A's involved in more renderings mayhem

Jason Burke | Oct 23, 2024

Sep 22, 2024; Paradise, Nevada, USA; The Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign. Mandatory Credit: Kirby Lee-Imagn Images / Kirby Lee-Imagn Images

The A's love to showcase renderings. Some that are for imaginary ballparks, others that can be wadded up and thrown in the trash, and still more that depict a giant green scoreboard inside of an armadillo. Yet, they were recently involved in a rendering that was released by Bally's, who will be developing the new casino-resort where the Tropicana Las Vegas once stood, and there are more questions than answers at this point.

The renderings in question can be seen here.

Bally’s aims to open hotel, casino at same time as A’s Las Vegas ballparkhttps://t.co/Xvpn61ExNf #vegas #athletics #mlb

— Mick Akers (@mickakers) October 22, 2024

The Las Vegas Review-Journal caught up with Bally's Chairman Soo Kim, who wanted to assure people, "The renderings are not really renderings." They've been out for a week and we're already at the "wad them up" portion of the renderings unveiling.

He continued, "They’re more like a representation of how much space that we have to work with here. I do think that the hotels towers will be located where they were depicted, but what shape and exact size that they’ll have, that depends on a lot of factors that have not been determined yet."

In fairness, Bally's has more time to work on the planning phase of their hotel-casino's first phase, which is the only phase they're hoping to have completed alongside the opening of the A's proposed ballpark in Las Vegas in 2028. In unfairness, why the heck were these images even released then? Nobody was clamoring for them. Nobody needed to see exactly how the Bally's portion of this project could potentially but probably not actually fit on the site.

This is one of those things that you keep in-house and continue to work on until it's a little more thought out.

At the end of the LVRJ piece, Soo Kim also mentions that their plan hadn't necessarily been to build something during Phase 1 until recently. "With the Tropicana, we’re focusing on the master plan and what do we want to build over time. And now we’re actually ready to say ‘OK, what do we want to build in Phase 1?’ We’re generally in favor of wanting to build something in Phase 1. It’s probably a realization that’s occurred over the last few months."

It feels like a follow-up question, a simple "why?" here would have been very telling. With so much noise surrounding both the A's and Bally's ability to actually fund the projects they're hoping to build on this site, one reason you would decide to drop renderings out of the blue and decide fairly recently to build something at all in Phase 1 is not because everything is going great and all of the money is totally lined up.

Something just feels off here.