The Athletics temporarily moved to California’s capital region, but insisted on avoiding references to Sacramento. Residents, who are thrilled to have M.L.B. games, are used to such slights.
As early as the 19th-century Gold Rush, when miners arrived on riverboats to stock up with supplies before heading into the mountains, Sacramento’s reputation has been more way station than destination.
It’s the place for a bathroom break on the way to Lake Tahoe. It’s a career stop, for ambitious politicians, on the way to Washington. And for millions of Californians, it’s a civics-lesson pit-stop on the way to the rest of their lives: the last time they came to Sacramento was for that fourth-grade field trip to the State Capitol.
So it’s fitting that as the Sacramento area finally gets a Major League Baseball team, it’s only as a temporary home for a club that is on the way to somewhere else. When the Athletics had a messy break up with Oakland after 57 years and set their sights on Las Vegas, the team needed a landing spot until their permanent stadium gets built on the Strip.
In stepped the Sacramento region, which eagerly agreed to host Major League Baseball for three years at its minor-league stadium. The catch: The A’s refused to adopt the city’s name.
As the team plays its home opener here on Monday, they’re not the Sacramento Athletics. They’re just the Athletics. And many Sacramentans, it turns out, are just fine with that.
“Always the underdog,” Rachel Birnschein, 35, said of her hometown as she ate with friends at a lively downtown plaza before a recent National Basketball Association game. “That’s the Sacramento mentality.”
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