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When Oakland A’s owner John Fisher announced in April that his team would be playing in Sacramento for the next three years while awaiting the construction of a Las Vegas stadium, including how exactly the time-sharing arrangement would work between the A’s and the minor-league Sacramento River Cats. As I noted here at the time:
It just occurred to me that the Pacific Coast League plays week-long series against one team at a time, to cut down on travel. This is going to make drawing up an A’s schedule really interesting, to say the least.
Three months later, and yup, “really interesting” turns out to be not the half of it:
Because the A’s will be co-tenants at Sutter Health Park, they not only will use the same field as the River Cats — the top farm team of the San Francisco Giants — but will need to adhere to Pacific Coast League scheduling to fit in their 81 home games.
It’s an extremely challenging logistical ordeal because MLB and PCL schedules aren’t molded in the same format…
Generally, the River Cats play one team per week in a six-game series with Monday set aside as a travel day. One week at home, the next on the road. The A’s need to mirror that and play in Sacramento when the River Cats are on the road and vice versa…
In other words, the 29 other teams are catering to the A’s because of owner John Fisher’s preference to leave the Coliseum, where scheduling would have been routine, for a temporary home in Sacramento, where the scheduling is complex, the heat is overwhelming and the facilities in need of major upgrades.
Oh yes, the heat, did we forget to mention the heat? Sacramento may actually be to the north of Oakland, but it’s also inland in the Central Valley, which has always been hot and is only getting hotter. The league is trying to schedule as many night games as possible, but the MLB national TV schedule means all A’s Sunday home games will have to start at 1 pm local time, plus the limitations set by the PCL schedule means it’ll be harder than usual to avoid weekday games on “getaway days” when the opposing team needs to catch a flight out of town.
Add in that the River Cats’ home stadium is set to get artificial turf installed, the better to put up with the pounding of two teams using it for home games, and game conditions on the field could be toasty indeed. “Complaints aplenty are expected, including from players, because of the brutal heat” is how the San Francisco Chronicle put it; the players union says it’s currently in talks with the league to try to address this as best as possible.
The Sacramento stadium will hold only 14,000 fans, so at least not too many people will have to subject themselves to the summer heat in order to watch the A’s finish last again. All of this is feeling very much like the Arizona Coyotes‘ attempt to play in a college hockey arena, only with the additional fun of heatstroke; it’s probably too soon to predict that the A’s Sacramento stay will be cut short like the Coyotes’ was at Mullett Arena, but that isn’t stopping people from doing so to beat the rush later.
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