Sacramento Is Hoping It Will Be Big Time in More Ways Than One

The biggest sports event in Sacramento used to be the Pig Bowl, an annual football game between city police officers and county sheriff’s deputies.

The Pig Bowl still packs them in--20,700 attended this year’s game at a community college stadium that seats 22,284--but now the biggest sports interest in town is the Sacramento Kings, a much-traveled National Basketball League franchise.

At mid-season, the Kings had sold out their 20 first-half home games in a 10,333-seat, temporary arena, even though they had one of the worst records in the NBA.

Now sports promoters and businessmen are dreaming about bringing other professional teams to California’s capital. “We have no desire to be minor league in anything in this town,” says Gregg Lukenbill, a developer who heads a group that bought the Kansas City Kings and moved them to Sacramento before the start of this season.

But spokesmen for big league baseball and football indicate Sacramento residents might have a long wait before they have the nation’s two other major sports in their backyards.

“It has been said that baseball is generally committed--let me underline the words ‘generally committed’--to expansion,” said Chuck Adams, a spokesman for baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberroth. “(But) nothing has been said that baseball will expand.”

Don Weiss, executive director of the National Football League, says “expansion isn’t an active issue right now (in the NFL) but it could be soon.”

He said the NFL anticipates adding two, and possibly four, more teams “when circumstances warrant it.”

The Sacramento Sports Assn., which owns the Kings, and the Committee to Help Attract Major Professional Sports, would like to bring an existing major league baseball team to Sacramento by the 1988 season to play in a proposed stadium that would eventually seat 65,000.

But Adams says Ueberroth wants existing franchises to remain where they are.

And a report prepared for the city by a San Francisco firm gives Sacramento no chance of getting either a major league baseball or football team in the near future.

The report, done over a year ago by Economic Research Associates, says Sacramento would have to compete with several larger cities that already have stadiums or plans to build them. The study also notes that baseball’s exemption from antitrust laws gives Ueberroth the power to block team moves.

Al Rosen, president and general manager of the San Francisco Giants, says Sacramento’s chances of getting a major league baseball team lie in the “distant future.”

“There are about 12 cities ahead of them on the expansion list, all of whom gave dynamite presentations at the winter (baseball) meetings,” Rosen said. “And Commissioner Ueberroth has made his feelings on franchise relocation quite clear. He’s dead set against it.”

Rosen, whose team complains of playing in cold Candlestick Park on windy San Francisco Bay, said weather and playing conditions in Sacramento are ideal. “But you have to be realistic. Phoenix, Denver and Miami can say the same thing.

“And San Jose (40 miles south of San Francisco) is quickly becoming the second-largest city in California. They all want expansion teams. And truthfully, I don’t think the owners are inclined to expand right now anyway.

“If Lukenbill thinks he can buy a baseball team and move it here as easy as he did the basketball team, he’d better think again,” Rosen added during a recent visit to the state capital.

Sacramento’s location and population may also create problems in getting and keeping a baseball or football team. The city is only a 90-minute drive from San Francisco or Oakland and would have to compete with Bay Area football and baseball teams for the large crowds needed to make such franchises successful.

“Criteria” put out to cities interested in expansion teams included a population “adequate to support a club,” Adams said. The projected population for the four-county Sacramento area in 1986 is 1.3 million.

In comparison, the San Diego Padres, which have one of baseball’s smallest population bases, can draw from more than 2.08 million people in San Diego County.

The prospect of major league sports in California’s capital has not been universally popular, mainly because of other development that has been tied by Lukenbill and his partners to construction of a permanent arena and stadium.

Developers want the city to rezone 6,500 acres of farm land north of downtown Sacramento for residential, industrial and commercial use. The sports complex would sit near the center of the area, called North Natomas.

A 1979 initiative sponsored by developers to rezone 435 acres of North Natomas land for industry and a sports complex was turned down by voters. That was before Lukenbill and his group bought the Kings.

In the next few weeks, the city council is expected to approve a much larger rezoning, prompting charges from environmental groups that major league sports is nothing more than a carrot being held out to lure the city into approving development that will increase congestion and pollution.

Virginia Moose, a city redevelopment commissioner and member of the Environmental Council of Sacramento, says she remembers watching newly arrived Kings players tell television viewers how much they liked Sacramento.

“I thought, how ironic,” she says. “Here they are being used as pawns in this giant land speculation deal that is going to turn Sacramento into another Los Angeles.”