The Oakland A’s are officially headed to Las Vegas. Major League Baseball owners voted Thursday morning to allow the club to relocate to the desert after nearly two decades of failed efforts to secure a new stadium deal with Oakland.
The motion, which required at least three-quarters of the leagues owner to vote in favour of it in order to pass, received unanimous support. With the deal approved, Oakland will now lose its last remaining professional sports franchise to relocation.
MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred previously said that the league would waive its $300M relocation fee in order to facilitate a deal. The A’s will look to move into a new state of the art $1.5B stadium on the Las Vegas strip, $380M of which will come from the state itself.
In a last ditch effort to save the team, Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao circulated a memo to MLB owners last week imploring them to reconsider their vote, and revealing that the city had raised $928M in funding to help build a new stadium in town. However it appears that last ditch effort was too little, too late, as every owner ultimately voted in favour of relocation.
The Athletics still have a lease with the Oakland Coliseum through the 2024 season. After that however, it remains to be seen where the club will play from 2025 through the 2027 campaigns. One possible solution is to operate out of their Triple-A ballpark in Nevada where the Las Vegas Aviators currently play. The Las Vegas Ballpark, located in Summerlin South, NV, has a capacity of 8,196 or 10,000 with standing room.
While it would be a less than ideal solution, it also represents roughly what the A’s were drawing in terms of attendance in 2023 in Oakland. The Athletics finished dead last in the major leagues with 10,275 fans on average, trailing the 29th ranked Marlines by over 4,000 spectators per home game.
Construction on the new Vegas stadium isn’t planned to be completed until the start of 2028. The team’s new stadium is earmarked for the site of the old Tropicana hotel on a nine acre parcel of land.
All that being said, there remain several hurdles to clear before the Oakland A’s officially become the Las Vegas A’s. Chief amongst them is a recently launched legal challenge from a teacher’s union in Nevada regarding the state funding promised for the new stadium.
Also on the discussion block is the initial stadium renderings which were released several months ago. While the small venue (33,000 seats) is one point of contention, the bigger issue could be the lack of a dome/retractable roof which will cause some blisteringly hot summer days in the desert.
While none of the above are necessarily deal breakers per se, they will all need to be smoothed out in the coming months before construction officially kicks off in earnest.
-Kyle Skinner
Twitter: @JKyleSkinner
Photo: Keith Allison. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.