The West Sacramento Athletics have been in existence as a viewing experience for three days and one full home stand, and already they have accomplished something of note. It’s this: They have already made 2,800 people disappear.
Beginning their indeterminate layover in Yolo County with a three-game series against the Chicago Cubs, they announced consecutive attendance figures of 12,119, 10,095, and 9,345. Those people were entertained by defeats of 18-3, 7-4, and 10-2. The baseball part of all this, we can presume, will take care of itself; the crowds, on the other hand, offer hints of just how aggressively unmoved the A’s new town seems to be by the presence of an actual Major League Baseball team in their midst.
In fairness, and we all know how much fairness moves us, it's been three games, and three games isn't even enough of a sample to be sized. In addition, we don't know how many actual people were in Sutter Health Park for each of the games, because teams long ago opted into the mild fraud of “tickets distributed” as the official method of tabulation rather than humans in place. And that's not to mention the well-established tradition of lying about even those numbers, since the only people who ever know the actual numbers are the team and the stadium ops people, none of whom could be trusted with a burned-out match at a barbecue. And that’s enough fairness for one blog.
In short, the teams largely control the crowd-count vibe they want to give, and the West Sacks have already suggested that 25 percent of the marks…er, customers…have already found other and better things to do with their leisure time. The team and the entire Yolo experience is three days in, and already 2,800 people are out.
Because every homestand here is a referendum of sorts about the A's in transit, we operate on the theory that the team’s sheer newness would emanate as a lure, and a measuring device. The franchise itself—the word team, for purposes of nomenclature, will be reserved to the players, who are blameless in this context if not those scores—is still hell-bent upon ending up in Las Vegas, to name another place where the citizens don't much care whether the team is playing there or not. But there remains a lingering body of suspicion about whether the A’s will ever actually get to the desert. That means West Sacramento is in an ongoing audition to become the hometown of the suicidal franchise nobody else cares about.
There is also a clear and justifiable suspicion that the townsfolk who could be the season ticket holders of tomorrow aren't yet willing to commit themselves to the new kids just because they're new. Indeed, West Sacramento is close enough to Oakland—it’s 80 miles on Interstate 80—that the franchise's epic saga of self-administered woe would be very familiar to those citizens. They certainly know, and can be reminded by looking at the players' sleeves, that the people who run the franchise are only planning to treat the town like a rental car, down to the underwhelming level of preparations for Opening Night and the general stonewalling of specific information thereabout. The desultory vibe is already in place: the A’s are not planning to stay, and they're not planning to try.
But this is de rigueur for the Fisher Athletics, an organization whose unofficial official city designation has been Somewhere Else for nearly 20 years now despite the owner's latest unconvincing explanation to the contrary. The story of the next few seasons is not what the A's might do in their new home but what the citizens will do about their new renters. Do they pretend to have a chance to win the owner over with love that they know is and will remain unrequited, or will they just find other ways to amuse themselves—for instance, by attending games of the minor league team that also shares the ballpark? Or just going to Costco to get grillables for a party somewhere else? Or cleaning the neighbor's garage on spec?
The question running through all of this is whether West Sacramento fans are willing to humor the notion that John Fisher is either charming or can be charmed, in case Vegas doesn't happen. The idea of a community coming together to try to win over a grouchy yet reclusive billionaire has deeply limited appeal, and may not even matter if the team ends up being stranded interminably on the left bank of the Sacramento River due to Fisher’s ongoing slapstick mismanagement. It is too early to say, but there are some obvious notes of skepticism being sounded already. Can 2,800 people really be so right, so soon?
To offer a broader view—and more unnecessary fairness—those first three games were played in damp, mid-50-degree weather, and a good number of the stadium’s seats are actually not seats at all but on a berm—a spot that can be ideal for a warm evening in July, but is less appealing on a misty night just the other side of March. The fact that “pleasantly warm” gives way to “oppressively hot” around these parts well before July has been mentioned often as another reason to resist the team's dubious-to-date charms—a seat on either dying grass or hard dirt on a shadeless hill in 106-degree heat isn't exactly a lyrical rite of summer. As it stands, sitting for two hours absorbing moisture through your seater while watching the home team lose by two touchdowns was hardly a come-on for Night The Second, and another thousand folks skipped the joys of a relatively temperate afternoon on Wednesday.
We will continue to monitor this ongoing experience in Franchise Bizarro World as it unfolds, or plops righteously to earth. Not following the baseball necessarily, but how a city that has been jonesing for big league ball for decades views its first experience not only with MLB, but with the signature corporate disdain of its nearest representative. Can West Sacramento, or even Sacramento at large, play the long odds and try to win Fisher's allegiance in the longer term? Can they swallow their pride and do this even as he rubs the illusory charms of Vegas in their faces, or will they dismiss him as just another motorhome owner filling a spot in the trailer park until Somewhere Else calls to his soul again? Or whatever passes for a soul, anyway. Like attendance figures, that is difficult to verify.
