As I covered the craziness of the first Major League Baseball game in Sacramento area history on March 31 and the national interest in the challenges the former Oakland Athletics will face playing an entire season at our own Sutter Health Park, a minor league stadium, there came a moment for me when I realized, “They’re playing Major League Baseball in Sacramento!”

Since the A’s and local officials announced in April 2024 the team would play in the West Sacramento ballpark for the next three years before a planned move to Las Vegas, I couldn’t help looking back to when I moved to Sacramento in late 1979, fresh out of the University of Nevada in Reno for a full-time job in the sports department of The Sacramento Union, then located just across the Tower Bridge at 301 Capitol Mall.

While mostly covering high schools and colleges, I was assigned the “minor league” beat, which was funny in a way because Sacramento didn’t have a minor league team then — the Sacramento Solons had left in 1976 after an ill-fated three-year run playing at Hughes Stadium, a football field.

It was a great beat, though, making trips to Stockton and Lodi to find stories involving the two closest professional teams, while compiling a weekly Sunday feature column on the dozens of locals playing in minor leagues around the country (and Canada), including future major leaguers Steve Sax, Chris Bosio, Dion James and Greg Vaughn.

Though local officials, led by developer Gregg Lukenbill, who later brought the Kings to Sacramento, tried mightily to bring a team to Sacramento, one could only dream in those days before the Kings arrived that any professional baseball team would return to the State Capital, and I wrote several stories for the Union on those ultimately fruitless efforts.

By the time Raley Field was built in West Sacramento and the River Cats, then called the Vancouver Canadians, were purchased by a group led by Art Savage and began their 25-year run in 2000 as the A’s Triple-A affiliate, Sacramento had been without professional baseball for almost 25 years. I was out of journalism by then, working for the state of California. But baseball was part of my life more than ever, following the MLB, playing hardball in a couple of adult leagues and catching several games a year at what was considered one of the best minor league parks in the country.

But the Major League in Sacramento? It didn’t seem a possibility, even as I’ve enjoyed covering the River Cats for more than 10 years for local publications. The reality that for the next few years I can walk across the Tower Bridge and on a whim see the A’s face all-star players like Bryce Harper (Phillies), Manny Machado (Padres), Mike Trout (Angels), Justin Verlander (Giants), Corbin Carroll (Diamondbacks), Aaron Judge (Yankees), or Juan Soto (Mets) — this year alone — is a treat that seemed unimaginable a few years ago.

But there it was, the first MLB game in Sacramento starting at 7:08 p.m. on a chilly, breezy night, preceded by all of the Opening Day pageantry one would expect from such a momentous occasion.

There was a sold-out Sutter Health Park crowd wondering how this experiment of an MLB team spending the next three years in a minor league ballpark would turn out. There were hordes of media from across the country (150 in total) and a heart-stirring memorial to A’s icon Rickey Henderson, who threw out the first pitch at the Oakland Coliseum finale last Sept. 26 before he died unexpectedly about three months later. Henderson was also honored during the game, as every Athletics player wore his No. 24 uniform number.

Then the game started.

“It was all good until the first inning,” longtime A’s fan Jeff Santos, of Auburn, tells me as he sits quietly in the stands as the 18-3 loss to the Chicago Cubs mercifully came to an end.

Indeed, the entire series was a painful introduction to the MLB for the Capital Region, as the A’s followed the opener blowout with 7-3 and 10-2 losses to the Cubs the next two days, the latter coming on a gorgeous 65-degree cloudless afternoon. The series showed fans that the unexpected could happen at any time in a MLB game, with Cubs catcher Carson Kelly hitting for an historic cycle (single, double, triple and homer) in the opener, the first cycle by a Cubs player since 1993.

The A’s sold a total of 31,556 tickets for the opening three-game series with the Cubs — the opener was considered the only sellout — and I wrote earlier for Comstock’s that pre-season reports indicated that ticket prices at Sutter Health Park were considered the highest in the league going into the year, at about $181. But now that the season has started, price adjustments have surfaced.

For example, the A’s featured a $60 A’s-Kings “Tower Bridge Doubleheader” promotion on April 9 that included a lawn seat for the day A’s game against the San Diego Padres and an upper level seat for the evening Kings matchup against the Denver Nuggets at nearby Golden 1 Center. The A’s also announced that for selected games in April, two tickets for $25 could be had. Further, I bought two seats on the aisle from StubHub ($48 each) for the A’s-Padres April 9 game, in a section off third base.

Meanwhile, an entire summer of almost daily baseball stretches before fans at Sutter Health Park, with the River Cats and their “one step from the major leagues” players providing special moments as well. Yes, this new era started with the disappointing opening series (and the A’s rebounded by winning the next series on the road in Colorado).

But as any fan knows, a 162-game season is a long haul, with a rollercoaster ride of successes and failures even for the team that eventually wins the World Series. There will be big comebacks, blown leads, walk-off home runs and moments that will make it onto Topps Now baseball cards (the Kelly cycle and the first career homer from the A’s Jacob Wilson already has).

And it’s here, right in West Sacramento. Sit back, grab a beer and a bag of peanuts, and enjoy something few people in the Capital Region thought would ever happen.

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