As early as the 19th-century Gold Rush, when miners arrived on riverboats to stock up with supplies before heading into the mountains, Sacramento’s reputation has been more way station than destination.
It’s the place for a bathroom break on the way to Lake Tahoe. It’s a career stop, for ambitious politicians, on the way to Washington. And for millions of Californians, it’s a civics-lesson pit-stop on the way to the rest of their lives: the last time they came to Sacramento was for that fourth-grade field trip to the State Capitol.
So it’s fitting that as the Sacramento area finally gets a Major League Baseball team, it’s only as a temporary home for a club that is on the way to somewhere else. When the Athletics had a messy breakup with Oakland after 57 years and set their sights on Las Vegas, the team needed a landing spot until their permanent stadium gets built on the Strip.
In stepped the Sacramento region, which eagerly agreed to host Major League Baseball for three years at its minor-league stadium. The catch: The A’s refused to adopt the city’s name.
As the team plays its home opener here on Monday, they’re not the Sacramento Athletics. They’re just the Athletics. And many Sacramentans, it turns out, are just fine with that.
“Always the underdog,” Rachel Birnschein, 35, said of her hometown as she ate with friends at a lively downtown plaza before a recent National Basketball Association game. “That’s the Sacramento mentality.”
Located in the expansive valley that runs through inland California, Sacramento is used to being overshadowed by Los Angeles and San Francisco. If it were in the Midwest, the Sacramento region, with some 2.5 million residents, would be considered a major hub — it actually has more residents than the metro areas of Kansas City, Cincinnati or Milwaukee, each of which have multiple big league teams.
Sacramento was founded in 1850 at the intersection of two rivers that now supply much of the state’s water. It long called itself the “City of Trees,” an ode to its lush canopy that spares residents from the searing summer heat, until several years ago when it declared itself the “Farm-to-Fork Capital.”
One of the city’s best qualities might be considered a backhanded compliment. It is, as they say, a great place to raise a family. Soccer games in the suburbs and bike rides along the American River Parkway define good living on weekends. Napa Valley wineries and Sierra ski resorts are a day trip away. Sacramento lacks the oppressive traffic that has come to define Southern California, though yearslong freeway projects have become a regular irritant.
In recent years, the city has invigorated its downtown. A modern basketball arena opened nearly a decade ago, and with it came a luxury condo tower, new bars and higher-end hotels. Before that, Sacramento was developing a serious culinary scene, built on that “farm-to-fork” locally grown mantra and driven by purveyors of bountiful produce at farmers markets.
The Sacramento Kings, the basketball team that has long been the lone big league franchise in town, had until recently been on its own upswing. A return to the N.B.A. playoffs two years ago was accompanied by a purple laser beam, which remains in use, that shot from the roof of the arena whenever the team won. (One popular T-shirt around town that season: “Sacramento vs. Everybody.”)
Sacramento’s image, to the outside world, has been shaped in part by famous storytellers who left it behind. Joan Didion wrote in 1967 of arriving in New York at age 20 “in a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already” as she stepped off the plane. Greta Gerwig, a filmmaker who grew up in Sacramento, portrayed her hometown as sweet but unbearably stifling in 2017’s “Lady Bird.”
“It’s soul killing,” the eponymous character says in the film. “It’s the Midwest of California.”
Hollywood will weigh in again next month when a feature film called “Sacramento” opens. The trailer depicts two guys from Los Angeles who take a road trip to, as one of the characters puts it, “a city I have no desire to be in.”
Still, those who live here appreciate Sacramento’s charms. Autumn leaves that paint bungalow-lined streets in streaks of crimson and gold. The cool Delta breeze on a hot summer night, carrying wafts of jasmine.
Sacramento has long yearned for a major league franchise. The concrete foundation of a baseball stadium has stood for decades near where the old basketball arena sat, the remnants of long-unfulfilled hopes. The M.L.B. stadium never materialized, but a minor-league park sprouted in 2000 — in West Sacramento, Calif., across the river from Sacramento proper.
It’s that stadium, now known as Sutter Health Park, with a capacity of about 14,000, that will host the A’s. Local fans generally seem thrilled at the idea of having the team in their backyard, just a bike ride or short drive away. For once, they don’t have to schlep two hours to an M.L.B. game.
“Everyone is buzzing about it,” Erin Nickerman, 46, said as she sat down with her son for a scoop of Bing cherry at Gunther’s Ice Cream, a beloved local parlor, on a warm afternoon.
The franchise’s official guidelines say the team should simply be called the “Athletics” or the “A’s” during the stay in Sacramento. That goes for standings and for public relations references, and the city’s name won’t be on the front of team jerseys.
“Knowing that this was an interim circumstance, we thought that the most respectful thing was to call ourselves the Athletics,” Sandy Dean, the A’s vice chairman, explained.
The A’s breakup with Oakland was agonizing for many fans in that area, leaving them seething at the team’s owner, John Fisher. A’s fans accused Mr. Fisher, an heir to the Gap clothing fortune, of dealing with the city in bad faith over the construction of a new stadium and purposely driving down attendance to make his case for moving the team, all while flirting with Las Vegas.
Not everyone in Sacramento is happy, either. Dave Weiglein, a local radio host, said the decision not to use “Sacramento” in the team name amounts to a slap in the face. Mr. Weiglein takes hometown pride seriously. On air, he goes only by “Carmichael Dave,” a reference to the Sacramento suburb where he grew up.
“Instead of getting off on the right foot and welcoming the Sacramento A’s at the end of this month, it will be basically him saying to the region, ‘You’re an Airbnb for us until we can relocate to Las Vegas,’” he said of Mr. Fisher.
The A’s do not anticipate adopting a city name until it incorporates “Las Vegas” after it starts playing there, Mr. Dean said, likely in 2028.
In the meantime, the team’s green and gold logo is already popping up across its temporary home. On a Little League field on a recent afternoon, Thomas Hines, 47, wore a green A’s cap as he warmed up his son TJ and the 5- and 6-year-old players on their team. Birdsong rang from trees near the bleachers as the thrum of the freeway emanated from beyond the outfield. He said Sacramento remains misunderstood.
“Everyone from the big cities, they think of it still as a little farm town,” Mr. Hines said. “But it’s growing.”
The Athletics did make one concession to better embrace a Sacramento identity, agreeing to a sleeve patch that features a local icon, the Tower Bridge, with the word “Sacramento” beneath it. But then the team announced that players will also wear a “Las Vegas” patch that more clearly shows that city’s name — on whichever arm tends to be more visible to television cameras.
“Little-brother energy,” observed Robert Soltero, 35, a state worker who was celebrating a friend’s birthday at a riverfront beer garden near the ballpark. “But I think we’re all comfortable with it.”
Alain Delaquérière contributed research.
