Las Vegas Offers A’s ‘Better Opportunity’
The Oakland A’s have been rumored to be moving out of Oakland for some time now, and Las Vegas has always been the most sensible suitor.
Las Vegas has hosted Triple-A teams since 1983. Most recently, the Aviators, the Triple-A affiliate of the Athletics, has been up and running since 2019.
“Las Vegas offers a dynamic that no other team has,” Aviators COO and President Don Logan said to ESPN on Saturday. “We have 45 million visitors annually in this market, and that’s what we want — heads in beds. That’s what Las Vegas is about.”
“It’s a better opportunity here [for the Athletics] in the long term.”
The Oakland Coliseum’s lease is set to expire after the 2024 season. The A’s will need a stadium, and there have been mock-ups in the past for a potential Las Vegas venue.
The Oakland Coliseum has been nothing short of a dumpster fire these past few seasons. Rats, cobwebs and cat feces galore. The stadium has turned into a proverbial graveyard.
Not to mention the horrible attendance at the Coliseum last season. The A’s averaged 9,973 fans per game, according to Statista. That’s good for dead last in the league by a wide margin. The league average was 26,843 per game last season. You don’t have to be a mathematician to recognize that the A’s were in deep attendance trouble last year.
Las Vegas has always made the most sense for the A’s. It would only be an eight-hour drive to move the entire organization eastbound.
Meanwhile, this will be another big hit for the city of Oakland, which lost the Raiders to relocation. They also headed to Sin City in 2020.
“It makes sense,” Logan said. “My perspective, make the best deal you can in Vegas and start to turn this community on. And every other [fan base] on.”
Right now, this isn’t a confirmed move. But all the baseball talking heads seem to agree with me — the A’s are Vegas bound sooner rather than later.
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