Category: Sacramento River Cats

Sacramento to keep grass field for A’s games, leaving only fans to broil in sun

access_time personNeil deMause

Amid much concern about whether baseball players and fans would bake to death once Athletics games are played in sweltering Sacramento starting next season, MLB has announced that the city’s stadium will keep its natural grass for 2025:

“Our shared, primary concern is ensuring the best and safest playing surface for the A’s, River Cats and visiting players. In light of the players’ clear preference for natural grass, and after weighing with the MLBPA the potential risks and benefits of maintaining natural grass versus replacing the playing surface with synthetic turf, all the parties are aligned in moving forward with a natural grass field for Opening Day 2025.”

This makes it sound like the driving force here was the players’ union, which could have filed a grievance over working conditions if it hadn’t been satisfied that Brent Rooker wouldn’t melt into a Brent Rooker–shaped puddle during Sacramento day games on turf. (MLB had previously announced that it would install a “hydration system” to cool the turf, but was never clear about how that would have worked.) To clear that obstacle, MLB seems to have decided it’s cheaper to pay to maintain grass at the stadium, even while the A’s and River Cats both play full schedules that will put a pounding on it.

Who’s going to pay to maintain the grass surface is still an open question, though so was who would have paid for installing turf. River Cats owner Vivek Ranadive has been promised he won’t be stuck with any costs of hosting the A’s, so it looks like this will either be on A’s owner John Fisher’s tab or on the league’s.

A’s fans, meanwhile, will continue to sit in a stadium without even a sun roof, so will likely melt into puddles on their own. They are welcome to file grievances of their own, hahahaha, the Fair Labor Standards Act doesn’t guarantee customers any right to grievances, so be sure to read the fine print on the back of your ticket as to whether you are releasing the A’s from liability in case you die of heatstroke.

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A’s will be forced to adhere to Triple-A schedule in Sacramento, endure blazing heat for Sunday day games

access_time personNeil deMause

When Oakland A’s owner John Fisher announced in April that his team would be playing in Sacramento for the next three years while awaiting the construction of a Las Vegas stadium, including how exactly the time-sharing arrangement would work between the A’s and the minor-league Sacramento River Cats. As I noted here at the time:

It just occurred to me that the Pacific Coast League plays week-long series against one team at a time, to cut down on travel. This is going to make drawing up an A’s schedule really interesting, to say the least.

Three months later, and yup, “really interesting” turns out to be not the half of it:

Because the A’s will be co-tenants at Sutter Health Park, they not only will use the same field as the River Cats — the top farm team of the San Francisco Giants — but will need to adhere to Pacific Coast League scheduling to fit in their 81 home games.

It’s an extremely challenging logistical ordeal because MLB and PCL schedules aren’t molded in the same format…

Generally, the River Cats play one team per week in a six-game series with Monday set aside as a travel day. One week at home, the next on the road. The A’s need to mirror that and play in Sacramento when the River Cats are on the road and vice versa…

In other words, the 29 other teams are catering to the A’s because of owner John Fisher’s preference to leave the Coliseum, where scheduling would have been routine, for a temporary home in Sacramento, where the scheduling is complex, the heat is overwhelming and the facilities in need of major upgrades.

Oh yes, the heat, did we forget to mention the heat? Sacramento may actually be to the north of Oakland, but it’s also inland in the Central Valley, which has always been hot and is only getting hotter. The league is trying to schedule as many night games as possible, but the MLB national TV schedule means all A’s Sunday home games will have to start at 1 pm local time, plus the limitations set by the PCL schedule means it’ll be harder than usual to avoid weekday games on “getaway days” when the opposing team needs to catch a flight out of town.

Add in that the River Cats’ home stadium is set to get artificial turf installed, the better to put up with the pounding of two teams using it for home games, and game conditions on the field could be toasty indeed. “Complaints aplenty are expected, including from players, because of the brutal heat” is how the San Francisco Chronicle put it; the players union says it’s currently in talks with the league to try to address this as best as possible.

The Sacramento stadium will hold only 14,000 fans, so at least not too many people will have to subject themselves to the summer heat in order to watch the A’s finish last again. All of this is feeling very much like the Arizona Coyotes‘ attempt to play in a college hockey arena, only with the additional fun of heatstroke; it’s probably too soon to predict that the A’s Sacramento stay will be cut short like the Coyotes’ was at Mullett Arena, but that isn’t stopping people from doing so to beat the rush later.

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Friday roundup: More vague Royals threats, Coyotes trying every trick in book at once, plus: stadium theme song challenge!

access_time personNeil deMause

Not gonna lie, this week has been a lot, what with Kansas City and environs voting down a Royals and Chiefs tax subsidy proposal and the Oakland A’s announcing a temporary move to Sacramento, requiring eight full posts in four days. (If you want to show your appreciation, or just your sympathy, you know where to find the tip jar.) I’m tempted to let you all go a day early, but then what would we do with all the other news that happened this week and got short shrift? Let’s take it one bullet point at a time and see how it goes:

  • Kansas City Royals owner John Sherman’s wife, Marny Sherman, for some reason got to be the one to make move threats in the wake of Tuesday’s “no” vote on a $500 million sales tax surcharge for the Royals and Chiefs, posting on Facebook that “neither team will work with Jackson County again.” Presumably she means to imply that the teams will either look to neighboring Clay County or the neighboring state of Kansas — she concluded her post, “We will be lucky if both teams wind up in Kansas. At least still in the area!” — though neither has a stadium funding plan in place right now, which is a big part of why the team owners were focusing on Jackson County. Meanwhile, Missouri state Sen. Bill Eigel — yes, the flamethrower guy — says, “I know of no path in the Missouri Senate where we’re going to do any public funding of sports stadiums” and “I think that would be resisted vociferously and extensively,” and while Eigel doesn’t have a leadership position, I’m not sure I’d want to risk finding out what he means by “resist extensively.”
  • Arizona Coyotes owner Alex Meruelo is dead set on winning an auction for public land on which to build a new arena, and also is looking for someone who wants to buy the team, and also is threatening to move the team somewhere if he doesn’t get the land. Plus, the Arizona Republic reports that “team leadership is also likely to seek a special taxing arrangement to help finance construction” if it does win the land bid. Alex Meruelo is also a lot — maybe he might want to consider having one less pregnancy?
  • Marc Normandin has taken on the question of why other MLB owners are content to let John Fisher have the A’s spend three years playing in a minor-league stadium and then potentially move them to baseball’s smallest market while continuing to rake in revenue-sharing checks, and concluded that other owners are not content at all, but they’re also not going to do anything about it: “Owners are probably just happy that the Fisher saga is nearly at an end, and that this potentially opens up the path for them to split expansion fees once the A’s are fully settled in somewhere new in a new park, and hey, in the meantime, one fewer suitor on free agency means prices get to come down.”
  • More on the Sacramento River Cats stadium that is supposed to host the A’s the next three years, via SFGate:  [River Cats broadcaster Bill] Laskey mentioned that the press amenities are dreadfully lacking, with only two total broadcast booths — one for each radio team — and, in Laskey’s estimation, space for four to eight people in the press box. When the occasional River Cats game was televised, Laskey told SFGATE the TV crew would take over one of the booths, forcing a radio broadcaster to call the game outside under a canopy, even in the blistering Sacramento sun.”
  • Philadelphia’s Civic Design Review committee called 76ers owner Josh Harris’s plan to build an arena on the downtown Gallery mall site “undercooked” and a continuation of the bad public planning that led to the failed mall in the first place, with one member saying, “We need to think about the real giveback here and whether we should build this thing.” The committee is only advisory, but coupled with the fact that city agencies are now months overdue producing studies of the arena project that would allow a city council vote, all the trash talking only adds to the project’s distinct lack of momentum.
  • Why should St. Petersburg-area taxpayers spend around $1.5 billion on a new Tampa Bay Rays stadium to revitalize the area around the current stadium when it could just build all the other stuff like housing and museums and skip the expensive part? That’s the question being asked by Tampa Bay Times opinion editor Graham Brink, before acknowledging that there are intangible benefits to having a sports team: “When the team wins, the city feels a sense of collective pride. What’s that worth?” That’s actually been studied, and the answer is: Not as much as you might think.
  • I had to head back home after one day of last week’s sports economics conference and so sadly missed taking in a Baltimore Orioles game with the assembled economists, but fortunately the Baltimore Banner has the recap.
  • This interview with Good Jobs First director Greg LeRoy took place before the Alexandria, Virginia arena plan for the Washington Capitals and Wizards got a fork stuck in it, but it’s a great reminder of both how dubious the economic arguments were for the deal (MuniCap, the consultant that came up with $75 parking fees to justify the arena, is “not a company known for saying no, let’s put it that way,” says LeRoy) and how dumb it is that team owners refuse to release details of their own numbers on the grounds it’s “proprietary” information.
  • And this interview with me by Debtwire took place right after the Kansas City stadium tax vote, but we covered a lot of ground regarding other cities’ stadium and arena shenanigans as well. If only we had had a theme song…
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