We’re gonna make the starting pitchers sit in the dugout for nine innings for the rest of the season, that seemed to work for us.”

(Top photo: Ezra Shaw / Getty Images)

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