The 2024 season will be the last the Oakland Athletics play at the old Coliseum.
Today, following nearly sixty years at the ballpark, the A’s announced they would be shifting their home games to Sutter Health Park in Sacramento, California. The first games in their new home will begin with the start of next season and continue through the 2026 and 2027 seasons before they move on to Las Vegas, Nevada, tentatively scheduled for 2028.
Sutter Health Park, with a capacity of 14,000, is currently home to the Sacramento River Cats, the Triple-A affiliate of the San Francisco Giants (previously, the long-time affiliate of the Athletics). It would be, by far, the smallest venue in the Major Leagues, but this is a temporary solution, of course.
“We explored several locations for a temporary home, including the Oakland Coliseum,” explained A’s Owner and Managing Partner, John Fisher, in a statement released to the media. “Even with the long-standing relationship and good intentions on all sides in the negotiations with Oakland, the conditions to achieve an agreement seemed out of reach. We understand the disappointment this news brings to our fans, as this season marks our final one in Oakland. Throughout this season, we will honor and celebrate our time in Oakland, and will share additional details soon.”
“We extend our appreciation to the Kings and the City of West Sacramento, and look forward to making Sutter Health Park our home until our new ballpark opens in Las Vegas.”
This news officially ends the era of Major League Baseball in Oakland, which began when the Kansas City Athletics moved to the Bay Area following the 1967 season. The A’s drew the attention of baseball fans worldwide with their wildly-coloured bright gold and green uniforms, white shoes, and nicknames instead of last names on the back of jerseys. As I fell in love with baseball in the late 1980s, the Oakland Athletics were by far the team I feared the most, a string of three-straight American League championships led by Rickey Henderson, Dennis Eckersley, Mark McGwire, Jose Canseco, and Dave Stewart, including a World Series Championship in 1989.
As of yet, there are no details about what the team would be called — if they would take on the name Sacramento Athletics or stick to using Oakland. If they do indeed change their name, it would be the fourth location this franchise has used for their name (following Philadephia, Kansas City, and Oakland), only for them to add a fifth (Las Vegas) in three years time.
I made a tongue-in-cheek suggestion yesterday (which far too many took as a serious pitch) to call the team the California Athletics, but this was mostly just an excuse to bring back the old “CA” Angels logo from the ’90s.
Don’t hate me for this, A’s fans — I’m not the enemy; I just like logos.
You have to be honest, though, it would be a heck of an upgrade over the Sacramento A’s logo that was trademarked and quickly abandoned back in the 1990s (no, not by the Oakland A’s):
You can’t get more “I made a logo in Microsoft Word and then printed it on my dot matrix in the ’90s” than this, kids.
Anyways, now’s as good a time as any to look back on the Oakland Athletics logo and uniform history from 1968 to 2024.
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