Las Vegas pro teams set high bar; owner ready to bring A's to the city to join them

ARLINGTON, Texas — The elephant in the room has finally been addressed.

The yearslong search to find a new home for the Oakland Athletics took a big step to becoming a reality Thursday, when all 30 MLB owners voted unanimously to approve the relocation of the team to Las Vegas. It marks a breakthrough in the club’s search for a stadium to replace the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, where the A’s have played since moving there in 1968.

While there are several regulatory steps that remain before ground breaks on a proposed $1.5 billion ballpark on the Strip, the vote also marks the newest chapter in the history of a franchise that’s existed since 1901, with the move here representing the fourth town the club (and its elephant mascot, Stomper) will call home.

Team owner John Fisher — who became part owner of the A’s in 2005 and retained full ownership in 2016 — sat down with the Sun on Thursday shortly after the conclusion of the MLB Owners’ Meetings for a brief one-on-one interview.

Here’s what he had to say:

You published a letter Thursday to Oakland fans expressing thanks for their support and sadness the team is leaving the city it’s called home since 1968. But at the same time, it marks the start of a new chapter for the franchise. What are you feeling now that this major hurdle has been crossed?

When you work on something for a very long time — 18 years, and the last six focused on Oakland, with just the last two-and-a-half on Las Vegas — you get to a momentous day like today and there’s just a lot of emotions and a lot of things going on that I think will take me a long time to begin to process. I think having a unanimous vote of the owners was always my goal, because I wanted to make sure that all my partners in this great game understood and supported the direction that we were going in.

I wanted to make sure that there wasn’t anything I had missed that somehow somebody might disagree with, and that’s really been meaningful and positive to me.

Some folks in Las Vegas have raised concern over the team’s record over the last few years — it had the worst record in baseball last year at 50-112, finished last in the American League in 2022 after going 60-102. The A’s have also been among the lowest payrolls in the league for several years, so what is your message to people who might be skeptical on your willingness to spend once the team arrives in Las Vegas?

Since I was at one of the Stanley Cup Finals games, and I saw what the Golden Knights have achieved, I know that’s the bar to which I am going to be held accountable, and it’s frankly the bar which I’m hoping to achieve. Because baseball and sports are entertainment businesses, and Vegas is the entertainment capital of the world. You know you better put on a good show for people to want to come.

Having said that, the A’s have had incredible success operating on relatively low payrolls over the past 20 years, among the most success of any team in baseball. But it’s been my goal to get a new stadium, because the new stadium will allow us to be able to sign players, sign our younger players for longer-term contracts, to be able to go out and be able to sign free agents or make trades for players who are higher priced, so that we can be more consistently competitive.

When you look at many of the most successful teams in baseball — including us — you’ll see that teams go through rebuilding periods. One of the greatest examples of this, and it’s sort of ancient history today, but the Cleveland Guardians. At the time they were the Indians, but in 1994 they moved into their new stadium Jacobs Field (now called Progressive Field). In the years before they moved in, they were among the worst teams in their division. They moved in, finished second the year they moved in and then first place the next six-plus years in a row. And, for the most part, have been great ever since. Same thing with the San Francisco Giants. They had some good teams before they moved into Oracle Park, but since they moved into that new stadium, they’ve been very strong ever since.

So I think that new stadiums, and quite frankly, a commitment of ours to increase our payroll significantly to be able to bring the kind of team to Vegas that the community demands and deserves is why we’re doing all of this. It’s why I’m investing so much time and capital, it’s to be able to put a team on the field that is something that has the same kind of excitement that the Stanley Cup winners have.

Where will the A’s play after the lease at the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum ends in 2024?

In terms of interim play, it’s something that we will be working closely with Major League Baseball. We wanted to focus our efforts on the relocation vote, and now that it’s been positively achieved, our focus now needs to be on interim play.

Las Vegas has of course gone through a lot of changes over the last 20 years or so, with the emphasis now being on sports entertainment and sports tourism. How familiar are you with the history of Las Vegas, and what’s it like to be a part of the city’s history moving forward?

I don’t really want to date myself too much, but when I first started going to Las Vegas, it was a gaming town. The hotels were kind of mediocre — I’m talking about the Strip — and the focus was all on gaming. And then all of a sudden, there was an understanding that people like to stay in nicer hotels, so the whole concept of developing resorts that people looked at as a vacation outside of gaming became really popular. Then it was, let’s bring in great restaurants and restauranteurs and bringing in great forms of entertainment.

Today, sports has become the latest form of entertainment. It’s hard to kind of believe that just a little over five years ago there were no professional sports teams outside of minor league teams in Vegas. We expect that we will be the third major team but there will be more coming in after that, which I think just establishes Vegas as the capital of the world for all forms of entertainment. You see it with local fans going to Aviators games, local fans about going to Golden Knights and Raiders games.

The possibility to have local fans who are very passionate about baseball combined with visitors coming from all over the country, who maybe are there to support the A’s, might be there to support their hometown team and they’re coming to Las Vegas to watch them. Or maybe they’re just in town and they want to go to a baseball game. That is what gets me really, really excited.