Nevada Assembly Approves A's Bill

The bill heads to a final vote in the senate

Not even 24 hours after the magical reverse boycott at the Oakland Coliseum on Tuesday night, the Nevada assembly voted to approve SB1 (A's ballpark bill), 25-15, with a few amendments. The bill will now head back to the senate to re-vote on the bill with those amendments. 

Per Tabitha Mueller of the Nevada Independent, those amendments include increasing the requirement for community spending from $1.5M to $2M, ensuring that the person responsible for oversight of the community benefits agreement between the A’s and Las Vegas Stadium Authority is independent, has lived in Clark County for at least five years and never worked for the team, and adjusts contributions of stadium revenues from a proposed homelessness prevention fund to instead support existing county housing fund.

That was the cost of doing business to rip a team out of a city--a diverse city which Major League Baseball supposedly covets--in favor of the A's billionaire owner getting his handout. 

This is a bill with a lot of promises, but not a lot of hard data to back up those promises. This is a bill that gives John Fisher his ballpark, but doesn't guarantee that he'll change his penny-pinching ways in any way. 

How is he supposed to increase team payroll when nearly a sellout crowd at the proposed ballpark every night for 30 years is what they're banking on in order to make the math in the bill make sense? There's one way to do it, and that's to increase ticket prices, though some of the legislature that has voted yes for this bill are expecting $12 tickets to be readily available. 

Meanwhile, the league that Nevada is ready to accept with open arms isn't even mentioning what happened at the ballpark in Oakland last night. A crowd filled with fans chanting "sell the team!" A movement that was fan-led that brought the crowd to the ballpark. The league has given up on Oakland in favor of a man born into his wealth that has done literally nothing but fail in every venture he's had. 

Meanwhile, many in Nevada have talked about the love that they have for their homegrown Las Vegas Golden Knights in the NHL, yet the clinching game of their first-ever Stanley Cup was the lowest rated clinching game in at least 30 years. Apparently that makes Las Vegas the sports capital of the world. 

John Fisher was looking for rubes, and it looks like he found enough of them with his empty promises.