Sacramento River Cats President Chip Maxson: Baseball America’s 2025 MiLB Executive Of The Year
In 2025, the staff of the Sacramento River Cats pulled off something that seemed impossible. Somehow, they managed to become the temporary home of the major league Athletics, while also hosting a Triple-A team in the same ballpark.
Among the many remarkable aspects of the River Cats’ year, there’s one that seems the most improbable: The field the River Cats and Athletics shared all season long was made of grass.
The Sutter Health Park field was never re-sodded. It survived days in the 40s and 50s in April and high 90s in July and August. It weathered more than 150 home dates and still looked full, lush and green in late September.
The Sacramento turf was the subject of many discussions. The worry was that a natural grass field would wither and die without getting the regenerative breaks that normally occur when a baseball team hits the road.
With a schedule that had the Triple-A River Cats playing at home on the weeks that the big league A’s were on the road, and vice versa, the grass would never have time to recover.
Originally, the plan was to bring in artificial turf to handle the extreme wear and tear. But concerns about how players would fare on a surface that held and radiated heat on near triple-digit days led to the decision to stick with natural grass.
And so Major League Baseball and the River Cats staff attacked the problem by being proactive. MLB head groundskeeper Murray Cook advised the RiverCats to use a well-wearing Bermuda hybrid grass. The River Cats laid it over a clay and sand mixture that helped the grass retain moisture and nutrients. A Sacramento homestand in June was moved to Tacoma to give time to re-sod if needed.
From there, the staff worked day and night to keep that from ever being needed. Drones with infrared cameras monitored for hot spots in need of extra care to prevent those spots from getting worse. Heating and cooling was piped underneath the turf to keep the grass in tip-top shape.
With a lot of work, the field held up extremely well. And it ended up using less fertilizer than the year before, thanks to the adaptations.
It’s one example of what was going on all year in West Sacramento. Team president Chip Maxson and the Sacramento River Cats did the near-impossible all season, which is why Maxson is the 2025 Minor League Executive of the Year.
From Day One, the River Cats embraced what could have been viewed as a never-ending marathon. No one had ever before hosted a Triple-A and MLB season in the same ballpark. It meant that Sutter Health Park hosted 151 games in an 182-day stretch.
“When the idea first came up, my first answer was, ‘Of course we can do it. It’s baseball. This is what we do,'”:Maxson said. “I got excited thinking about the opportunity. It’s something that has never been done before.”
Suddenly, the River Cats’ Triple-A ballpark had to be brought up as much as was possible to MLB standards. Over six miles of fiber optic cable had to be laid to handle the demands of MLB broadcasting. A new security perimeter had to be created to meet MLB security standards.
MLB officials and A’s officials helped. The River Cats are owned by the NBA’s Sacramento Kings, which also proved very helpful.
After an all-hands-on-deck April, Maxson and the staff settled into a schedule, and everyone was ordered to take days off. No one ended up going 151-for-151, with most full-time staff ending up working 125 to 135 games. When staffers were off, Kings staff stepped in to fill those holes.
The River Cats survived and even thrived. Over one million fans attended A’s and River Cats games in Sacramento.
“We are excited to run it back and do it again,” Maxson said. “We learned so much. We want to apply that in 2026.”
