Jim Wilson / New York Times, file
The Oakland Coliseum, home of the Oakland Athletics since 1968, in Oakland, Calif., May 13, 2022. From faking a rainout at a World Series game to a possum in a television booth, the Athletics, who want to build a stadium on the Las Vegas Strip, have rarely been happy at home.
Sunday, Nov. 12, 2023 | 2 a.m.
The owners of Major League Baseball’s 30 franchises will gather this week in Arlington, Texas, for their annual meeting. The highlight of the agenda: a vote on the Oakland Athletics’ move to Las Vegas.
The A’s will need 23 of those owners to vote in favor of the move, which includes a proposal for a $1.5 billion ballpark at the Tropicana site on the south Strip.
The stadium plan calls for $380 million in taxpayer dollars Nevada lawmakers approved during a special session of the Legislature this summer. Construction would need to start by April 2025 to be completed in time for the 2028 season.
While groups like the Nevada State Education Association oppose the move on grounds it would allocate taxpayer dollars at the expense of the public school system, government subsidies for stadiums have become a long-accepted cost of obtaining and keeping a professional team, said Nola Agha, a sports economist at the University of San Francisco.
Examples of team owners using private capital to build stadiums and arenas exist. SoFi Stadium, home of the Los Angeles Rams and Chargers, was financed by billionaire Stan Kroenke, owner of the Rams, without any taxpayer dollars — but that is overwhelmingly the exception, not the rule.
“In almost every instance when you see a team move, the reason they move is because there’s a public entity that’s willing to give them money for that,” Agha said, adding that leagues like MLB and the NFL essentially mandate public assistance for stadium construction.
American sports leagues are primarily “closed,” meaning it’s up to team owners to vote on league expansion, Agha said. That gives leagues leverage because they intentionally keep the supply of teams low, and the reality is that demand in a league like MLB likely exists to have more than 30 teams.
“It’s very purposeful that they have kept that number low,” Agha continued. “For exactly this reason, cities will bid against each other to have a team. That drives up the public subsidy and, therefore, that drives up the value of each team and the value of the league. So it’s very much a purposeful profit-maximizing decision for the league to do that.”
Local governments have been providing direct subsidies to teams as far back as nearly 70 years ago, Agha said, and there is evidence to suggest that other public incentives to build stadiums existed even further back. That could come in the form of tax abatements or low-value property sales, but providing government resources has long been seen as a cost of doing business.
A 2019 analysis by Arizona State University’s Global Sport Institute shows that all but two of the 30 MLB stadiums — Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles and Wrigley Field in Chicago — have received at least some infusion of public dollars for either construction or venue rehabilitation.
Nevada’s $380 million investment would make the Las Vegas stadium the sixth-largest public subsidy for a baseball stadium, behind Nationals Park in Washington ($693 million in taxpayer dollars), Citi Field in New York ($614 million), T-Mobile Park in Seattle ($517 million) Globe Life Field in Arlington, Texas, ($500 million) and Loan Depot Park in Miami ($479 million).
Bill Robinson, an economics professor at UNLV who specializes in the economics of gaming, sports and entertainment, agreed that professional sports in the U.S. existed in its model because of government subsidies. But even with privately funded venues, municipalities still provide services like directing traffic and standby EMTs.
And although most economists agree that stadium developments seldom generate the monetary return on investment that is anticipated, Robinson said there were intangible factors that can benefit the local economy.
“The city is spending considerable amounts of money and, in general, we don’t expect that public financing is ever going to come back directly,” Robinson said. “The idea is for it to come back indirectly.”
For Las Vegas, Robinson said that could come in the form of auxiliary development from surrounding resorts.
MGM Resorts International CEO Bill Hornbuckle said Wednesday during the company’s quarterly earnings call that he met with A’s owner John Fisher and was shown a new rendering of the proposed stadium. “They actually showed me the design, which was spectacular, I might add,” Hornbuckle said.
Hornbuckle said MGM Resorts International would likely remodel parts of the MGM Grand, which is across from the proposed A’s stadium site.
But the stadium could also spur new development on Las Vegas Boulevard south of what’s considered the Las Vegas Strip, which Robinson said represented the hallmark of a new generation of the Strip’s history.
What’s also important to consider, Robinson said, is maximizing the value of the Tropicana site. The Tropicana sits on land owned by Gaming and Leisure Properties Inc., and in addition to the new ballpark, GLPI executives have stated that the anticipated stadium would also be built alongside a new resort directly adjacent to it.
“On the Trop side of the Strip as you go south, there’s opportunities there,” Robinson said. “There’s a lot of dumpy stuff there. And there’s some vacant land down there. And so you could see development move south and you can see opportunities there for people to come up with projects.”
In Allegiant Stadium, which received $750 million in taxpayer dollars through an increase in room tax, Las Vegas currently has a premier space for large events. But Las Vegas also has several smaller venues like T-Mobile Arena, the MSG Sphere, and the Thomas & Mack Center at UNLV, leaving an opportunity like the baseball stadium to hold events that are too big to be staged at smaller venues but would leave large parts of Allegiant empty.
Both Agha and Robinson said it would take years to determine how close the stadium was on track to hit tax revenue projections. And although it’s possible the baseball stadium won’t be the financial boon proponents of the project say it will be, Robinson contends it might be necessary for the evolution of the Strip, much like the arrival of megaresorts in the 1990s.
“Tons of the old-school gambling people made fun of Steve Wynn for building a 2,000-room hotel with a volcano,” Robinson said, alluding to the Mirage, which opened in 1989 and led to a spate of other large properties on the Strip.
“They were laughing at him (Wynn) that it was going to fail, and it actually remade the whole town,” Robinson continued. “And I think we’re potentially at one of those points again, where people are going to look back at this in 10 and 15 years and think it’s a good thing we did all that.”
Glenn Nowak, a professor of architecture at UNLV, and Robinson agree that the 9-acre plot can be beneficial. If built with 33,000 seats, the Las Vegas stadium would be among the most intimate MLB venues. Nowak added that many modern stadiums are built on sprawling landscapes surrounded by “a sea of asphalt,” and that large stadiums now have tended to make people end up watching the scoreboard instead of the real-life action.
Part of what sets baseball apart from other sports is how stadiums have unique landmarks, Agha said. From the “Green Monster” at Boston’s Fenway Park, to a stingray petting aquarium at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, Fla., most venues have some quirk that add to its allure.
But it is vitally important to make sure that “quirk” isn’t in fact something that will be looked back on as a design flaw.
“At the end of the day, it needs to be a functional ballpark,” Agha said. “That’s the most important thing.”
Developers, however, will have a unique chance to incorporate the colorful history of Las Vegas alongside the teams in a way that will be new and exciting to patrons, with the hopes of making it a destination fans from all over will want to see in person, Nowak said.
“Here we’ll hopefully see seating that feels as intimate as a casino lounge act and as fantastic as a Cirque du Soleil show,” Nowak said. “This is the entertainment capital of the world, so I imagine some of the features … could be amplified.”
