OAKLAND — After the A’s announced they were finally preparing to leave this city, the team’s faithful reacted with despair, bitterness and a sense of inevitability.
In the days after, however, skepticism crept back into the mix — as it always seems to with the A’s, who previously pursued new ballparks in Fremont and San Jose. So just how likely is it that the team is actually going to leave Oakland in 2024 and finish constructing a new home a mile off the Las Vegas strip by 2027?
The team has secured a binding deal to buy land in Vegas, but it still needs to figure out the specifics of financing a $1 billion, 35,000-seat stadium with a retractable roof. And as they say, the devil is in the details.
The larger question of whether the Vegas move is a done deal may come down to the A’s expectation that Las Vegas, Clark County and the state of Nevada will cough up as much as $500 million in public financing.
In speaking to media last week, neither team President Dave Kaval, who has long teased the A’s departure, nor an evidently fed-up Mayor Sheng Thao closed the door on a reunion.
“There’s always the possibility of discussions in Oakland, and we’re always open to discussions,” Kaval told this news organization last week. “But the focus now is on Las Vegas. We have a deadline of January of next year to have a binding agreement on a stadium or we lose our league revenue, so we’re on a tight deadline to get this done.”
The ballpark would be built on a 49-acre parcel at Dean Martin Drive and Tropicana Avenue on the other side of I-15 from Vegas’ most popular casinos and less than a mile north of Allegiant Stadium, the Raiders’ current home.
Google Maps already has marked the site as the “Future Home of the Las Vegas Athletics MLB baseball team,” a series of words that would induce gags from many Oaklanders.
At the start of the year, the location was just one of several identified by the A’s as candidates for a land purchase, according to Jeremy Aguero, an economist for Las Vegas-based firm Applied Analysis, hired in January to help with a stadium-financing plan.
Aguero’s work is concentrated in Las Vegas, and although he says Oakland still appeared to be in play when he came aboard, the big draw to Vegas is obvious: Up to 30% of those attending A’s games there would be out-of-towners, and half would make the trip just to watch the visiting team, per his findings.
“We did extensive analysis. There are quite a few (comparable) facilities to look at,” Aguero said in an interview about how he arrived at those numbers. “We did surveys of locals in Las Vegas to see how many baseball fans there were.”
The new ballpark and surrounding parking space would not take up much more than a quarter of the entire lot, so the A’s already are looking into surrounding the stadium with public-facing developments such as bars, restaurants and retail.
That’s mainly where the team hopes to raise the public money — levies and taxes on sales and property for those businesses.
But they also want the state to provide redevelopment dollars and tax credits, betting that Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo’s intense stance against new taxes will not interfere with a public-private partnership.
Oakland, meanwhile, had been willing to allow not just a waterfront ballpark and surrounding businesses but several thousand new housing units.
Bay Area observers had guessed the city’s development package would be more enticing to billionaire owner John J. Fisher, a wealthy heir known to have always wanted to conquer the real estate world.
Pandemic-era inflation and the promise of rising interest rates, however, led the A’s to keep leaning on the city for more investment — ultimately requesting more than $500 million, far more than the team’s initial ask.
“We’ve spent so much time being accommodating to them,” said Councilmember Dan Kalb. “There’s nothing final — the fat lady has not sung yet — but what they’re doing is discouraging and insulting to the city of Oakland.”
Another revenue source expected by the team in Vegas is live events at the ballpark, which at 35,000 seats could host acts that draw anywhere between the capacity of the local basketball arenas and the 65,000-seat Allegiant Stadium.
Experts familiar with the stadium deal say Allegiant Stadium saw far fewer events last year than anticipated, perhaps due to a decline in activity seen by most brand-new venues after an initial honeymoon period.
And despite Las Vegas’ open arms to new developments, it is fair to question if fatigue might be setting in for stadium deals, especially after the state promised the Raiders $750 million, mostly from a hotel-room tax intended to target visiting fans. The Raiders similarly received a lot of money from Oakland and Alameda County that it hasn’t paid back.
As financing goes, there’s also the question of how sports gambling, which has skyrocketed in popularity after becoming legal in many states, will play a role. Aguero denies that it’s part of the team’s interests or his financial analysis.
But the prevalence of online betting has correlated with a sudden interest in stationing sports franchises in the casino capital of the world — the Raiders, hockey’s Golden Knights and women’s basketball’s Aces arrived in just the past few years, with an NBA team widely expected to follow.
“Vegas was always seen as a risky thing,” said Nicholas Irwin, a professor of sports economics at UNLV. “But as sports gambling has become more widespread, it’s made the leagues much more comfortable with the idea of being located here.”
All of this is simply talk, and the A’s have done their share of talking over the years — loudly declaring, for instance, that the hard cutoff to reach an agreement in Oakland was last November’s election, before blowing well past that deadline.
“Until you have a signed agreement, there is no deal,” said Stanford University sports economist Roger Noll in an interview. “But on the other hand, I’m sure the A’s talked to government officials there before saying, ‘I am hereby burning my bridges in Oakland.’
“I doubt Dave Kaval and John Fisher would make this announcement unless they had more than a pipe dream in their head,” he added.
Staff writer Shayna Rubin and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
Source: www.mercurynews.com