How Worried Should A’s Be About Ballpark in Sacramento After Cubs Series?
The Athletics finished up their first homestand in their temporary home in Sacramento, and it did not go well. The team was outscored 35-9 by the visiting Chicago Cubs and wasn’t terribly competitive in the three-game set, outside of a couple of innings in game two on Tuesday.
Before the season began, Athletics on SI wrote about one big change that could have a detrimental impact on the A’s in 2025, with that change being the batter’s eye.
The reasoning basically being that moving from a pitcher’s park at the Oakland Coliseum to a more hitter-friendly environment was always going to take a bit of an adjustment period. The A’s front office said repeatedly during the offseason that Sutter Health Park is more of a pitcher’s park in the Pacific Coast League, so they expected it to play league average with big-league hitters.
Maybe they didn’t account for Seiya Suzuki and Kyle Tucker, who combined to go 13-for-28 with four doubles and five home runs. There were a combined 12 total home runs hit by both teams, with the A’s accounting for just four of those.
The data that was available that made this seem like a pitcher’s park included the old batter’s eye and the lower run environment.
So that’s the backdrop we’re working with. There could legitimately be an issue afoot here for the A’s long-term, given how bad their pitching staff looked in the three games at home, including big offseason additions Luis Severino and Jeffrey Springs.
There are a couple of reasons that this may not be the end of the world, too.
The first is that the Cubs are a pretty good team, and after getting swept by the Los Angeles Dodgers in Japan and having a tough luck split against a really good Arizona Diamondbacks team, they seemed primed to break out. Sometimes it’s not who you play, but when you play them.
