Here We Go Again: More Chit-Chat About Oakland Athletics Moving To Las Vegas
By Alan Snel of LVSportsBiz.com
I’d love to see Bill Murray in a modern adaptation of Groundhog Day play some aging sports scribe who has to write yet again another story about the Oakland Athletics moving to Las Vegas.
It’s a story local Las Vegas media can write any day of the week.
But when the Lords of Baseball gave the the green-clad Athletics the green light to look for a new ballpark in other cities, well, that was a news hook that had every news editor and producer in town biting down hard on this week.
We in Las Vegas have heard about the Oakland Athletics moving to Southern Nevada for quite a few years now.
But when the the grand oracle of Major League Baseball said the A’s can go hunting for a new city to play ball, what he really meant was that the Oakland franchise can move to another market willing to fork over a few wheelbarrows of million-dollar bills to help pay for a new ball yard for the A’s. It’s all about creating leverage for the Athletics in their talks with the city of Oakland. We’ve seen this done over and over in many an MLB market — kind of like Groundhog Day.
Just in case you weren’t keeping score, Southern Nevada is raising more than $1 billion over 30 years to pay back debt so that it can pay $750 million towards the Raiders’ sparkling new domed, 65,000-seat stadium. (Clark County will likely dip into a contingency fund again to pay off the next debt bill because of a shortfall in hotel room tax revenues caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.)
Plus, there’s the $80 million the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA tourism agency) gave to Howard Hughes Corporation in the form of a naming rights deal to help build the $150 million Triple-A ballpark in Summerlin. Over in Henderson, that city is using $42 million in public dollars to help build an $84 million 6,000-seat minor league hockey arena for Vegas Golden Knights owner Bill Foley. Even good ol’ Thomas and Mack Center, that veteran workhorse of a sports venue on the UNLV campus, got a $70 million improvement a few years with public cash.
The point here is that Las Vegas and its governments are pretty much tapped out when it comes to doling out free money to professional sports teams so that franchises can get a subsidy to build a venue that generates revenue streams that the teams collect.
When there’s a viable ballpark construction plan for the Oakland Athletics in Las Vegas complete with legit financing then I’ll pay more attention. There might a billionaire out there willing to shell out $1 billion in private dollars to build an MLB baseball stadium some place in metro Las Vegas. The chances of that happening is probably equal to the chance that the All Net Resort and Arena will be built on the Strip.
Raiders/Aces owner Mark Davis had a press conference Tuesday to discuss his naming of Nikki Fargas as president of the Las Vegas Aces WNBA team. It was the same day that MLB said the A’s can go shopping for another city that would give the team a nice ballpark. Here’s Davis’ response:
My favorite line from Davis: “I don’t even think of the A’s.”
And until there’s a legit privately-financed ballpark proposal, Las Vegas should take the same approach.
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