When the Athletics declared that they’d be crashing in West Sacramento for three of four years while their planned ballpark in Las Vegas was under construction, Sacramento Kings and River Cats owner Vivek Ranadivé said that the A’s tenure in Sacramento would be a good showcase for the capital region.

The team ended up drawing just 9,487 fans per game on average, announcing seven sellouts all year. Given the capacity sitting somewhere around 12,500, lower numbers were expected overall, but a packed house was supposed to be the norm.

In a terrific piece by Chris Biderman of the Sacramento Bee, it looks like Sacramento Mayor Kevin McCarty is ready to make the city’s push for MLB expansion.

Sacramento Getting Ready for MLB Expansion

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In the Bee’s piece, the mayor says that he sees landing a baseball team as a huge economic opportunity for the region, where they could bring in 2 million fans per season. The League is expected to expand in the coming years, and commissioner Rob Manfred has said that he would like to be the one that chooses the sites before he retires in 2029.

That could bode well for Sacramento, given that the city helped solve a big headache for MLB by giving the A’s a place to play ball outside of Oakland, where they’d spent the last 57 years.

Sacramento will also have to do its part to show that the region is ready, which is why McCarty is making a push for the public to show support for the franchise in the coming years.

He was quoted in the Bee as saying, “After talking to people in Major League Baseball … they say there’s one thing to dramatically increase our odds. It’s making sure we support the A’s here and show that we are worthy of a major league franchise. So get out there and support Major League Baseball.”

He’s also going to help the club secure corporate sponsorships because helping the A’s succeed is seen as a big win for the region in the battle for an expansion bid.

As we sit here in October of 2025, Nashville appears to be the far-and-away favorite to win the bid in the East, while Salt Lake City and Portland, Oregon are the biggest competition in the West. Both of those locales are a bit further along when it comes to securing financing, land and having an ownership group in place.

That could leave Sacramento scrambling to catch up, but they do have a couple of big advantages.

Sacramento’s Advantages for Expansion

One big advantage is a borderline favor, with Ranadivé helping to bail out A’s owner John Fisher and Major League Baseball by getting the A’s away from the persistent “Sell the team!” chants. That’s likely enough to get the city into the conversation, but it’s likely not enough to land them a full franchise.

The second advantage that Sacramento has is that they currently have a big-league team playing in their city. While many long-time A’s fans will dislike this, the way to make Sacramento more appealing for MLB would be to help Fisher make more money while he’s here—which is exactly McCarty’s plan.

Sacramento has the opportunity to showcase that they can support an MLB franchise and give a glimpse into what the financial landscape could look like for the league if an expansion team was awarded to the region.

That’s data that no other city vying for a franchise would have. Of course, they’d also have to figure out where to put a ballpark (more specifically than West Sacramento), line up an ownership group, and get the money together. But if the A’s thrive over the next two years and all of that falls in line, then Sacramento could make arguably the best case of the trio.

Cause for Concern

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At the same time, this could all be a ploy by MLB to help Fisher look better before he lands in Las Vegas. While they didn’t explicitly ask Sacramento to repair his image, having a packed house every night would change some of the narrative around the club, which may be needed to help the franchise have sustained success in Sin City.

There’s no guarantee that any amount of work that Sacramento does will land the region with an expansion franchise.

Urging the fans to come out to the ballpark and working to make this stay a successful one should have been something that McCarty and Ranadivé were working on heading into the 2025 campaign. Now they’re playing from behind, trying to change the narrative about Sacramento as a baseball town, instead of trying to set the narrative from the beginning.

Just like with Salt Lake City and Portland, Sacramento is playing from behind. That doesn’t mean that it can’t or won’t happen, but they’re going to have to work hard in order to catch up.