Oakland A's headed to Las Vegas

That's a good story.

Kaval didn’t rule out the team playing for several years at Las Vegas Ballpark in Summerlin until the new stadium is completed but couldn’t say if the A’s would share the 10,000-seat stadium with the Las Vegas Aviators, the team’s triple-A affiliate.

He did say that the Aviators would continue to play in Las Vegas as the A’s top farm team after the new stadium is complete.

So, no return to the PCL for Portland. Bummer.

And fuck Mark Davis. he bailed on Oakland twice and has no business at all ripping on the A's.

 

Las Vegas has decades of experience in throwing up "temporary" 20-30,000 seat arenas for boxing matches, I suspect a stopgap expansion of the Aviators' field to 30,000-ish is doable.
A lot of South American and Asian soccer fields have quite extensive sun canopies; I would think that would be a near necessity in Vegas, as well as playing literally all games at night, as the Texas Rangers did when they were playing in their Arlington Stadium solar convection oven.

 

Billy Beane has done a great job over the years. He has often caught flak that should have been aimed at John Fisher, one of the worst owners in baseball history.

 

Not with that bullet in his eye.

 

The season chronicled in "Moneyball" is now 20 years ago, but it's still used as a talk radio synonym for all this newfangled cyber sabermetric nonsense, etc etc.

 

It is crazy to think they've finished over ;500 so many times since then - and this year on a record pace for futility.

 

The best part of Moneyball was Brad Pitt trashing Carlos Peña, then trading him to the Tigers

 

Cities giving hundreds of millions in public money to billionaire team owners.

As unlikely as, say, a SCOTUS justice on a billionaire's payroll.

Oh, wait...

 

The nerds won, just the A's didn't. Whether that win was good for baseball or not is debatable.

 

Rich nerds > Poor nerds

 

Pretty much, yes. As it is in our cosmos.

 

So David Samson was again on the Front Office Sports podcast, and his comments make me reconsider my previous review.
He said when he was with the Marlins, he publicly declared 7 times that the team was done negotiating with Miami. The city, in turn, declared 6 times that it was done talking to the team. They made a deal.
So the land isn’t everything. The NV legislature still has to agree fork over hundreds of millions, and it has to approve that future expense by Dec. 31, 2023 or the A’s get excluded from MLB revenue sharing. I think that’s what he said.