Sacramento River Cats
The Sacramento River Cats are a minor league baseball team based in West Sacramento, California. The team plays in the Pacific Coast League (PCL) and is the Triple-A affiliate of Major League Baseball's San Francisco Giants. Through the 2014 season, they were the top affiliate of the Oakland Athletics.
Since moving to California in 2000, the River Cats have played at Raley Field in West Sacramento. The team began play 38 years ago in British Columbia in 1978 as the Vancouver Canadians, and played their home games at Nat Bailey Stadium through the 1999 season, their first with Oakland since 1978. Following that 1999 season, in which the Canadians won the Triple-A World Series, the team was purchased by a group led by Art Savage and moved south to West Sacramento and became the River Cats for the 2000 season. Savage was the majority owner of the team until his death at age 58 in November 2009. His widow, Susan Savage, became majority owner upon her husband's death.
Sacramento led the minor leagues in attendance during each of its first eight seasons at Raley Field. The team averaged 9,338 per game during the 2015 regular season, for a season total of 672,354, under its first year with the Giants. In 2012, Forbes listed the River Cats as the most valuable minor league franchise.
Sacramento River
The Sacramento River is the principal river of Northern California in the United States, and is the largest river in California. Rising in the Klamath Mountains, the river flows south for 445 miles (716 km) before reaching the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta and San Francisco Bay. The river drains about 27,500 square miles (71,000 km2) in 19 California counties, mostly within a region bounded by the Coast Ranges and Sierra Nevada known as the Sacramento Valley, but also extending as far as the volcanic plateaus of Northeastern California. Historically, its watershed has reached farther, as far north as south-central Oregon where the now, primarily, endorheic (closed) Goose Lake rarely experiences southerly outflow into the Pit River, the most northerly tributary of the Sacramento.
The Sacramento and its wide natural floodplain were once abundant in fish and other aquatic creatures, notably one of the southernmost large runs of chinook salmon in North America. For about 12,000 years, native peoples have drawn upon the vast natural resources of the watershed, which had one of the densest American Indian populations in California. The river has also been used as a trade and travel route since ancient times. Hundreds of tribes sharing regional customs and traditions inhabited the Sacramento Valley, though they received little disturbance upon the arrival of Europeans in the 1700s. The Spanish explorer Gabriel Moraga named the river Rio de los Sacramentos in 1808, later shortened and anglicized into Sacramento.
Sacramento River (Mexico)
The Sacramento River is a river in the state of Chihuahua, Mexico.
History
In 1847, a Mexican army was defeated along the river by the U.S. Army during the Mexican-American War. The engagement is known as the Battle of the Sacramento.
