Is the A’s move to Las Vegas a done deal? | The Bandwagon
Yahoo Sports MLB writers Hannah Keyser and Zach Crizer are joined by Dan Moore - who covers the team in Oakland - about the organization’s agreement to purchase land in Las Vegas and whether it means the move to Sin City is a foregone conclusion. Listen to the full conversation on Yahoo Sports’ new baseball podcast, “The Bandwagon”. Be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts.
Video Transcript
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- Do you think the hopes in Oakland are officially over?
- No, I do not think that hopes are officially over. This particular ownership has been angling to leave Oakland or to leave the Oakland Coliseum, more specifically, for a long time. 15 years ago, they tried to move to San Jose. They were famously blocked by Major League Baseball.
They have, in fact, purchased land in this similar manner elsewhere and have not moved to those places. So that's one reason that, I think, that, though this land purchase agreement is hardly good news for Oakland A's fans, it's not exactly unprecedented. I think another important point is, when you think about what has happened here just over the last week, the land purchase agreement actually came in the middle of what was a premeditated summit that was being held between the city of Oakland, and Fisher and Kaval, John Fisher, and Dave Kaval, the owner and team President of the A's.
That summit was designed to hammer out some kind of deal. It was in the midst of that, that the news leaked, that the A's had purchased land in Las Vegas. And if you look at where the state of things actually are in Las Vegas right now or in Nevada, nothing has been officially passed or agreed upon by city or state leaders there. There's no ballpark design. There's no rendering.
All they have is a plot of land on which they hypothetically could build a stadium. Not to mention building that stadium would require, right now, estimates, I think, rather conservatively are putting it at $500 million in public financing. $0 of which has been secured. So those are all sort of reasons that I see what happened last week as, perhaps, something of a bundled negotiating tactic by Fisher and Kaval, which is one reason that, I think, that a lot of people here are saying, oh, well, there's not a lot of momentum.
There's not a lot of concrete, positive, forward movement there. Maybe there's still some hope. I'll temper all that by saying, when the Oakland Mayor Thao, Sheng Thao, heard the news that the A's had purchased land, she was sort of rightly very mad and pulled Oakland out of negotiations. So I want to temper all this by saying things are hardly in a great place here in Oakland, but we shouldn't overestimate how much more there is left to do in Las Vegas to get a stadium deal done.