The Oakland Athletics are 11 weeks from extinction.
They’ll set up shop in Sacramento for three or four years, and after that they plan on making Las Vegas their new home. The A’s fans hate the idea, of course. The elected officials in Nevada, who authorized $380 million in public funding toward a new ballpark in Las Vegas, largely love the idea.
Las Vegas has a strong baseball community, and a growing cast of major league players. I spent the past few weeks asking major leaguers with Las Vegas roots what they thought of the A’s move and whether they believed the team would succeed there. Their comments were thoughtful and often nuanced — well, most of them.
“I think it’s a terrible idea,” Arizona Diamondbacks closer Paul Sewald said. “The whole thing, I fear, is going to be an abject disaster.”
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Sewald said he would prefer the public funding be used for schools and roads. He said he also was skeptical that Las Vegas could support the A’s when the Raiders and 2023 Stanley Cup champion Golden Knights already are there, the two-time defending champion WNBA Aces have sold out their entire season, and it is possible that an NBA expansion team could beat the A’s to town.
“We just don’t have enough bandwidth to invest in three, four, five professional teams,” Sewald said. “We just don’t have enough people. That’s OK. We don’t have to be a city that has all four major sports.”
Bryce Harper, the Philadelphia Phillies’ All-Star first baseman, said he was unsure if the A’s would succeed in Las Vegas. He would prefer an expansion team — a team that could create its own history, just like the expansion Golden Knights.
“Everybody is still locked in on the Golden Knights,” Harper said. “It’s a tough thing to see the A’s go away from Oakland. They have so much tradition and history there: the green, the yellow, the white cleats, Eric Chavez and all those guys that played there, Barry Zito, [Mark] Mulder, Huddy [Tim Hudson], the teams they had.
“I see it in Oakland. I don’t see it in Vegas.”
Said Texas Rangers pitching coach Mike Maddux: “I think it would be great to have a big league team, whether it was a team that moves or an expansion team.
“I think the economy is there. It’s grown so much that it can support a team. And all people need is a reason to go to Vegas. If you’re going to go there to watch a ballgame, let that be your excuse to get out there.”
Sewald is not convinced the baseball fans of Las Vegas would become A’s fans.
“They are all Dodgers fans,” he said. “Ninety percent of the people there are from California. That’s how my dad got there. That’s how I became a Dodger fan growing up. They’re not leaving the Dodgers fan base, just because you have a team.”
Chicago White Sox outfielder Tommy Pham said he understood the skepticism. He also said he had heard it before.
“They said the same thing about the Golden Knights: Would this be a hockey town?” Pham said. “And the Golden Knights were winning, and look at it now. Everybody wears Golden Knights stuff in Vegas now.”
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Maddux had no doubt the A’s would enjoy a honeymoon period in Las Vegas.
“They’ll always come at the beginning,” he said. “Then you have to sustain it.”
That is the fundamental concern of all the Las Vegans with whom I spoke for this column.
“Seeing the A’s, and going to their park the last few years and seeing how that has been kept up,” Angels All-Star pitcher Tyler Anderson said, “and how they run their team — a lot of times, they have really good teams, but it seems like, as soon as they get a good team, they start trading guys before they get too expensive.
“It’s hard as a fan to have a good connection with players and teams there. You hope they come [to Las Vegas] and it changes a little bit.”
In Oakland, the A’s have ranked last in payroll in each of the past two years and have not ranked among the top 20 in payroll since 2007. They are on pace to lose 100 games for a third consecutive season.
“No one in Vegas is an A’s fan,” Sewald said. “Why are they going to change allegiances to a team that is not trying to win?”
That, really, is the $380 million question: Has Nevada bought itself a winner?
The only one who really knows the answer is John Fisher, the A’s owner. So I asked him.
“By moving into our new stadium on the Las Vegas Strip,” Fisher said in a statement, “we will finally have the resources to significantly increase our payroll, retain our most talented young players, and make acquisitions through trades and in the free-agent market.”
A’s fans like to point out — they may be emailing me at this very moment — that Fisher’s Major League Soccer team, the San José Earthquakes, moved into a new stadium nine years ago. The Earthquakes have neither posted a winning record nor hosted a playoff game since then, and their payroll generally ranks in the bottom half of the league.
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What Fisher’s teams did in the Bay Area need not be relevant in Nevada. If the A’s spend to win in Las Vegas, Pham said, they shouldn’t be concerned about winning over their new hometown.
“Shouldn’t be,” Pham said. “Shouldn’t be, man. These owners are profiting, you know? They cry broke.
“I do the same thing. I cry broke when people ask me for money but, deep down, I know I got it. It’s what people with money do.”
Times staff writer Mike DiGiovanna contributed to this column.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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