Catching Up on A's Relocation News

The A's relocation to Las Vegas is anything but settled

Just last week I wrote about how bleak it looked for the A's staying in Oakland. I also said that things can move quickly, and that what I had written was meant to be a snapshot in time of where everything stood at that exact moment. In the past week, Ken Rosenthal has continued to hammer A's ownership on the relocation plan, even talking to Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao, the Mayor of Las Vegas said the A's should stay in Oakland, and ESPN even talked about the team's relocation for a couple of minutes in the middle of Super Bowl week. 

Things can change quickly, and you get the sense that the tide is changing across the media landscape when it comes to the A's relocation. A's fans have known that this deal doesn't make sense for nearly a year, and kept the entire process in the news cycle through the Summer of Sell. Now, with the Super Bowl on the horizon and pitcher's and catchers reporting to camp next week, the A's relocation remains atop the baseball news cycle. 

Major League Baseball certainly had to hope that throughout the course of the off-season, without games to attend, that the fans wouldn't have as much of a voice. During that time A's owner John Fisher could have made some tangible progress towards making Las Vegas a reality, and really squashing any rallying cry heading into the 2024 season. 

Since the end of the regular season not much has happened in Vegas. MLB owners voted to approve the team's relocation, but that doesn't mean that they have to move. It was just procedural, and needed to be done at that time to keep the A's in their contract with the Tropicana site. That is arguably the biggest news on the Vegas front, and it didn't even involve John Fisher. 

They also announced that the new ballpark would have an art installation, and said there would be renderings of the ballpark in early December but they have yet to be released. They have also yet to secure financing for the ballpark and had Fisher's coming out party at the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce go viral for the wrong reasons. 

How’s the A’s relocation going you ask? pic.twitter.com/6H6xAquAbA

— Jason Burke (@ByJasonB) January 24, 2024

On Wednesday, with the narrative around the move seemingly changing, I wrote about how the local leaders in Oakland need to make some noise. If the A's start looking for an escape route from this relocation ordeal, Oakland needs to be waiting with open arms, and plenty of solutions. On Thursday, mayor Thao talked with Ken Rosenthal for The Athletic, which is a pretty big move.

Not much of what was said in the article was new to A's fans, but the best quote in the entire piece was, "There was a thought that this plan he had in the beginning was viable. And now we’re seeing that actually, maybe the plan isn’t viable. The question becomes, are the plans not viable or is it that the ownership’s not viable?” Getting her message to his wide audience was a good move. 

Add in that Rob Manfred said he would be "disappointed" if the A's ballpark isn't ready in Las Vegas by Opening Day 2028, and you get the sense that MLB isn't going to support Fisher forever in his ballpark quest. 

Melissa Lockard opined on Twitter this weekend that Manfred really wants to make it into Las Vegas before the NBA, which is why they have been bending over backwards to make this relocation happen. She notes, as was reported in The Athletic, that expansion may not happen as quickly with the RSN deals in a precarious situation. "We’re gonna have to get our footing on local media a little better" Manfred told Evan Drellich. 

If Lockard is correct, and it would make sense that she is, then what happens if Fisher doesn't meet that deadline to get a ballpark built by Opening Day 2028? Could the fate of the A's depend upon when the NBA actually decides to expand and when they plan to introduce those two new teams, presumably in Vegas and Seattle? 

There is still not a clear path to getting the A's back to Oakland, but there are a lot of floating timelines out there that could become a hindrance to Fisher's plans. The Tropicana is closing its doors on April 2 to get ready for demolition--with or without a ballpark on the site--on top of the NBA's plans for expansion. Fisher is going to have to start meeting the deadlines set before him to make sure that he stays in the picture, or he may be pushed out entirely. 

If Fisher doesn't meet the 2028 deadline, and we'd know if he is on track to do so by about this time next year, then maybe MLB decides they'd rather just have an expansion team in Vegas, which has been the smart play all along, if they aren't going to beat basketball to the market. With Vegas off the board, then it could come down to a choice between Salt Lake City or Oakland for which city the team gets to call home. Which location ends up hosting the team in 2025 could be a big determining factor. Oakland has the advantage of $70 million in RSN money for Fisher, but Utah has the perk of the A's owner not being a villain in his own ballpark, at least for a little while. 

This adventure still has many twists and turns to come, and fans are about to start filling ballparks once more. Except for Opening Day, when A's fans will be staging a boycott in the Coliseum parking lot.