Three Factors That May Crater A's Attendance in 2027

The final year of A's baseball in Sacramento is trending towards being a season of new lows. 

In 2025, the Athletics twice drew an announced attendance figure that began with a seven. In the first game of their series with the Toronto Blue Jays in July, they notched 7,950. A new low was set against the Tampa Bay Rays a month later, with the A's drawing 7,731 Sacramentans. 

Overall, the A's played well in the second half and looked like a promising team heading into 2026. 

This season the A's started off well, but injuries and inconsistent pitching have the A's in the all-too-familiar spot of being one of the worst teams in baseball with a 54-86 record. That's a half-game better than the Los Angeles Angels — who weren't necessarily hoping to contend — and tied with the consistently rudderless Colorado Rockies. 

The A's have not surged in the second half this season, either. Instead, they've floundered, and have gone 14-40 since the beginning of July. Attendance has also been suffering. 

While the A's are drawing 560 more fans per game on average on the year, this past homestand saw the A's draw their lowest announced attendance in Sacramento, 7,228, on a Friday bobblehead night with beautiful weather. Two days later they drew 7,606. 

Earlier in the month they also had a pair of games with 7,427 and 7,343 attendees. 

Obviously losing has dimmed some of the shine here, but this is going to be very interesting heading into the A's 2027 campaign, which is expected to be their final one in Sacramento before moving to Las Vegas. 

Not only will there be less ownership of the team by the locals, but the 2027 season is expected to be played following a lockout during the offseason. How revved up are locals going to be for baseball in general — let alone for a team that's going to be abandoning them by the time 2028 rolls around? 

Some are thinking that the impending lockout could last for a while and have similar repercussions to the 1994 strike, which took the sport years and a once-in-a-generation home run chase to recover from. 

Before the strike in 1994, the average attendance across baseball was 31,256 fans per game. When baseball returned in 1995, that number dropped to 25,021, and wouldn't surpass 30,000 per game again until 2004. 

The owners want a salary cap to cap their biggest costs (player salaries), while putting that under the guise of making baseball more competitive. 

Meanwhile, the San Diego Padres were sold for a record $3.9 billion earlier this year, and the Los Angeles Angels are reportedly being sold for $4 billion as of this week. Those prices are going to be tough to justify to baseball fans when owners say they can't spend on payroll. Clearly there is money being made.

The longer a potential lockout draws on, the more apparent it will become to fans that the billionaire owners are at fault for keeping baseball from them. A common way to get back at billionaires is to boycott what they're selling, hitting them in the pocketbook to send a message. 

If that's how the offseason plays out, the A's attendance in 2027 will be impacted because there is already little incentive to come out to a game. The team has been bad for five straight seasons; they'll be in a different town in a year, and the novelty of seeing a game in a minor-league park has long worn off. 

The trend is already visible in real time. The A's had more games in the 7,000 range (four) last month than above 10,000 (three). All three of those games were on Saturdays. The ceiling in August was on the first day of the month, when they drew 10,426 fans. 

Season ticket holders will set the floor for 2027's attendance, but how this offseason plays out will determine what kind of a ceiling the A's are working with.