The Athletics — formerly of Oakland but not yet of Las Vegas — have one of the worst home records in baseball.
Maybe it figures.
The A’s are one of two big league teams playing in minor league ballparks this season, along with the Tampa Bay Rays. Tampa Bay was forced out of Tropicana Field after damage caused by Hurricane Milton, so the Rays are playing home games at the Yankees’ spring training base in Tampa. The A’s left Oakland and are spending at least three seasons at Sutter Health Park in West Sacramento before moving to a planned ballpark in Las Vegas.
So far, these temporary venues don’t seem to be helping in the win column. Tampa Bay has played far more games at home than on the road, but the Rays are 16-18 at home and 10-8 away. For the A’s, the difference is even more jarring. They are 14-12 on the road but just 9-19 at home.
These are the only two teams in the major leagues that have a winning record on the road and a losing record at home.
After improving from 50-112 in 2023 to 69-93 last year, the A’s were actually above .500 less than two weeks ago. Then they dropped 11 in a row, the last six of which were at home, before finally beating Philadelphia 5-4 on Sunday.
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Following that damaging stretch, the Athletics have a winning percentage of .538 on the road and .321 at home. That difference of .217 is on pace to set a modern record. The previous mark was “achieved” in the strike-shortened season of 1994 by the Chicago Cubs, who were 29-25 (.537) on the road and just 20-39 (.339) at home.
The record for a full season was set back in 1908, when Pittsburgh was 56-21 (.727) on the road and 42-35 (.545) at home.
As the season is just around the two-month mark, however, there is plenty of time for the A’s to reverse course – even if they can’t fully recover the kind of pace they were on earlier in 2025, avoiding making the wrong kind of history is possible. Sutter Health Park might also end up playing differently as the year goes on and temperatures rise, and it’s unclear just what the consequences of that will be for the A’s at this junction: they might give up more offense in the heat, but by the same theory they should score more runs, too.
Coincidentally, if you take out the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, the Athletics already hold the modern record for the biggest home-road winning percentage difference in the other direction. In 1945, the Philadelphia A’s went 39-35 (.527) at home but just 13-63 (.171) on the road for a split of .356. That noteworthy affinity for home wasn’t enough to keep them in town forever, however: the Philadelphia A’s would move to Kansas City a decade later, in time for the 1955 season, and then head further west to Oakland for 1968.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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