Oakland A’s Make Move to Las Vegas: Purchase Land for New Stadium

The Oakland Athletics just bought land in Las Vegas to build a new baseball stadium. The President of the team, Dave Kaval, said that the stadium will be big enough for 30,000 to 35,000 people and it will be close to the Las Vegas Strip. They were originally unable to build a new venue in the Bay Area, so they decided to purchase land in Las Vegas instead.

The A’s are teaming up with the state of Nevada and Clark County to pay for a new stadium. The A’s will hopefully start building it next year and be ready to play in their new home by 2027. According to Kaval, this is a big deal. All of this work in Las Vegas has paid off since they now have chosen an ideal location for their long-term home.

The A’s have wanted a new place to play since they moved from Kansas City in 1968. Their first home was Oakland Coliseum, but it has become worn out and old. They tried to build a stadium in Fremont and San Jose, but then decided on the waterfront of Oakland. This would be the team’s fourth base after starting off as the Philadelphia Athletics back in 1901.

The Oakland A’s now want to relocate to Las Vegas. They are paying full attention towards this decision and Commissioner Rob Manfred even said that they don’t need to pay a fee for moving there. He further added that the situation of staying in Oakland has gone beyond the reasonable timeline.

Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao said in a statement that she was disappointed because the A’s baseball team didn’t cooperate and work together with her city.

The city has done its best to reach a good agreement so that the A’s could stay in Oakland. We made a lot of effort in the past three months to finalize the deal and it looks like the A’s don’t want to stay here anymore because they’re trying to get an even better deal from Las Vegas. I don’t want to keep playing with them – our fans and people from Oakland deserve better.

I’m really happy with what the city has achieved, even when dealing with budget deficits. We have a large amount of money (over $375 million) to use on our port and other resources so that everyone in Oakland can be safe and taken care of. Because of this, we’re not going to keep talking about the redevelopment of Howard Terminal and are finding new ways to go forward with it.

The Oakland A’s would be only the second Major League Baseball team to move to a different city in more than fifty years. Before that, the Washington Senators became the Texas Rangers in 1972. The Montreal Expos moved to become the Washington Nationals in 2005.

The A’s agreement at their current stadium, the Coliseum, is due to end after 2024. Owner John Fisher has had trouble getting people to come watch as he reduced spending and sold stars off of his team.

The Oakland baseball team had the least amount of money spent on it at the opening day with only $58 million. That’s a lot less money than what was spent on Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander from the Mets, who each got an identical salary of $43.3 million!

So far this season, the team has won only 3 out of their 16 games. This makes them really bad compared to other teams in the league because 86 more runs have been scored against them than for them! Also, the average attendance in their stadium is 11,027 which is less than half of the attendance that an average team gets. It’s even worse if we look a few years back where they haven’t seen more than two million people attend their home games since 2014.

The Oakland A’s, a major professional sports team, might have to leave the city. If that happens, then Oakland wouldn’t have any pro sports teams anymore because the Raiders (NFL) had already moved to Las Vegas in 2020 and the Warriors (NBA) had gone to San Francisco in 2019. Kaval said it was sad news for people from Oakland but progress was not happening fast enough.

Las Vegas has become a big sports area after having been looked down on for a long time due to its gaming activities. With gambling becoming legal in many areas, the city now has three sports teams: An baseball team, NHL’s Golden Knights and the Raiders.