Major League Baseball owners have unanimously approved the move of the A’s to Las Vegas from Oakland, after a vote on Thursday at their meetings in Arlington, Texas. A MLB representative confirmed the vote.
The fourth move for the vagabond franchise isn’t slated to occur formally until 2028, when a $1.5 billion, 30,000-seat ballpark is completed on the Las Vegas Strip. The A’s are scheduled to play at the Oakland Coliseum through the 2024 season, when their current lease expires.
Where they will play the following three seasons has yet to be determined. Options include the Coliseum, Oracle Park in San Francisco, which is owned by the Giants, or the A’s minor-league ballpark in Summerlin, Nev., just outside of Vegas, which seats about 10,000 and can be expanded to double that number. But the last of those would seem to be a nonstarter for both MLB and the Players Association because it’s an open-air facility and games would have to be played there during the 100-degree summer heat.
The A’s needed 75% of the league’s owners to vote for approval to move and will be the first MLB franchise to do so since the Montreal Expos left for Washington and became the Nationals in 2005. It’s only the second MLB franchise to relocate since the Senators moved from Washington to Texas in 1972.
The A’s played in Philadelphia until 1954 and Kansas City until moving to Oakland in 1968. The current ownership is the fourth to control the franchise since it moved west. John Fisher bought the team in 2005 and has worked to build a new ballpark in multiple local cities since then.
The move follows months of protests by A’s fans at home games and at a recent meeting of the Oakland City Council. When a trio of disgruntled Oakland fans approached Fisher at this week’s meetings in Texas, he told them his patience had been exhausted after almost two decades of trying to resolve the ballpark issue.
“It’s been a lot worse for me than you,” he said.
On June 15, both houses of the Nevada state legislature passed a bill appropriating $380 million toward the new retractable roof ballpark. The A’s still have to identify about $1.1 billion in private funding to build the new facility.
Subsequently, the A’s filed an application for relocation with MLB and the Nevada State Education Association established a political action committee to collect 102,000 signatures to put a measure on the ballot for a public vote in Nevada’s four congressional districts. The teachers contend that any tax dollars allotted should go to the school system rather than a ballpark.
“Our priorities are misguided,” union spokesperson Alexander Marks said when reached in Nevada by telephone. “And a stadium, even partially financed by the public isn’t going to solve anything.”
Last week, a Nevada court told the union to rework the wording of the referendum and come back for approval before it can start collecting the signatures.
“The order of the court is that the referendum petition is legally deficient because it does not provide the full text of the measure … when gathering the necessary signatures as mandated by the Nevada Constitution,” District Court Judge James Russell said while making the ruling.
Marks said the union would proceed in dual directions, appealing that ruling to the Nevada Supreme Court and rewriting the referendum. The second-largest teacher’s union in the state has until this coming July to gather enough signatures to force a public vote on the issue on the November 2024 ballot.
“If there was an adverse development with respect to that referendum, that would be a significant development,” MLB commissioner Rob Manfred told writers before the first game of the World Series. “That’s all I can say about that.”
A negative public vote would scuttle the public money already apportioned for the ballpark and delay an A’s move to Las Vegas for the immediate future. The club’s talks about the Howard Terminal stadium and real estate project just west of downtown Oakland have been on hold, but Oakland city officials have said they’re open to restarting negotiations.
Manfred said MLB’s relocation committee met multiple times about the A’s stadium situation.
That committee approved the move and sent it to the full ownership this week with some questions about Las Vegas as a viable market for baseball. For example, the A’s would be leaving the 10th-ranked media market in the country for the 40th. Additionally, the A’s currently have a regional sports network contract with NBC Sports California in the Bay Area that pays them an average of $60 million a year through 2033. There’s no comparative to that in Vegas.
The National Hockey League’s defending Stanley Cup-champion Vegas Golden Knights lost their RSN deal and just became the first pro sports team to join Scripps, which was launched in December, to a free over-air TV deal in the Las Vegas area. The contract affords the hockey team a wider television audience, but a modest up-front rights fee with a chance to eventually sell its own advertising inventory.
In any event, since the A’s will be leaving for a much smaller market, they will still be eligible for their slice of MLB’s revenue sharing regardless of any growth of local revenue accruing to the move. According to Sportico, the A’s had local revenue of $205 million in 2022, dead last among MLB’s 30 teams.
