It’s officially fall. And on top of the changing leaves, cooler nights, and pumpkin spices, autumn brings my two favorite words in sports: October baseball.
With 12 Major League Baseball teams battling it out to play in the World Series (including my beloved Cleveland Guardians), one team faces a much different battle. The Oakland Athletics, who have called Oakland home for 57 years, are attempting a move to Las Vegas. As the team waits for its new stadium in Vegas, they’ll play three years at a minor league ballpark in Sacramento.
Though jumping ship from one market to another is hardly new in professional sports, the A’s move from the Bay Area to California's Central Valley and then Nevada’s desert is a bit of a climate mess.
And how MLB and the A’s navigate this mess highlights the challenges and possible solutions of playing sports in a climate-changed world.
The most immediate climate concern for the A’s is their three-year pit stop in Sacramento.
Sacramento is much hotter than the rest of Northern California, and it's getting hotter: This summer, the city saw its hottest 20-day stretch in recorded history, with temperatures averaging nearly 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 Celsius).
And unlike the permanent domed ballpark being built in Las Vegas, Sacramento’s ballpark is fully outside.
This heat is made worse by the ballpark’s playing field. To reduce wear and tear of two teams playing full baseball schedules (the A's and the triple-A Sacramento River Cats), Sutter Health Park is swapping out grass for turf. Though turf holds up better than grass, it also traps way more heat.
“The health and safety concern of having AstroTurf at the major-league level, which creates heat in the Valley that’s often in the 100s during the summer,” player agent Scott Boras told The Athletic. “The other aspect is access to the locker rooms in-game and what kind of facilities are being built to allow players to condition and train outside of the hot sun.”
Despite this climate mess, the Athletics' move to Vegas also offers some climate opportunities — both in Sacramento and in Sin City.
It’s not every day you get to build a ballpark. And because they're highly visible and attended by millions of fans each year, ballparks have an outsized influence on our behaviors. So to get people excited about a greener future, any new ballpark should showcase green technologies, like solar panels, wind turbines, recycled water, and energy-efficient flood lights.
These green bells and whistles are great. But we must also remember that most stadium emissions come from construction and travel.
That’s why it’s so important to build ballparks downtown and accessible to public transit, which I’ve written about before.
And it’s why it’s so important for ballparks to use energy-efficient and material-efficient designs, as well as sustainable building materials, in construction.
Of course, building an actual ballpark is only half the battle. Once built, ballparks continue to cash in on all those fans, selling advertisement space all over the field and even on uniforms. Unfortunately, oil and gas advertisements are too common in this setting.
At least 60 U.S. sports franchises have sponsorship deals with oil and gas companies, or utility companies that generate and sell electricity from fossil fuel-burning power plants, according to a new UCLA survey.
And three MLB teams advertise oil and gas companies right on their jerseys.
So instead of defaulting the highest bidder, baseball teams and players should use both their ballparks and platforms to reject fossil fuel advertising and uplift green solutions, something Los Angeles Times’ reporter Sammy Roth writes about a lot in his Boiling Point newsletter:
“To avoid climate chaos, we need society’s most powerful people — in sports, entertainment and other industries with major cultural and economic clout — to stop sitting on the sidelines and start taking real responsibility.”
Like most things in society, sports are about making money. And though it would be better to avoid building new ballparks in the first place — especially ones in the middle of the desert that need air-conditioning — the reality is that teams move and build ballparks.
How we build these ballparks, and how we talk about them, is a climate opportunity we can’t afford to waste.