Tomorrow afternoon a Major League Baseball team will take the field at a 14,000-seat ballpark in West Sacramento that until last September was hosting a Single-A affiliate and a between-innings race featuring a man dressed as a tomato. The team is called the Athletics. Not the Sacramento Athletics. Not the Oakland Athletics. Just Athletics, the way a man whose wife has left him introduces himself at a wedding.
I want to be clear about what’s happening, because I had to read it three times before I believed it. A franchise that has won nine World Series — nine — is going to play its 2025 home schedule in a ballpark whose left-field wall is sponsored by a regional credit union and whose press box, I am told by a friend who covers the Pacific Coast League, is reachable only by a metal staircase that gets hot enough in July to brand a notebook.
Coach DiMaggio used to say that the dignity of a thing was just the sum of the small choices nobody bothered to make. He was talking about the way our linemen wore their socks. But I thought of him this week when I read that the league had approved this arrangement on the grounds that the team is, quote, in transition. They are in transition the way a man falling off a roof is in transition.
The transition, of course, is to Las Vegas, where in 2028 the Athletics are supposed to move into a $1.75 billion stadium on the old Tropicana site that, as of last Tuesday, did not have a roof, walls, seats, plumbing, a confirmed financing package, or a groundbreaking that anyone outside the renderings has actually seen. Until then they are guests of the River Cats, which is a sentence that would have started a fistfight in 1974.
Ray Kowalczyk called me Sunday night. Ray is sixty-eight, lives outside Modesto, and has been an A’s fan since Reggie. He told me he drove out to Sutter Health Park last weekend just to look at it from the parking lot. He said the marquee out front said WELCOME ATHLETICS in those plastic letters they use at a Holiday Inn when the Rotary Club is meeting in the conference room. He said he sat in his truck for forty minutes. He said he didn’t go in.
The rest of the league, by the way, is rolling out the usual spring-cleaning indignities to keep us from focusing on the one in California. Pitch clock is now down to a number that exists only on stopwatches. Ghost runner remains in extras, which I will continue to call extra innings until they pry the second word out of my mouth. Some scoreboard somewhere will play a TikTok between innings of a team going for a no-hitter. The Yankees, after a hundred and twenty-two years, have decided that beards are now permissible, and we are supposed to treat this like the Berlin Wall came down.
Petey Corrigan, who you’ve heard me write about, still has his 1989 Series cap. The bill is the color of weak tea. He told me at the diner last week that he’s going to Sacramento on a Greyhound for the third weekend in April, by himself, to watch the team that doesn’t have a city play a game at a park that doesn’t have a major league team. I asked him why. He said because somebody ought to. I bought his coffee.
Here is the part where I’m supposed to soften, and I will, because this is still baseball and I still love it the way you love a brother who keeps making it worse. Tomorrow afternoon a kid making the league minimum is going to throw a 99-mile-an-hour fastball to a kid making the league minimum, and one of them is going to win that pitch and the other is going to lose it, and the credit union sign and the Tokyo series and the Las Vegas renderings and the man dressed as a tomato will all stop existing for about four seconds. That’s the trick of it. That’s why we keep showing up at the Holiday Inn.
Denise is making chili tomorrow for first pitch. She heard about a recipe on a podcast that uses cocoa powder and something called “a glug” of coffee. I told her that sounded like a war crime. She told me to be quiet and find the channel.