West Sacramento Just Needs To Let The A’s Come To Them

Martha Guerrero has been the mayor of West Sacramento, California for four years now, and as such should know the first rule of politics in the 21st century—never hint at the money for a project until the extortion process has officially begun.

It’s an easy enough rule to follow, generally, but Guerrero forgot it when she was asked the most enticing question of her term in office to date. Her dials spun, and she gave the answer that has launched a thousand SMHs:

Guerrero showed her cards when she let her civic pride answer a $2 billion question about a new stadium to house the Vagabond Athletics when their three-year stay in Sacramento is supposed to end. Of course she would say West Sac can build an MLB-level stadium, even if it's for a team the city isn't even housing yet. Hell, she'd say she could annex and drain Lake Tahoe for condominiums if she was asked. As a mayor, she is supposed to sell the sizzle; that's how you get elected to thankless jobs in politics, which is its own redundancy.

But when she said talks have already begun on a 40-50,000 seat stadium along the (Sacramento) river, and then doubled down with "We have looked at it and we know it's possible," her use of the royal pronoun screamed, "We are open for business. Work us."

True, Guerrero never mentioned money specifically. But promises only have to be implied for rich folks to interpret them as binding. The rich folk in question here being Vivek Ranadive, who owns the Sacramento Kings basketball team, as well as the Sacramento River Cats Triple-A baseball team and Sutter Health Ballpark, where the Cats currently play. Ranadive also dabbles in other stuff; his net worth is an estimated, and probably underestimated, $700 million. In other words, he was rich enough to try and buy Chelsea Football Club in 2022 before Todd Boehly outbid him at the wire and turned that club into a drunkard's bounce house.

This A's talk began earlier this year when Ranadive first offered to house the A's while they wait for what is still a purely notional Las Vegas ballpark. As that project has not yet begun the plans for a plan, A’s team owner and porridge doppelganger John Fisher was quick to take him up on the offer. Fisher, who had already reached his prime goal of taking the team out of Oakland, desperately needed a place to crash; Ranadive smelled an opportunity a few minutes before everyone else did.

That opportunity, in short, is a bet that when Vegas can't get Fisher's crap together for him, he and his team will be stuck in West Sac. None of these are facts currently in evidence, but they will remain interpreted as such until someone involved with this project finally gets up the gumption to rent a digger on The Strip. Until then, we are still firmly in the "He's got nothin'" stage of the Fisher-in-Sin-City saga. That, however, did not stop people from asking the mayor of the team's future holding pen if her town of 56,000 people—that’s half the size of Green Bay, Wisconsin—can build a park that will cost about $36,000 per inhabitant.

This isn't about West Sac's viability as a big league town, or as a haven for heatstroke aficionados in the summer months, or even the financing issues involved in building a park that would require money from multiple counties and maybe even the state itself. West Sac is a perfectly fine place, and we’ll throw no shade on it even though it could use all the shade it can get these days. This is about tutoring the mayor on how not to get out over her skis for something she hasn't even gotten to throw the first pitch for yet.

Given the dynamic of the team owner, whose inability to get anything done is matched only by his stubbornness in not doing it, Mayor Guerrero's best play here was to be maximally coy. Given the cost of what would almost be a significantly smaller than 40,000- or 50,000-seat domed stadium, the only answer that doesn't get her in a future jam is, "We'd need more information on a lot of things—like who's paying for this—but conceptually we'd be very intrigued." Or, more specifically, "We have the geography to house a ballpark but the voters are the ones who decide everything else, not me. I work for them."

Ideally, West Sac would get the park because Fisher should never get anything he wants in any avenue of his life ever again (I know, I know—vindictive much?) and Oakland has sold the Coliseum ground because the current political structure knows that the big leagues are never coming back to town. MLB would hate the idea, because it had its eyes set on Vegas and not Yolo (which doesn't stand for You Only Live Once in this case) County, and who doesn't want MLB to be unhappy for its complicity in the Oakland debacle? But the greater principle of Let The Rich Oafs Pay For Their Own Stuff must always take precedence over Wouldn't It Be Cool To Have A Big League Team, if only because reversing the order on those two sentences means the price tag starts at two bills and goes up from there.

What we really need is Ranadive to stand next to the mayor, preferably behind a Detroit Lions-sized lectern, and say, "If you've got the land, we've got the money." He can't say that, of course, because it's not Ranadive’s place to claim the team until Fisher sells it to him, and anyway buying the team and building a stadium makes the cost to any buyer $3.5 billion—and that’s for a $1.2 billion ball team that would find itself in a significantly smaller market. That’s not good business, but this stuff never is.

So maybe Mayor Guerrero's best answer here was, "Cool. Keep me in the loop." That way, she looks eager and responsible. There are plenty of people who want to go all daffy for this still-in-pipe-dream-stage idea, but she got elected on a platform of Don't Do Anything Stupid Until We Tell You To. If the Vegas plan dies in a heap of Fisherian ennui, she'll get her chance soon enough.