The Athletics (A’s) franchise of North America’s Major League Baseball (MLB) have announced that ahead of their 2028 relocation to Las Vegas, the team will play the 2025 through 2027 seasons at the Sutter Health Park in Sacramento, California.
Sutter Health Park, formerly known as Raley Field until it was rebranded for sponsorship purposes in 2019, is the home of the Sacramento River Cats minor league baseball team, of the Pacific Coast League.
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The River Cats, the triple-A baseball affiliate of MLB’s San Francisco Giants, are owned by the Sacramento Kings basketball franchise of the NBA, with which the A’s agreed the deal that officially sees the franchise leave Oakland for the first time since it arrived in that Californian city in 1968.
As a part of the three-year lease agreement, the A’s will also have an option to extend the lease to a fourth year, 2028, should the team’s new ballpark in Las Vegas not be constructed in time for the season.
The A’s will also not utilize a city name until they enter Las Vegas, and as such will not be known as the Oakland A’s, nor the Sacramento A’s, during the three-year tenure in the latter city.
With a capacity of only around 14,000 seats, Sutter Health Park holds less than a quarter of the seating capacity of the Oakland Coliseum that the A’s are leaving, and less than half of the proposed 33,000 capacity of the A’s prospective new ballpark. off the Las Vegas strip.
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By GlobalDataAs late as Tuesday (April 2) the A’s had met with city authorities from Oakland, aiming to reach an agreement to continue playing at the Oakland Coliseum for the three-year term, before the Las Vegas move.
US news outlet ESPN reported that a number of offers had gone back and forth between the two parties, most recently a three-year lease with a $60 million extension fee offered by Oakland city officials – which was contingent on MLB agreeing to grant the city a one-year right to seek an owner for a future MLB expansion franchise.
Less than 24 hours later, however, A’s management had met with Sacramento officials and agreed to a deal there instead.
The relocation to Vegas, heavily unpopular with locals and long-time fans, has been driven by a number of failed attempts by the A's to leave their Oakland Coliseum ballpark and have a new one built in the Bay Area of neighboring San Francisco with taxpayer financing.
Ironically, Sutter Health Park is one of the few ballparks in the US that was not taxpayer-funded.
The A’s purchased land for its new $1.5 billion stadium project in April 2023 and following the MLB owners unanimously approved the team’s relocation.
With Oakland’s previous NBA franchise, the Golden State Warriors, leaving for San Francisco in 2019 and the Oakland Raiders NFL franchise leaving for Las Vegas in 2020, Oakland will have no major league men’s sports franchises after the A’s depart.
