According to a report from Joseph Jarosz of SactownSports.com, the Oakland Athletics seem to have an agreement in place with the city of Sacramento to play baseball games at Sutter Health Park from 2025-2027.
The Athletics met with representatives from Sacramento earlier today, though there has been no official update from the team as of Wednesday night.
After the A's met with the city of Oakland and Alameda County on Tuesday, there seemed to be a sizeable gap between the two sides' asking price for a lease extension at the Coliseum.
The A's had offered to pay $17 million in rent for the next three years, while the city had asked for $97 million in total, as well as Fisher's ownership stake in the Coliseum.
John Shea and Scott Ostler of the SF Chronicle ($) reported yesterday that the two sides felt uncomfortably far apart and that no deal was imminent.
BREAKING:
— Carmichael Dave (@CarmichaelDave) April 4, 2024
The Oakland A’s and Sacramento are finalizing an agreement to play temporarily in the capital city beginning next season.
There will likely be an official announcement as soon as tomorrow or Friday.
This story is developing…
Fast forward to this evening and we have this breaking report that the A's are finalizing a deal with Sacramento for at least the next three years.
It's been speculated that Vivek Ranadive, owner of the Sacramento Kings and Sacramento River Cats (who play at Sutter Health Park), is using this opportunity to leverage his way into purchasing the A's from Fisher and keeping the team in Sacramento for good.
That feels like an unlikely scenario given the lack of major league ballpark in the area and the amount of work that would have to go into getting the public financing piece taken care of.
At most, it seems this would be a temporary home for the A's while they wait for their make believe stadium to be built in Las Vegas.
It's unclear at this time whether the A's RSN, NBC Sports California, will be willing to renegotiate the TV rights deal with Fisher. At present, the A's get roughly $70 million annually from NBCSCA but Sacramento falls outside of the regional boundary, meaning the deal will have to be reworked if the A's want their games televised on the existing network.
It was reported earlier in the off-season that NBCSCA would consider a reduced payment to the A's if the team ended up playing in Sacramento but we haven't heard from either of the two primary parties in that regard.
The report from Sactown Sports mentioned that we could expect an announcement from the team as soon as Thursday or Friday. We'll see how it plays out as any move to an existing minor league stadium will require a sign-off from the MLB Players Association.
What's even worse than the A's moving to a minor league stadium is that as Casey Pratt of ABC7 reports, the team would likely leave most of it's stadium staff behind in Oakland and use a combination of River Cats and Kings employees to handle the duties at Sutter Health Park.
John Fisher simply does not care about any of this. He doesn't care about the franchise, the fan base, the players on the field, or any of the impacts stemming from this mishandled relocation process. It's extremely difficult as an A's fan to watch this situation continue to play out in such haphazard fashion.