Latest On A’s Plans For 2025-27

9:44pm: By contrast, Mick Akers of the Las Vegas Review-Journal writes that the A’s remain focused on Oakland for the 2025-27 campaigns. However, Akers echoes Drellich’s report that the three remaining possibilities are Oakland, Sacramento and Salt Lake City.

8:07pm: The A’s are running low on time to figure out where they’ll play home games between 2025-27. That has been a priority for team officials over the past few weeks. In addition to touring a handful of stadium sites, the A’s met with Oakland officials yesterday about a potential three-year lease extension at the Coliseum.

While that is still on the table, Evan Drellich of the Athletic reports that Sacramento has emerged as the front-runner for temporary hosting duty. According to Drellich, the two additional possibilities still under consideration are a lease extension at the Coliseum and playing in Salt Lake City. Previously, the A’s had considered a few other options: Reno; Summerlin, Nevada; and sharing Oracle Park with the Giants.

A’s and Oakland officials were fairly quiet coming out of their meeting on Thursday. The organization released a brief statement yesterday, calling it “a constructive and positive meeting with the City of Oakland and Alameda County” and noting they were “focused on continuing conversations around a lease extension at the Coliseum.” However, Drellich writes that the fraught relationship between the city and the A’s remains a significant obstacle.

The A’s lease at the Coliseum expires at the end of the upcoming season. The team’s new park on the Vegas Strip isn’t expected to be ready until 2028. If the A’s leave the Bay Area, that jeopardizes their local broadcasting contract with NBC Sports California. The network can drop their TV deal — which will reportedly pay the organization around $70MM in 2024 — once the team leaves Oakland or San Francisco. Sacramento is not included in the Bay Area under the terms of that contract. A short-term lease extension with Oakland would allow the A’s to collect those revenues for another three seasons.

That’s not of concern to Oakland and Alameda County, of course. Oakland mayor Sheng Thao has suggested the city could have significant demands to approve a lease extension. She has floated requiring that the franchise leave the A’s moniker behind — a non-starter for the organization — or that MLB guarantee the city a future expansion team.

To that end, Scott Ostler of the San Francisco Chronicle reports that Thao’s office has had “preliminary talks” with MLB about conditioning an A’s lease extension on the guarantee of a future expansion franchise. Thao’s chief of staff, Leigh Hanson, implied that’s a necessary trade-off from the city’s perspective.

“If a three-year extension was to be offered, and granted, then our expectation is that the city of Oakland would retain an MLB team,” Hanson told Ostler. “I recognize that (team president) Dave Kaval and (owner) John Fisher are not in a position to negotiate that point, so I think our further conversation will have to include the commissioner.”

Whether that’ll ever be a legitimate consideration for MLB remains to be seen. For now, it seems the league’s hope is that the A’s can make something work in Sacramento. Drellich suggests they could try to renegotiate the TV deal with NBC Sports California if they head to the California capital. That’d very likely come with reduced rights fees but could allow the organization to maintain some portion of the money that they’d otherwise lose if they left Oakland next season.

Sacramento’s Sutter Health Park is the home stadium of the River Cats, the Triple-A affiliate of the Giants. Its fan capacity is a little above 14,000.