Confirmed: Oakland A’s Moving to Las Vegas

By Scott Roeben, on April 20 2023
4 min read 26 comments
Las Vegas

What a wild ride it’s been getting an MLB team to Sin City, but it appears it’s finally happening.

Rumors of the Oakland A’s moving to Las Vegas have circulated for years. We should know, our rumors.

Now, it seems, a deal is close at hand for the team to move into a shiny new ballpark on the site of the former Wild Wild West casino—49 acres of land owned by Red Rock Resorts (Station Casinos)—just off The Strip.

There isn’t an official logo yet, so we made this one. We’re handy like that.

Along with the exciting news of an MLB team moving to Las Vegas, casino lovers’ hopes are simultaneously dashed because that site was supposed to get a resort called Viva. Oh, well.

Before we move onto the sportsball news, let’s take one last bittersweet look at what might have been. Read more.

Bygones.

Then again, Station Casinos is only selling half its land to the A’s, so there will still be 50 acres where Station could build a casino. Fingers crossed, and you’ll know before anybody because you read this blog!

Reports are the A’s will build a $1.5 billion, 30-35,000-seat stadium with a retractable roof.

The retractable roof, of course, is necessary because in the summertime, Las Vegas gets hotter than Kelly LeBrock in “Weird Science,” a reference we’re fully aware is now 38 years old but a good many boys became men watching that movie, so deal with it.

The A’s looked at a number of sites in Las Vegas for a potential ballpark, including near the Rio and Tropicana casinos, along with the Las Vegas Festival Grounds (at Circus Circus).

According to a story in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, analysts say the ballpark will draw about “400,000 incremental visitors annually to Las Vegas.”

While we’re pulling whimsical, made-up numbers out of our butt, an MLB team will contribute 140 bazillion dollars to the local economy.

News of an A’s deal to move to Vegas is the culmination of years of angling (and drama in Oakland), and not without controversy, of course.

Taxpayers were royally scrod when the Raiders moved to Las Vegas, as $750 million in public funding (through hotel room taxes) was used to build Allegiant Stadium.

Last we heard, the A’s were looking for $500 million in rich guy subsidies from Nevada.

“Ban on public funding” has such a nice ring to it.

Public officials swear the deal won’t involve new taxes, which is always adorable.

According to The Nevada Independent, “The plan would be to pass a bill through the Legislature to create a funding mechanism, including a special taxation district covering the stadium site, which would allow for sales tax proceeds to be reinvested in the area, along with an allocation of transferable tax credits estimated to be worth around $500 million. Clark County would also have to sign off on a new taxing district.”

For a project that doesn’t involve new taxes, that sure is a lot of talk about taxes.

Anyway, all that is yet to be hammered out.

Here’s the official statement from the Oakland A’s: “The A’s have signed a binding agreement to purchase land for a future ballpark in Las Vegas. We realize this is a difficult day for our Oakland fans and community. For more than 20 years, the A’s have focused on securing a new home for the Club, and have invested unprecedented time and resources for the past six years to build a ballpark in Oakland. Even with support from fans, leaders at the city, county, and state level, and throughout the broader community, the process to build a new ballpark in Oakland has made little forward progress for some time. We have made a strong and sincere effort to stay here. We recognize that this is very hard to hear. We are disappointed that we have been unable to achieve our shared vision of a waterfront ballpark. As we shift our focus to Vegas, we will continue to share details about next steps.”

It’s safe to say Oakland is a little butt-hurt. You win some, you lose some.

The new A’s ballpark should break ground in 2024, with an opening season in 2027.

Vegas has become a sports obsessed town, and the Oakland A’s move will certainly add to that trajectory.

Don’t be surprised if there’s an announcement about an NBA team in the near future. We’re pretty sure a team will land at the Oak View project, south of The Strip.

Is there a sports saturation point?

Is California going to resent the fact we’re stealing their sports like Robert Redford stole Demi Moore in “Indecent Proposal,” a reference we realize is 30 years old, but they haven’t really made any good movies since then, so again, deal.

Did we mention we shared first word of the A’s moving to Las Vegas two years ago?

There are still lots of questions to be answered about this saga.

Does Las Vegas have a sufficiently large population to support an MLB team? Officials expect locals to make up 70% of ticket buyers at the new stadium.

Isn’t Major League Baseball the one that’s been on a slow decline since the height of its popularity in 2007?

Of the people who were clamoring to have an MLB team in Vegas, were any of those people clamoring for this team?

We aren’t a sports person, so we’ll leave the Las Vegas A’s reporting to the folks more qualified to talk about such things. Specifically, everyone.

Before we do, not to make it awkward, but shouldn’t someone ask if the A’s are any good? Definitely awkward. Then again, lots of people say, “Las Vegas wasn’t built on winners.” We don’t agree with them, but the A’s might be a good fit if you do.

While it’s a bummer to have lost a perfectly good (albeit somewhat sad) casino in the Wild Wild West, along with dreams of another to replace it, Viva, the site at I-15 and Tropicana seems a good one for an MLB stadium. It’s close enough to the tourist corridor without being on The Strip, which would’ve created an ingress-egress nightmare.

Big picture, given the legalization of gambling across the country, Las Vegas needed to pivot, and it appears sports is the diversification of choice.

We’ll see if Las Vegas has enough bandwidth for all the sports it’s so enthusiastically luring to town.

Personally, we’re excited for the hot dogs. Ballpark hot dogs just land different.

Also, for too long Las Vegas has suffered a paucity of urinal troughs. No city can call itself a world-class destination without urinal troughs.

And spitting. And possibly scratching. And yelling obscenities at umpires.

One doesn’t need to be a sports person to know about and appreciate these timeless traditions! Play ball!

 

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