I must admit I'm curious about Sacramento. Maybe a one-day visit via Amtrak?
By Carl Nolte, Columnist March 22, 2025 - San Francisco Chronicle
Next week, Sacramento joins the big leagues.
It’s about time. Sacramento has been a big city for years, but never got credit for it. Sacramento was ignored by Bay Area- and Los Angeles-based snobs who looked down on the capital of California as a sort of urban backwater, a pit stop on the way to Tahoe.
But all that changes next week. Sacramento has taken in the orphaned Oakland Athletics for at least three years until a new stadium is built in Las Vegas. The first game is on Monday night, March 31, against the Chicago Cubs at Sutter Health Park. It will be the first Major League Baseball game in the city’s long history.
Never mind that the stadium is actually located in West Sacramento, just across the river, or that this is a minor league ballpark, or that the basketball Sacramento Kings have been major league for 40 years. This is American League baseball, six months of America’s pastime. The real thing.
“The stuff of dreams,” Darrell Steinberg called it. He was the mayor of Sacramento when the A’s ownership, fed up with Oakland, announced the deal to move to Sacramento for a bit. “I have no doubt our fans, our ownership will wow them all,” he said. The three years in Sacramento may well be an audition for a future major league team there.
Sacramento is no cow town: It has a population of nearly 527,000 people in the city limits, almost as many as the combined populations of St. Louis and Cincinnati, both major league cities. The seven county area the Census Bureau calls Greater Sacramento has 2.6 million residents, more people than 15 states.
But Sacramento has an image problem; It’s perceived as a quiet place, slow, behind the times. A lot of America’s image of Sacramento comes from the writings of Joan Didion, the city’s most famous native daughter, especially in her “Run, River” and “Where I Was From.” Her view of the West Coast is celebrated, especially on the East Coast, but I suspect her view of Sacramento has been overtaken by time.
A more recent view of the city came in 2017 in the movie “Lady Bird” about a young woman named Christine who grew up in Sacramento and couldn’t wait to leave. “I have to get out of Sacramento,” she says, “It’s killing. It’s the Midwest of California.’’
A newer movie is out next month. It’s called “Sacramento,” about a road trip by some young people in an old yellow car from Los Angeles to Sacramento.
I haven’t seen it myself, but I made my own road trip myself, this one by bus and train from San Francisco, up and back in a single day.
Sacramento is joining the big leagues. And despite what you may think, it’s no cow town
Greg