As Major League Baseball looks towards the future, commissioner Rob Manfred has been open about his desire to eventually expand to 32 teams. While MLB needs to sort out the stadium situations with the A’s and Rays before they can fully focus on adding additional franchises, a handful of markets have emerged as potential options for new teams. This week, we’ll take a look at four of the biggest ones. Our first two installments focused on Nashville and Portland. Today we focus on Las Vegas.
LAS VEGAS — Of all the cities in North America without a Major League Baseball team, this one may be the most likely to welcome a franchise in the coming years. Just ask the mayor.
“There’s no question in my mind: We will have Major League Baseball,” Las Vegas mayor Carolyn Goodman said one morning this past summer from her City Hall office.
The question, to hear city officials, Clark County officials and community figures tell it, is not a matter of if, but when. And, even more importantly, who. Will it be an expansion team or a relocated version of the Oakland Athletics?
For decades, Las Vegas operated on the periphery of professional sports, a vital cog in the industry’s economy as a gambling mecca, but a community without a major professional team of its own. That began to change near the end of the 2010s. Hockey opened the door, with the NHL’s Golden Knights launching in 2017. A WNBA franchise relocated from San Antonio a year later. The biggest coup came in the early months of 2020, when the Raiders left Oakland and its rundown Coliseum for the charms of the desert and a new stadium built partially from public funding.
The gold rush has not ended. Las Vegas hosted last year’s NFL draft. The Super Bowl will come to Allegiant Stadium in 2024. The 2023 calendar includes a Formula 1 race on the Las Vegas Strip. Major League Soccer has targeted the area as a destination for expansion. So has MLB, although the prospect of a brand-new franchise opening its doors here is several years away. And the Athletics might get here first.
The holdup over MLB expansion stems from the stadium impasses of the Athletics and the Tampa Bay Rays. The situation in Oakland figures to be resolved before the one in Tampa. For a variety of reasons, Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, Fla., is far from an ideal home; unlike the Coliseum, it has not been overrun by feral cats. The Rays remain competitive in the cutthroat American League East. Athletics owner John Fisher has torn down his roster over the past two seasons. After hanging with better-funded foes for several years, Oakland finished last in the American League West last year. Another basement-bound season looms. The Athletics ranked last in attendance in 2022, the only team to average fewer than 10,000 fans per game.
With the Athletics receiving revenue-sharing money as part of the newest collective bargaining agreement, Fisher must strike an agreement by next January to either build a new ballpark in Oakland or find a new home. For the past several years, team president Dave Kaval has described the Athletics as traveling a “parallel path” between breaking ground on a stadium in Oakland and leaving for Las Vegas. (An Athletics spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on the situation.) Kaval and Fisher have made several trips to scout locations in southern Nevada. The team has also been locked in perpetual negotiations with the city of Oakland over a proposed $12 billion ballpark and development project at Howard Terminal in the Jack London Square neighborhood. The talks hit another snag last week when the city was denied $182 million in federal funding that could have been directed towards the project.
The 2024 deadline prompted MLB commissioner Rob Manfred to describe 2023 as a “crucial year” for the Athletics last month at the Winter Meetings. Manfred has informed the Athletics he would waive any relocation fee, which could cost hundreds of millions of dollars, if the team moves to Las Vegas.
The A’s current challenges in Oakland have led to a “parallel path” between remaining in the Bay Area and a possible relocation to Las Vegas. (Kyodo via AP Images)
“We’re past any reasonable timeline for the situation in Oakland to be resolved,” Manfred said. He suggested the onus for a resolution relied upon the city, citing Fisher’s pledge to privately fund the ballpark. “If Oakland wants to keep the A’s, they need to figure out a way to get a deal in front of the A’s that’s acceptable to John Fisher,” Manfred said. “Look, and I should say this every single time I talk about Oakland: an owner who’s prepared to invest a billion dollars in building a stadium is an unbelievable commitment on the part of ownership.”
In the summer of 2018, Manfred mentioned Las Vegas, along with Charlotte, Montreal, Nashville, Portland and Vancouver as a possible location for a new MLB team. Baseball had previously held Sin City at arm’s length. That distance shrunk in recent years as the sport entered a series of partnerships with betting companies. Gambling ads are now regular features of MLB broadcasts. A provision in the latest collective bargaining agreement even allows players to sign gambling endorsement deals.
“The view over time, depending on what your period of time is, certainly has evolved,” Manfred said about Las Vegas this past November at the owners’ meetings. “I think there was a reluctance years ago about, you know, gambling, the size of the market, whatever. I think it’s become a more appealing market over time.”
Manfred has pointed to the birth of the Golden Knights and the arrival of the Raiders as further evidence of Las Vegas’ viability. “We probably should already be there,” said one MLB executive, who requested anonymity to speak freely about the situation.
In other cities mentioned by Manfred, development groups like Nashville’s Music City Baseball or the Portland Diamond Project have coalesced to build community support, gather investors and scout potential stadium sites. No such public-facing group has emerged in Las Vegas, in part because of the uncertainty with the Athletics.
Even amid the influx of fellow professional teams, complications remain for baseball in Las Vegas. There are questions about the location of a new ballpark, the funding for the park’s construction, and how to fill that ballpark for 81 home games in a community that does not exactly lack entertainment options.
One day this past summer, a question about Las Vegas elicited a chuckle from Brian Gordon, a principal economic and market analyst for the consultancy Applied Analysis: Is it possible for there to be too much to do in one city?
“Maybe the best way to answer that one is just to say Las Vegas has proven its ability to be both resilient and resourceful over the better part of the last century,” Gordon said. “Las Vegas has always found a way to evolve to meet consumer demands. Entertainment has been atop the list, in terms of what visitors and consumers seek out when they travel to destinations like Las Vegas. Entertainment has expanded beyond your typical showroom acts, and has evolved into sophisticated theatrical performances, immersive experiences and professional sports.”
The Golden Knights became a vital part of that tapestry en route to a runner-up finish in the Stanley Cup playoffs in the summer of 2018. The club has emerged as one of hockey’s leaders in attendance, with an average of 18,000 fans packing into the 17,500-capacity T-Mobile Arena through the first 24 games this season. The 6-11 Raiders lagged in the bottom third of NFL attendance this past season.
A baseball team, of course, would play more games, most of them amid the oppressive dry heat of the southern Nevada summer. Despite the climate, tourists still descend upon the city in all seasons. The city welcomed 42.5 million visitors in the pre-pandemic year of 2019, according to figures released by the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, and stood on pace for about 38 million visitors through November of this past year. Harry Reid International Airport served a record 5.17 million passengers in October, according to Clark County officials.
Were baseball available in Las Vegas, some members of the community said, those numbers might only increase. Derek Stevens, a casino owner who once owned the town’s Triple-A baseball affiliate, conjured up a scenario where fans of the Chicago Cubs or St. Louis Cardinals converge upon the city for a three-game series.
“There’s an awful lot of baseball fans who take a road trip every year to a different city,” Stevens said. “You bring baseball to Vegas, I think everybody’s making that trip. It’s a little bit different than going to a little less energetic city.”
There is a healthy debate about the ideal location for a new ballpark. Some favor the resorts corridor, colloquially known as the Strip, where it would blend into the vast landscape of hotels and casinos. Both Allegiant Stadium and T-Mobile Arena call the Strip home. Others prefer a venue more convenient for locals. The mayor’s office had made a proposal to the Athletics utilizing the land around Cashman Field, the former home of the Triple-A club, in downtown Las Vegas.
“I think there’s some value in attracting hometown fans to a facility that is not on Las Vegas Boulevard,” Clark County commissioner Michael Naft said.
At this point, the “parallel path” of the Athletics has led to ongoing negotiations in the Strip. The team is in talks with Bally’s Corporation about land at The Tropicana, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported last week. Talks had petered out with casino magnate Phil Ruffin about a site on the Las Vegas Festival Grounds.
Just how a stadium would be funded remains unclear. The Raiders received $750 million in public subsidies for Allegiant Stadium, created by a new tax on hotel rooms. Several city and county officials suggested that the same courtesy would not be extended again.
“It’s important that we don’t sell ourselves short,” Naft said. “We have a more attractive product than I believe anywhere else on the planet. And because of that, we really need to recognize the fact that we have a lot to offer, without adding a financial element to that. Economically you’re not going to perform anywhere better than you are in southern Nevada right now.”
The Raiders received $750 million in public subsidies to build Allegiant Stadium. (Kirby Lee / USA Today)
Or, as Mayor Goodman put it: “We know our constituents don’t want to put new taxes on.”
Manfred’s message about this year being crucial for the Athletics carried a dual meaning. Some in Oakland interpreted it as a threat. Some in Las Vegas saw it as a signal to get ready.
“When Commissioner Manfred announces that the Oakland Athletics will have their relocation fee waived if they decide to move to Las Vegas,” said James Gordon, chairman of the Clark County Commission and former mayor of Henderson, “that tells me that a lot of that heavy lifting has already been done.”
Gordon believes the community would embrace a baseball team joining the fold of professional franchises. He referenced the robust environment for high school baseball, which has produced big-league All-Stars like Bryce Harper, Kris Bryant and Joey Gallo. “There’s a wonderful opportunity for Major League Baseball here,” Gibson said. Like so many others, he was waiting for a resolution with the Athletics.
“We’re anxious for there to be a decision,” Gordon said. “In the meantime, we’re not letting moss grow anywhere. We’re working to be ready.”
(Top image: Sean Reilly / The Athletic; Photos: iStock)
.