A's Attendance in Sacramento Reaches New Low

The A's haven't cracked 10,000 since Lawrence Butler bobblehead day on Thursday, July 10, a span of 11 home games. A sellout at Sutter Health Park is just over 12,000.

The reason that people have been somewhat locked in on the A's attendance figures in Sacramento is because this is a brand new city that you would expect to rally around a new baseball team in their backyard, but the A's have pushed them away at a number of stops, including putting up "Las Vegas" signage all over the park.

It's clear that this is a temporary stop for the franchise, and with that information, fans are choosing to stay away.

There has been plenty of talk that the A's attendance struggles have been overblown in Sacramento, and that they didn't draw well in Oakland either, but there was also a reason that the team didn't sell well that final stretch of years.

In 2020, there were no fans admitted. In 2021, there were still COVID concerns and attendance was limited. In 2022, the team had just traded Matt Olson, Matt Chapman, Sean Manaea and Chris Bassitt and ended up going 60-102.

In 2023 they were even worse on the field, going 50-112, and that was also the year that they announced that they'd be leaving Oakland for Las Vegas. So in order to get an accurate comparison for where the A's are now as an up-and-coming club, we decided to look at how they drew against the Tampa Bay Rays in 2017.

The A's finished 75-87 that year, which is an attainable record for this year's club. They also had Chapman, Olson, and Semien beginning to click on the roster, much like this year's version with Nick Kurtz, Jacob Wilson, and Lawrence Butler.

In 2017, the fans in the stands were still cheering loudly for the players as ownership had said that it was Oakland or bust for them. It wasn't a bad time to be a fan, but there were still plenty of previous trades (like an entire roster of All Stars a couple of years back) that made some feel uneasy. So how did they draw?

Against that same Rays, they pulled 9,736 on Monday, July 17, then 15,231 that Tuesday, and finally 17,019 on Wednesday. While these aren't quite the numbers that some teams pull, they're also not the attendance figures that are typically pointed to as the reason that John Fisher had to pull the A's out of Oakland in the first place.

These numbers show that there was a fan base just waiting to fall in love with the roster. The point of the fans staying away from the Coliseum (other than COVID) was to show that they were dissatisfied with the product they'd been fed for two decades. The joke among fans was that it was a bad investment to get a player's jersey, because you wouldn't be able to wear it long.

That is what spawned the now very familiar "Sell the Team!" chants. The club was built well enough to be able to qualify for the postseason, but weren't often considered a club that had real World Series expectations for more than a year, if that, every teardown cycle. Those tear downs were every few years.

We should also note that the Tampa Bay Rays were also the A's opponent for the 2019 AL Wild Card game, which drew 54,005 fans, along with the aforementioned "Reverse Boycott" game.

Fans in Oakland did not care who was playing, other than their team. They would show up when given a reason. Ownership just didn't give them enough reasons over the years, and instead blamed the fans on the way out. It's been said before, but in any other business, if nobody is willing to pay for the product you're selling, that's on you, the owner. In baseball, you can just blame the customer--and then not draw fans somewhere else.