There’s certainly a buzz around baseball as the Chicago Cubs and the Athletics play the first MLB game at Sutter Health Park in West Sacramento, Calif.

That doesn’t mean everyone is ecstatic to be playing at the stadium that holds 14,014 fans.

“I mean, I’d rather be playing in Oakland,” Cubs second baseman Nico Hoerner told reporters in West Sacramento on Monday before the series opener. “Oakland is a special place for me.”

The 27-year-old was born and raised in Oakland, the former home of the A’s. He grew up going to games at the Oakland Coliseum and cheering out the Green and Gold. Hoerner remembers being in the crowd when the A’s mounted a ferocious, ninth-inning rally capped off by a Coco Crisp walk-off single to force a decisive Game 5 in the 2012 ALDS against the potent Detroit Tigers.

“I still think, like the best sporting events I ever been to were the A’s-Tigers Division Series games I went to in high school,” he said. I remember Coco Crisp’s walk-off single and just like no one left the stadium for like 30 minutes after the game, and just the whole celebrations.”

It was scenes like that that made Hoerner dare to have lofty goals – and it’s what made his trip to Oakland in 2023 as a Cub so special.

“And just as someone growing up with dreams of playing in the major leagues, seeing that firsthand, and what playoff baseball can be like still gives me chills and stuff thinking about that,” Hoerner said. “So definitely was a part of my own development of just seeing the best players in the world and wanting to do that myself.

“I’m really grateful I got to play there in 2023 and got to share that with a lot of my favorite people there.”

[WATCH: Cubs manager Craig Counsell on Sutter Health Park]

That’s what makes this trip to Sacramento so difficult for Hoerner. He knows there’s a generation of kids in the East Bay that won’t be able to see the best athletes in the world compete in front of them and dare to believe that they, too, can do that one day. And, in five years, Oakland lost three sports franchises – the Warriors moved across the Bay to San Francisco in 2019, the Raiders went to Las Vegas a year later and last season was the last for the A’s.

“I feel for fans in Oakland,” Hoerner said. “Baseball fans, sports fans in general, right? All three teams being gone in a very short span is a hard hit to an entire community and three teams that created a lot of joy for a lot of people.

“Just straight up, community-wise, I think sports play a great role in the place and to have all that stripped very quickly is a really challenging thing.”

Those vibes are something that can’t just be picked up and moved to Sacramento or Las Vegas.

“No, I think it’s more about people and community than any physical place,” he said. “I think that’s going to be hard to transport. It’d just be something different. It doesn’t mean it won’t be well done or positive. It’d just be different.”

He hopes one day that baseball can return to the East Bay but knows that’s far from a certainty. But if it does, he wants a team with the right intentions to be there.

“Yeah, I mean, I’d always, I would be in favor of that,” Hoerner said. “I think as long as it was a true effort to put in the best possible team and stadium on the field for Oakland, I think that’d be a really, really great thing.”

That’s because baseball in Oakland was special. It wasn’t the glitz that can be found in Southern California or New York or the history in Chicago or Boston. But it had its charm that made it one-of-a-kind. One that, as an Oaklander, he knew and loved – and one that players around the league appreciated, too.

“I guess just that, like around the league, a lot of people really appreciated the quality of baseball that was played there without always the best resources and the fans and the energy that they brought,” Hoerner said. “A lot of people, like players, just speak highly of their experiences playing games at the Coliseum, even if the locker rooms weren’t the fanciest or things like that.

“It was just a great baseball place. And I hope that fans know that players appreciate a lot of the same things that they did.”