The Oakland Athletics have reached an agreement to acquire land near the Las Vegas Strip and said on Wednesday that they hoped to be playing games in a new billion-dollar retractable roof stadium on the site by 2027.
The agreement on the 49-acre site in Nevada, which the team’s president, Dave Kaval, confirmed on Wednesday night, will seemingly end years of tense negotiations for a new stadium in the Bay Area, an investment the team said it needed to remain financially viable and competitive with its peers in Major League Baseball.
“The reality is that despite six years of very hard and sincere work for a visionary stadium in Oakland, the progress necessary for it to succeed is just not occurring,” Kaval said in an interview on Thursday. “We just are not able to see a path where we would be able to open a stadium in Oakland any sooner than seven or eight years from now. That is just too long and it doesn’t work on anyone’s timeline.”
In the past decade, the A’s have explored moves to Fremont, Calif., and San Jose before settling on a detailed plan for a waterfront stadium in Oakland — any option, it seemed, that might lure fans to watch a team that last season was the only club in baseball to average fewer than 10,000 fans a game.
The news that the team had a land deal in Las Vegas drew an angry response on Wednesday in Oakland. The city’s mayor, Sheng Thao, issued a statement saying the city would no longer negotiate with the A’s, who the mayor contended had “simply been using this process to try to extract a better deal out of Las Vegas.”
“I am not interested in continuing to play that game,” she said. “The fans and our residents deserve better.”
A move of the franchise, which appeared to have the backing of Major League Baseball, is also sure to infuriate fans of the A’s, who have bemoaned the team’s unwillingness to spend the money required to field a competitive team to rival its championship teams of the early 1970s; the home-run-bashing A’s of the late ’80s; and the more budget-conscious teams that followed — clubs that introduced baseball to the cost-cutting, value-centered approach known as Moneyball.
In recent years, Oakland has faded as a competitive force, selling off all of the team’s prominent players without developing suitable replacements, resulting in an M.L.B.-low payroll of $58.2 million. The team also increased ticket prices in the cavernous and antiquated Oakland Coliseum. As a result, attendances have plummeted, sometimes to fewer than 3,000 fans a game.
To try to signal to the team that they were still interested, a group of A’s fans this week announced plans for what they said would be a reverse boycott: an effort to show the team their numbers and commitment by filling the Coliseum for a game in June. It now appears the effort may have been in vain.
Now the A’s will have to contend with a short-term future in which their relationship with fans in Oakland could be harmed even further. The team’s lease at the Coliseum runs out after the 2024 season and possibilities include a short-term renewal, playing games in San Francisco’s Oracle Park or moving to Las Vegas Ballpark, currently occupied by the Las Vegas Aviators, a Class AAA affiliate of the A’s.
“That is an option,” Kaval said of the possibility of relocating to the minor league field, which holds fewer than 10,000 fans.
Rooted in Oakland, the fan group that had been working to arrange the reverse boycott, issued a statement after the Las Vegas deal was reported.
“The decision to move the team to Las Vegas is a slap in the face to the fans who have invested so much time, money and energy into the team,” the statement said. The group said the decision “hurts the city of Oakland” and that it would be considering what it should do about the protest, which was planned for June 13.
If the move happens — plenty of deals with the A’s have fallen apart over the franchise’s long history — Las Vegas would become the fourth home for the A’s, a team that was born in Philadelphia as an original American League franchise in 1901, left for Kansas City, Mo., in 1955, then moved to Oakland before the 1968 season. The last major league team to switch cities was the Montreal Expos, who left Canada and became the Washington Nationals before the 2005 season.
M.L.B.’s commissioner, Rob Manfred, has expressed support for an A’s move out of Oakland, saying in December, “We’re past any reasonable timeline for the situation in Oakland to be resolved.”
The move would be the end of major professional sports in Oakland, a port city that has in recent years become an extension of California’s Silicon Valley. The N.F.L.’s Raiders, who were formed in the city in 1960, moved to Los Angeles before the 1982 season, moved back to Oakland in 1995 and moved to Las Vegas in 2020. The N.B.A.’s Golden State Warriors, who officially moved to Oakland from San Francisco before the 1970-71 season, moved back across the Bay three seasons ago. And now the A’s would join the Raiders in Las Vegas.
Baseball would be following the N.F.L., the N.H.L. and the W.N.B.A. into a Las Vegas market long coveted by sports leagues and team owners even as it was once considered taboo because of its strong association with gambling.
“It’s a sad day for our fans in Oakland,” Kaval said. “We’ve been here for almost 60 years and we have a tremendous amount of gratitude for Oakland providing us a home for all these years at the Coliseum. Incredible memories.”
Benjamin Hoffman and Andrew Das contributed reporting.
