Details on A's Season Tickets in Sacramento

Jason Burke | Aug 23, 2024

Aug 17, 2024; Oakland, California, USA; A fan of the Oakland Athletics holds up a sign during the eighth inning against the San Francisco Giants at Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum. Mandatory Credit: Darren Yamashita-USA TODAY Sports / Darren Yamashita-USA TODAY Sports

With just a handful of games left at the Oakland Coliseum, the A's plans for season tickets in Sacramento are beginning to have some details attached to them.

According to the Sacramento Bee, the expected cost is between $15,000 to $20,000 per seat, which comes out to $183 to $244 per game. As a reminder, the A's will be playing in a minor league facility, but it sure looks like they're charging big league prices. A seat in the second row behind home plate at Sutter Health Park is going for $41.80 when the River Cats take on the Las Vegas Aviators next week. That's an even bigger price increase than the one that happened in Oakland after the A's traded away Matt Olson, Matt Chapman, Chris Bassitt and Sean Manaea.

The Dodgers charged $209 per ticket on average in 2023, while Yankees tickets went for $186. The A's averaged $100 last season for a 112-loss team, while the National League champion Arizona Diamondbacks charged $90. Obviously, the prices being discussed are for the most expensive seats that will be offered (and will also offer access to shade and air conditioning for those hot days), so this figures in Sacramento will go down a bit as more information comes out.

Also from the Bee: the A's are selling between 10 to 12 premium season tickets per day. There are 301 seats in one section behind home that doesn't even go all the way back. That one section will take three and a half week to sell out, and that's if they stay on the high end of 12 tickets per day at their current pace.

The other key detail here is that the premium seating season ticket plans also require a three-year commitment, though that same commitment will not be needed for the regular season ticket packages which have yet to go on sale.

While there has been an uproar on social media about the three-year commitment in order to secure season tickets, from a business perspective it kind of makes sense. The fewer variables a business has when setting a budget, or in this case payroll, the more flexibility they are affording themselves to potentially be able to spend on a player or two--if they can convince them to play in Sacramento. You can see the rationale there from a business perspective, given that the team has said that they will begin to spend money for so long, and if they don't soon, then they never will.

Yet, as José Canseco said over the weekend, the A's have been run strictly like a business, and the fans are tired of it. The only way that commitment works is if the A's start spending some money on the roster. If they don't, then there will be no reason to believe things will ever change with this ownership group.