The Losing A’s Found a Winning City to Host Them

West Sacramento Is on a Hot Streak. Other California Cities Should Watch

The Oakland A’s are baseball’s biggest losers. But their new temporary home—West Sacramento—is one of California’s greatest winners.

No California city has had a better 21st century than West Sacramento. The municipality of 54,000 people has grown in population and prosperity with striking speed, even as California has stagnated on both fronts.

The A’s will spend three years, 2025 through 2027, in West Sacramento’s minor league ballpark as the team waits for a new stadium to be built in their future home, Las Vegas. Perhaps their relocation will bring West Sac, as …

by Joe Mathews | April 16, 2024

Before Taylor and Travis, There Was Helen and John

She Was an Actress. He Was a Shortstop. We Can Learn From the Press Parade Around This 19th-Century Power Couple

by Scott D. Peterson | January 11, 2024

Everyone who’s the least bit plugged into the NFL or popular culture, or has spent at least five minutes out of a coma the past few months, knows why the …

Which California Baseball Team Has the Worst Owner in Pro Sports?

The Oakland A’s and the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim Are in a Race to the Bottom

by Joe Mathews | October 3, 2023

In California, a land blessed with more than its fair share of winners, we learn our most important lessons by dwelling among the losers.

So, in this final week of the …

tktk | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

If You’re Latinx, Loving the Dodgers Is Complicated

The Team’s Ballpark Has a Dark History. But There’s No Other Place I Feel More Like an Angeleno and Chicana

by Natalia Molina | October 19, 2022

As a kid growing up in Echo Park in the 1970s, I would walk to Dodger Stadium with my brother or kids in the neighborhood. For three dollars, we could …

My ‘Field of Dreams’ Above Carpinteria

At Santa Barbara County’s Ken McMullen Baseball Camp, a True Team Player Taught Us How to Teach Others

by Joe Mathews | September 15, 2020

Did you have strange dreams during this unsettling, crazy California summer? Me too.

Mine compressed time and space. In dreamland, I toggled between the anxious claustrophobia of summer 2020 and memories …

Why Was Baseball Legend Oscar Charleston Forgotten?

The Pathbreaking Player, Scout, and Manager Was Part of a Black Baseball Tradition That Is Still Obscured

by Jeremy Beer | March 1, 2020

History, more often than we would like, is an unjust judge. Consider the case of Oscar Charleston, a baseball player who for nearly 40 years was one of the most …

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