The Capital Deserves a Capital Team: Why Sacramento's MLB Moment Is Now

By Justin Gregg | Sacramento Solons Revival

04/04/2026

Introduction

There is a certain irony in the fact that California's seat of government has spent the better part of a century watching baseball happen somewhere else.

Los Angeles. San Francisco. Oakland. For decades, the state's major-league geography has traced the coast, bypassing the Central Valley entirely and the region that contains the state's capital, its agricultural spine, and roughly 2.5 million people within commuting distance of Sutter Health Park. Sacramento has been the quiet center of California's civic life, home to the legislators who govern a $4 trillion economy. Yet, it has never been trusted with a team of its own.

That is about to change. Or it should. Whether it does depends on what happens between now and 2029.

A City That's Been Here Before

Before Los Angeles had a National League team, before San Francisco had a World Series trophy, Sacramento had the Solons.

The Sacramento Solons were not a minor footnote in baseball history; they were a cornerstone of the Pacific Coast League, one of the premier regional circuits in American professional baseball for more than half a century. Sacramento entered the PCL as a charter member in 1903. The team won back-to-back championships in 1938 and 1939, drew crowds to Edmonds Field at Riverside and Broadway, and Sacramento hosted the first night game in Pacific Coast League history on June 10, 1930 — five years before any major league club played under stadium lights.

The name itself carries weight that most expansion candidates simply cannot manufacture. "Solon" is both a proper noun and a concept, derived from the ancient Athenian lawmaker who reformed the code of Greek democracy. The word was long used by journalists as shorthand for senator or legislator. In California's capital city, the connection is not a branding exercise. It is a birthright. Sacramento's legislators were called solons in the press before the team ever took the field.

The Solons played until 1960, when the arrival of the Dodgers and Giants on the West Coast essentially dismantled the PCL's independent structure. The team was sold and relocated to Hawaii. Sacramento was left without professional baseball until 1974 and without a functioning, purpose-built ballpark situation until Raley Field, now Sutter Health Park, opened in 2000. What was lost in 1960 was not simply a franchise. It was Sacramento's place in the national game.

Sixty-six years later, the city is staging its case to reclaim it.

The Stress Test That Nobody Else Can Run

The most compelling argument for Sacramento in the expansion race is not demographic. It is not financial. It is happening right now, in real time, at a 14,000-seat ballpark on the west bank of the Sacramento River.

When the Athletics needed a place to play while their Las Vegas stadium was being built, they came to Sacramento. They arrived in 2025, set up in a minor league facility with real MLB rosters and real MLB schedules, and gave this city something no other expansion candidate has: live, verifiable proof.

No city vying for an expansion franchise - not Salt Lake City, not Portland, not Nashville - can show the league what Sacramento is showing right now. The others are presenting spreadsheets and renderings. Sacramento is presenting attendance data, corporate engagement numbers, and actual fan behavior across 81-game homestand after homestand.

Opening Day 2025 sold out. The 2025 season averaged 9,487 fans per game, the lowest in MLB, but the A's also had the second smallest MLB stadium in the country, played under an identity that was never formally Sacramento's own, and arrived with almost no local marketing infrastructure in place. By any reasonable analysis, those are correctable variables, not structural weaknesses. The market infrastructure, the stadium location, and the civic will are already there.

Opening Day 2026 told a different story. The Athletics broke the Sutter Health Park attendance record on April 3, 2026, with a near-capacity crowd of 12,410 for the home opener against the Houston Astros. That was not a curiosity. It was a data point. It was the market speaking.

Mayor Kevin McCarty has said it plainly: "After talking to people in Major League Baseball, they say there's one thing to dramatically increase our odds. It's making sure we support the A's here and show that we are worthy of a major league franchise." The city heard him. The fans heard him. The seats filled.

The Territorial Argument No One Is Talking About Loudly Enough

Here is the structural reality that tends to get buried beneath stadium renderings and ownership group announcements: when the A's leave for Las Vegas after the 2027 season, the San Francisco Giants will be the only Major League Baseball franchise in Northern California.

The Giants' territorial rights extend across a vast swath of Northern California, rights that have historically complicated any conversation about Sacramento. But territorial rights are not permanent barriers when market logic demands otherwise. MLB has demonstrated repeatedly that it will negotiate territorial considerations when the geographic case is compelling enough. And the case here is compelling.

Northern California, from the Oregon border to Fresno, contains more than 10 million people. The Giants serve the Bay Area. They do not serve Sacramento, Stockton, Fresno, Chico, or Redding in any meaningful way. These communities have never been within reasonable driving distance of Oracle Park for regular-season baseball. They've been baseball fans without a team to call their own.

Mayor McCarty framed it precisely: "I think MLB is going to give a hard, hard look at Sacramento with only one team in Northern California." I believe that he is right. The Giants' territorial monopoly in the post-A's vacuum is not an argument against Sacramento. It is the argument for Sacramento. A league that leaves 10 million people in California's interior without a team, when a viable candidate city is sitting right there with live market data, is leaving money and fans on the table.

A Sacramento expansion franchise does not cannibalize the Giants' market. It fills the vacuum the Giants never cleanly filled to begin with.

Comparing the Competition

Sacramento's competitors for the Western expansion slot are serious, and they deserve an honest assessment.

Salt Lake City has the most advanced infrastructure of any Western candidate. The Larry H. Miller Company is leading a $3.5 billion mixed-use development called the Power District, the Utah state legislature has committed up to $900 million in public funding for stadium construction, and the bid has a credible ownership structure behind it. By most national accounts, Salt Lake City is currently the frontrunner in the West. That has to be acknowledged.

But Salt Lake City has genuine weaknesses that don't receive enough attention. The Mountain time zone creates broadcast disadvantages that affect national television revenue, a structural factor in any franchise valuation, and one that no amount of capital can fix. On market size, the picture is mixed: Salt Lake City's MSA is approximately 1.2 million, but included with the broader Salt Lake-Provo-Orem Combined Statistical Area, the figure economists typically use, reaches an estimated 2.8 million. The population argument is a wash depending on how you draw the map.

What isn't a wash is this: Salt Lake City has no live stress test. The Power District is a rendering. The stadium is a concept. The ownership group is promising. Yet, Sacramento has actual games, actual crowds, and an actual track record, and actual fans who want a Major League Baseball team they can finally call their own.

Portland presents a different profile. Its metro area is around 2.5 million, comparable to Sacramento's, and the Portland Diamond Project has secured roughly $800 million in state financing and identified the Zidell Yards waterfront site. But Portland still lacks a confirmed ownership "whale," otherwise known as the lead general partner with the financial gravitas to anchor the franchise. As PDP's own leadership has acknowledged, that remains an open gap.

Portland also carries a more complex civic history around large public projects, and its market, while loyal, has not been stress-tested in the way Sacramento's has.

Nashville is the near-consensus Eastern pick and largely irrelevant to Sacramento's Western case, though worth noting as evidence that MLB is serious about expansion.

What separates Sacramento from the field is not any single advantage. It is the convergence of several: a live market proof, a real stadium footprint, active public-private partnership infrastructure, a mayor committed enough to run a formal bid, and a territorial vacuum that is genuinely unprecedented in the league's geography.

The Financing Picture

A new ballpark will cost in excess of $1 billion. McCarty has said so directly, and there is no reason to dispute it. This is where Sacramento's bid remains most vulnerable, and where the most work still needs to be done.

The good news is that a framework already exists. West Sacramento's special taxing district, the same mechanism used to help fund the Sacramento Republic FC soccer stadium, could be redeployed and substantially expanded for a baseball facility. Property tax rates in West Sacramento run at roughly 48 cents on the dollar, compared to about 22 cents in the city of Sacramento proper, making the west bank the logical financing jurisdiction.

The Greater Sacramento Economic Council has projected approximately $650 million in annual economic impact from an MLB franchise, a number that, if accurate, transforms the public investment calculus significantly. The region's goal of drawing 2 million fans per season at an expanded, MLB-caliber facility is not a fantasy. The Kings' arena set a precedent for Sacramento's ability to complete large-scale public-private infrastructure. The Republic FC stadium project is adding to that track record.

What remains unresolved is the ownership group. McCarty has floated a strategy of targeting investors who come second in the San Diego Padres sale process, serious money that was already prepared to buy into MLB but was outbid. It is a creative approach. Whether it produces a committed lead investor in time is the key open question.

What May Means

Mayor Kevin McCarty and West Sacramento Mayor Martha Guerrero are planning a formal, unified press conference in May 2026 to launch Sacramento's official expansion bid. They have committed to bringing the full regional coalition of cities, counties, and economic development partners to that announcement.

This is a hinge moment. Not the announcement itself, but what precedes it. The weeks between now and May are when the case gets built or doesn't. When the ownership group gets named or doesn't. When the financing mechanism gets specified or doesn't. When the public narrative around Sacramento's readiness is shaped by people inside the process or by people outside it.

This essay is written by someone outside it. I am a lifelong Sacramento native. I was born in Kaiser downtown, am a graduate from Sacramento State, someone who has worked within the State Assembly, and am a political science researcher who believes that the narrative matters, that the civic case deserves to be made loudly and precisely, and that the window for making it is narrower than it looks.

MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred has stated his intention to finalize expansion decisions before he retires in 2029. The league's collective bargaining agreement expires after the 2026 season. If the CBA process is contentious, the timeline compresses further. Sacramento does not have the luxury of waiting to be discovered. The Power District is a compelling story. Portland has a waterfront and bipartisan state support. Sacramento's counter-argument has to be specific, urgent, and grounded in the data that no other city has: the data of a live MLB market, already operating, already growing, already proving the case one sellout at a time.

The Name That Closes the Argument

There is one more thing worth saying:

Every other expansion candidate is selling the MLB a concept. Nashville is selling country music and the New South. Salt Lake City is selling the Miller legacy and mountain views over the Jordan River. Portland is selling the waterfront and Pacific Northwest identity.

But us here in Sacramento? We are selling something that already exists and once already existed: a baseball city with a name, a history, a championship tradition, and a 120-year relationship with the game.

The Solons were PCL champions. They played the first night game in Pacific Coast League history. They gave this city an identity at a time when Sacramento was still finding its footing as a capital city. The name "Solons" is not just nostalgia. It is a brand asset that no expansion city in the running can replicate because it belongs to Sacramento, and only Sacramento, by right of history and civic identity.

Maybe in hindsight, revival is not the right word. Continuation is. The Sacramento Solons belong in Major League Baseball. The market is ready. The infrastructure is in development. The civic leadership is committed. The stress test is running, and the results so far are positive.

All that remains is to make the case loudly enough, specifically enough, and in time.

May is coming. Let's be ready.

Justin Gregg is a Sacramento native, CSU Sacramento Political Science graduate, and founder of the Sacramento Solons Revival Project, an independent advocacy effort for MLB expansion in California's Capital Region. He can be reached at jdgregg.com.

If you believe Sacramento deserves an MLB team, follow @solonsrevival on Instagram, X, and Threads to help show there’s real local support behind this idea.

Full sources and fact-check index available in the companion post.