California's a Trailblazer Again, Fields Baseball's First Homeless Team

California, which has blazed so many trails for the rest of the country, is now trailblazing again, fielding baseball’s first homeless team.

On Thursday, the Seattle Mariners will kick off their 2025 season with a game at home against “the Athletics.” Not the Oakland Athletics, although the team’s ignominious abandonment of its home since 1968 is still so recent that its season schedule page at MLB.com still carries an ad that tries to entice you to visit lovely Oakland. And not “the Sacramento Athletics” or “West Sacramento Athletics,” although the team will play this year and, the story goes, the next two seasons in the latter city. No, the team is now just “the Athletics,” without a city. 

This is because the team plans to abscond again, this time in Las Vegas, in 2028, and so it doesn’t want fans in Sacramento too comfortable with the idea of the A’s being around. This is, after all, the most peripatetic franchise in major league baseball, having started out in Philadelphia, then moving to Kansas City in 1955, and then to Oakland. That matches the Boston/Milwaukee/Atlanta Braves, but now the A’s have taken the lead with the move to Sacramento, and the Vegas shift will give them a two-city lead in the race to be the most restless ballclub. 

The cityless moniker is also particularly fitting since the team is (for now) still playing in Gavin Newsom’s California, where far-left officials have allowed homelessness to proliferate to an alarming degree, and homeless people, including many who are drug-addicted and mentally ill, to terrorize the populace. One cannot visit a major city in California without encountering one or more ranting, potentially dangerous person on the street. And so now it’s fitting: California has given baseball, and the nation, its first homeless team.

The Athletics chose to be homeless. SportsLogos.net reported back in Nov. 2024 that the nearest analogy to their cityless name “was when the Anaheim Angels became the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim and spent the next decade referring to themselves only as the Angels in just about everything aside from their preferred abbreviation, ‘LAA.’” 

The A’s even reserved trademarks that include the name Sacramento: “There’s really no obvious reason for the Athletics to go this route. The team already owns the trademarks for both Sacramento Athletics and Sacramento A’s. They could’ve proceeded just as the Angels did previously and reserved the use of Sacramento for standings and scoreboards while sticking to ‘Athletics’ on their uniforms and all official releases.”

One reason why they may have decided not to go for “Sacramento Athletics” could be that they actually will play in a minor league ballpark in West Sacramento, which is a different city, and a quite small one at that. It would be like a team calling itself the Carson City (Nevada) Athletics, or the Saratoga Springs (Utah) Athletics. And anyway, West Sacramento is just a flop for this club, a homeless shelter it can stay in until its new digs open up in Las Vegas. If they do, but one never knows. Just a few years ago, this team proudly proclaimed that it was “Rooted in Oakland” and had grand plans to build a new stadium there that would rival the little jewel in San Francisco where the Giants play, but Marxist city officials, climate-myth fanatics, a crumbling, crime-ridden, leftist-run city of Oakland, and the Athletics’ cheapskate billionaire owner worked wonderfully together to scuttle that idea.

     Related: Elegy for the Oakland Athletics

And so now they’ve become the Homeless Athletics, a living celebration of what Gavin Newsom has done to the state of California. They need uniforms to match. Maybe instead of the famous green jerseys emblazoned with the word “Athletics,” they could get uniforms that are customized with rips and stains, and with, say, a letter missing from “Athletics.” Have the L drop off, maybe lost to a hole in the front of the shirt, and add a P for “peripatetic,” and you have the perfect name for this team: Pathetics.

The dark comedy of the Athletics and the decline of California under Gavin Newsom are all part of the larger story of the immense damage the left has done to that country. That story is, alas, not yet fully told. But we can be thankful that for the first time ever, its end is actually in sight.