WEST SACRAMENTO — Sitting through nine long innings of the first Major League Baseball game in our state capital, no one could be blamed for wondering (1) if this ballpark will remain a bandbox, (2) how many more visiting players will moan about the facility, and (3) why in the good name of Rickey Henderson was the A’s home opener not played at the Coliseum.
Despite months and months of refurbishing and reconstruction, there was no hiding the fact that Sutter Health Park still very much has a minor-league feel, even a spring training feel.
The players felt it themselves. They’re accustomed to major-league environments, but it wasn’t exactly what they experienced when the Oakland-turned-Sacramento A’s were embarrassed 18-3 by the Cubs on a chilly, windy Monday night alongside the Sacramento River and Tower Bridge.
It wasn’t the coming out party that A’s owner John “Las Vegas or bust” Fisher and his buddy Vivek Ranadivé, the Kings and River Cats owner who’s gifting him the field, had anticipated.
A’s pitchers got clobbered for 21 hits including four home runs. In 57 years at the Coliseum, the A’s never surrendered a cycle, but the first game in Sacramento, it happened, courtesy of Cubs catcher Carson Kelly. Things got extraordinarily feeble in the ninth when an A’s position player (Johnny Pereda) took the mound and pitched to a Cubs pitcher (Colin Rea).
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“We’re not going to make any excuses for how we played tonight,” A’s manager Mark Kotsay said. “We just played bad.”
A’s players generally say all the right things when asked about playing in the Triple-A Park because they’re trying to embrace it as their home for the next three or four years as Fisher’s new stadium in Las Vegas is built. It’s the visiting players who’ll be more outspoken about the conditions — especially because they’ll be occupying what’s likely the tiniest visitors’ clubhouse in the majors, located beyond the center-field wall, which forces players to walk across the field if they need to reach their clubhouse during games.
“Opening up here, the first-ever major-league game in Sacramento, is something, I guess. I don’t know if it’s a good thing or bad thing,” said Chicago’s Justin Turner, who began his 17th big-league season and didn’t sound too thrilled about the surroundings.
“It’s obviously unfortunate for all the great fans in Oakland. You feel for them. It’s a great opportunity for people up here in Sacramento to get a chance to have a major-league team for a couple of years. As far as whether it’s a good thing or bad thing, I guess we’ll find out.”
The game was a sellout at the 14,014-capacity yard, but the official crowd was 12,119 because the A’s announced only tickets sold, they said. Either way, it didn’t at all have any kind of Coliseum vibe. No drummers or banners, both long-time staples in Oakland. In fact, the A’s cracked down on old Oakland habits with a new set of regulations that, according to the team website, disallows “clothing, garments, or signs displaying explicit language, profanity, or derogatory characterization towards any person[s].”
In other words, the A’s are hardliners against those pesky “SELL” or “[bleep] Fisher” shirts. Of course, a few diehard Oakland fans sneaked in their favorites anyway. A couple of fans wore “I’d rather be at the Oakland Coliseum” T-shirts, and one guy was bold enough to lift a sign flashing those exact words. Another wore an A’s cap with the logo upside down.
It didn’t take long for a “Let’s go Oakland!” chant to break out, coming just a few pitches into the game. In the late innings, with the A’s getting humiliated, you could hear the infamous “sell the team” chant.
“I’d rather be playing in Oakland,” said Cubs second baseman Nico Hoerner, an Oakland native who collected three hits against the team he grew up loving; he still gets chills thinking about Coco Crisp’s walk-off single at the Coliseum in the 2012 postseason.
“Around the league, a lot of people really appreciated the quality of baseball that was played there, without always the best resources, and the fans and energy that they brought. A lot of players speak highly of their experiences playing games at the Coliseum even if the locker rooms weren’t the fanciest. It was just a great baseball place, and I hope fans know that players appreciate a lot of the same things that fans do.”
Hoerner added, “I had a good amount of friends who stopped going to A’s games” because of what Fisher did to the team. As far as an expansion franchise one day landing in Oakland, which is getting no traction in the commissioner’s office, Hoerner said, “I would be in favor of that as long as it was a true effort to put in the best possible team and stadium.”
At the Coliseum, a chilly night often made long fly balls die in the outfield, but Monday, the cold air (52 degrees at game time) hardly mattered because of heavy winds that pointed the U.S. and California flags out to right field. Two Cubs, Michael Busch and Dansby Swanson, homered in the first inning off Joey Estes, who surrendered another homer in the fourth to Kelly.
Jacob Wilson homered for the A’s, the first of his career. If big-league hitters are crushing the ball this time of year, it could be homers aplenty when temperatures soar in the summer months, in some cases well north of 100 degrees. Especially because hitters can recognize pitches much better than previous years here with a new batter’s eye erected in center field.
“I know it gets really toasty here in the summer,” Swanson said, “and I would imagine the ball flies even more when it gets hotter. I can definitively see some guys having some good offensive performances here. It’ll be fun to keep track of.”
If the one-sided game wasn’t bad enough, the A’s radio broadcasts went off the air multiple times, both English and Spanish. A drone delay slowed the game in the seventh inning, ending only after an A’s batboy snagged it out of the air.
On the flip side, folks from Sacramento, with its baseball roots running deep, finally got to attend a major-league game in their town. Henderson, the greatest player in franchise history who died in December, was honored with a pregame video tribute. His daughters tossed ceremonial first pitches, and all A’s players and coaches wore Rickey’s No. 24.
Sadly, Rickey Henderson Field is long gone.