Damage to the roof of Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, Fla., home to the Tampa Bay Rays of Major League Baseball, on Thursday morning, Oct. 10, 2024. The A’s and Tampa Bay Rays will play in minor league ballparks next season, one because of hurricane damage and the other because of an interstate move. (Zack Wittman/The New York Times)
By VICTOR MATHER
Major League Baseball teams are worth billions of dollars and generally fill mighty, 40,000- to 50,000-seat stadiums at premium prices dozens of nights each year.
So why are two of them playing next season in bandboxes that can barely fit 10,000 fans?
The Tampa Bay Rays announced Thursday that because the roof of their home stadium, Tropicana Field, was shredded by Hurricane Milton last month, they will play next season in the 11,000-seat George M. Steinbrenner Field, which normally hosts the Tampa Tarpons of the minor league Florida State League as well as the New York Yankees’ spring training games.
And after leaving Oakland, their home of more than 50 years, the A’s will play the next three seasons in Sacramento, California, while they wait for a stadium to be built for them in Las Vegas, their new permanent home.
Their stadium in Sacramento — Sutter Health Park in West Sacramento, California, directly across the Sacramento River from downtown — seats about 10,000, although a few thousand more can fit on a grassy hill by the outfield. It is normally home to the Sacramento River Cats of the Pacific Coast League, a minor league team.
The Oakland/Sacramento/Las Vegas team can now theoretically lay claim to three cities’ fan bases, but will any of them turn up for the games?
The A’s drew an average of 11,500 disillusioned fans in 2024, when it was clear the team would be departing Oakland. That was the lowest figure in the major leagues. And those fans seem unlikely to follow the team 80 miles northeast, choosing instead to look elsewhere for their baseball fix.
“There are so many teams littered with former A’s players; I see people continuing to follow players,” said Bryan Johansen, an engineer and a founder of Last Dive Bar, an Oakland A’s fan group. “The vast majority are pretty much done with baseball.”
Vegas fans anticipating the team’s 2028 arrival might be lured for a peek at their future hometown club, but they are a nine-hour drive away.
That leaves fans in Sacramento, who have only one major men’s professional sports team — the Kings of the NBA. Baseball fans around the California capital have offered a mix of reactions, from indifference to mild curiosity to enthusiasm.
The main attraction for many fans who end up at the ballpark might indeed be the visiting team — although that could well mitigate what little home-field advantage the A’s muster in Sacramento. Others might come for the long ball: There should be plenty of home runs hit out of the small park.
And there is also a more enduring problem: The quality of the A’s themselves. Their record was a paltry 69-93 in 2024, and that was actually an improvement over the previous two seasons.
In an acknowledgment of the peripatetic nature of the team, it will go by a naked “Athletics” without any city attached to its name.
The Tampa Bay Rays at least aren’t going very far. The team drew 16,500 fans per game last year at the Tropicana, in St. Petersburg, Florida, well under its full capacity of 42,000 (many of those seats aren’t ever used, and attendance is normally capped at 25,000). So they may not miss out on much in terms of ticket sales, even in their much smaller temporary home across the bay in Tampa.
The damage to the Rays’ stadium from Hurricane Milton, which destroyed its roof and parts of its interior, is expected to take a full year and more than $50 million to fix. The Rays had been planning to move into a new stadium in 2028 anyway, although for now they are expected to return to the Trop, as it is known, when it is ready.
MLB teams have occasionally dropped in at smaller parks over the years, either voluntarily or otherwise. The Rays played some games at Walt Disney World in 2007 and 2008, and two games were held at a “Field of Dreams” park in Iowa in 2021 and 2022.
In 2003, the Expos, who were on their way out of Montreal, played a significant chunk of the season in an 18,000-seat stadium in Puerto Rico. The Toronto Blue Jays played the COVID-shortened 2020 season at an 18,000-seat stadium in Buffalo, New York, and started the 2021 season in an 8,000-seat stadium in western Florida to avoid the hassle of crossing the U.S.-Canada border under pandemic restrictions.
Just after the Brooklyn Dodgers’ only World Series win in 1955, their owner, Walter O’Malley, who was itching to take the team out West, decided to tweak New York City by playing 15 games in two years across the Hudson River, at Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City, New Jersey.
That ballpark, which seated 24,000, was fairly large for a minor league venue, and it filled up with eager Jersey fans for at least some of the games.
Asked how he got to New Jersey for the first game, in April 1956, Dodgers slugger Duke Snider quipped: “I swam over. It wasn’t bad. There was a little debris in the river. Maybe I’ll come by submarine the next time.”
Next year, the remaining Oakland fans are unlikely to travel to Sacramento by any means of conveyance. Still, many of them, despite their antipathy toward John Fisher, the owner who moved the A’s out of town, say it will be hard to quit the team entirely.
“I got a big old A’s tattoo on my arm,” Johansen said. “I’ve been a fan for over 40 years. You can’t just erase that. I’ll still follow them for the purpose of dragging John Fisher every step he takes.”
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