Baseball fans blasted the Athletics and MLB for letting them play in a small Sacramento stadium

The Oakland Athletics’ days in the Bay Area are numbered. They’ve already made that quite clear. And after the 2024 season — the team’s final year in Oakland — the A’s are making a rather drastic move for the foreseeable future.

According to ESPN’s Jeff Passan, the Athletics will play in Sacramento’s Sutter Health Park for at least three seasons starting in 2025. There will be an option year to play in 2028 in case their hopeful (extremely tentative?) new stadium in Las Vegas isn’t complete. You might be asking: What’s the catch? (There’s always a catch.) You see, dearest readers, Sutter Health Park has a general capacity of 10,000 seats, with grass outfield seats expanding it to 14,000. That is more than double the smallest capacity stadium in MLB — the Cleveland Guardians’ Progressive Field has just under 35,000 seats.

It is already a minor league stadium for the San Francisco Giants’ Triple-A affiliate, Sacramento River Cats. (Never mind the likely logistics nightmare there.) Well, I suppose that makes this news much less shocking because Athletics owner John Fisher seemingly wants to operate his professional organization like a minor-league outfit:

What the Athletics were already planning to do to the Bay Area was embarrassing and shameful enough. To opt for an exremely small stadium while preparing for a future move to Nevada — all while your fans continue to express rightful frustration — is brazen cowardice. Plain and simple. It’s also a terrible look for the MLB that the league would even let this happen to one of its franchises.

Poor Athletics fans and poor baseball fans. We’re seeing a once beloved team brand tarnished like this.