Field of dreams: A look at Sacramento's major league ballpark that never was
SACRAMENTO — More than a decade before the River Cats home was built in West Sacramento, there was a plan in place—and under construction—to build a Major League Baseball stadium in Natomas.
To this day, from the air, you can still see the outline of what that field of dreams would've looked like.
Take a bird's eye view of what was going to be Arco Park: a baseball stadium being built next to the then-Arco Arena. It was meant to attract either the Oakland Athletics or an expansion team.
My late, great friend Greg Van Dusen helped bring the Kings to Sacramento from Kansas City. He reminded me back when we originally did this story that developers dug deep to go deep with this project, putting in $16 million in the early stages.
"We built the entire foundation, which would be the dugout, the operations, the kitchens, all that kind of stuff, underneath for storage from foul pole around home plate to foul pole," Van Dusen, former vice president of the Kings, told us in 2015.
Oh, and Arco Park wasn't going to be built just for baseball. It would have also housed a football field.
The 53,000-seat dual-use stadium would've given Sacramento-area sports fans the venue of their dreams.
"You need to be as close as possible to the action," Van Dusen said in 2015. "You want your fans to be just inches or feet from the playing surface."
After all that, Arco Park would strike out and fumble the chance to exist. The funding simply ran out, but it wasn't for a lack of effort.
In a push to show Major League Baseball that Sacramento could be a baseball city, organizers put together a road trip to the Oakland Coliseum to see an A's game—"The March on Baseball" as it was called—in August 1987.
It still holds the record for the largest single group sale event in the history of Major League Baseball. Approximately 22,000 fans from the Sacramento area made the journey.
It's a journey that began with the field of dreams in Natomas that never became a reality.