Tag: Las Vegas

A’s ‘not likely’ to hit public funding cap with Las Vegas ballpark, says people who are new at this

We’re gonna need some better journalism than this.

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Good news, everyone! The CEO and President of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority said that the A’s aren’t likely to use all $380 million in public funds that they’ve been allotted for a new ballpark in Vegas. The Las Vegas Review-Journal relayed the news in the way only an outlet that regurgitates authority figures without checking them can: by quoting them extensively and never raising an eyebrow about it.

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The A’s relocation and MLB’s antitrust exemption don’t fit together

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Remember the summer of 2022, when MLB had to turn its attention away from the lockout and the then-finalized collective bargaining, and toward Congress, which was questioning the league about its antitrust exemption? Remember, too, that one of commissioner Rob Manfred’s defenses of the antitrust exemption — which was under scrutiny in no small part due to the mistreatment and exploitation of minor-league players — was that its central purpose was to keep teams from relocating, taking baseball away from the communities that had it in the process?

The receipts are out there, so let’s start going through them. Here’s Manfred speaking with Bill Shaikin at The Los Angeles Times, from July 15:

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The A’s Las Vegas stadium bill is dead, unless it isn’t

The A’s stadium bill didn’t make it through the normal legislative session, so now it’s on to a special session, which doesn’t guarantee anything, either.

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The legislative session that included the Memorial Day weekend Las Vegas stadium bill for the A’s has come and gone, and without the bill being passed. A’s supporters in Vegas were always up against the clock here, so the session ending, bringing on the need for a special session this summer, was a likely possibility from the start. The thing is, a special session can’t just be called by anyone, which is how we ended up in situations like the one the A’s and their supporters are in now.

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A’s, pro-A’s Vegas politicians try to Friday News dump a bad stadium bill

Don’t believe what sports teams and their political allies say about stadium financing on a normal day, never mind on a holiday weekend Friday news dump.

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​It seems pretty clear that the A’s and their allies are up to some nonsense in their quest for a taxpayer-funded ballpark, and not just because every taxpayer-funded ballpark is some level of nonsense. They didn’t just submit a bill on a Friday before a holiday weekend because the current Las Vegas legislative session ends in early June: they were also doing what everyone does when it comes time to try to push through something unsavory, and attempting to hide it by limiting the audience for it.

Luckily, Neil deMause wrote up the various issues with the bill over at Field of Schemes on Saturday, the most pressing of which is that the $375 million in tax dollars (paid out in various forms, which deMause broke down) is most assuredly a lie, while the $380 million “cap” is just a cap on the kind of tax dollars they’re publicly disclosing. There’s room to go well over $500 million here, and both the stadium and the land it’s on will be exempt from property tax. And, as discussed before by deMause, the tax increment financing for the stadium will create new taxes even if those taxes aren’t directly being handed to the A’s:

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The A’s are speedrunning the Las Vegas stadium talks

The A’s are packing years of roller coaster stadium talks into mere weeks (and getting just about as far).

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Let’s rewind to just a few weeks back, when news first broke that the A’s had secured a “binding” land deal with the city of Las Vegas to build a stadium there. The city of Oakland did not know this was happening — they had been, as they had been for years and years, in the midst of negotiations with the team to keep them in the city by way of a big bag of public money. And then Oakland found out just a little bit before everyone else that the A’s had agreed to buy some land in another city. Which brings us to the below, from me on April 21:

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Notes: A’s and Vegas, Nashville, and front office unionization

More on the A’s and Las Vegas, the next step in expansion, and a look at the why and what of front office unionization.

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The A’s are likely going to play baseball in Las Vegas as soon as their lease with the city of Oakland is up following the 2024 season, but then again, maybe they won’t. All of that is pretty unsettled at the moment, with all kinds of negotiations for public subsidies and tax dollars still occurring, which will happen for at least another month until Vegas’ current legislative session ends. “The A’s move to Las Vegas” is probably the most-likely scenario, but there’s also “the A’s stay in Oakland, sell, and current owner John Fisher takes over an expansion team that will go to Vegas instead” as well as “the A’s and Las Vegas don’t agree on anything in time but Oakland won’t renew the lease, leaving the A’s to play their games in a Triple-A stadium while they argue over public funding for years, again.”

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The A’s are horrid (and also bad at baseball)

MLB and the A’s can blame the fans all they want, but neither they nor their actions built this embarrassment.

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The A’s are almost unbelievably bad in 2023. With most of the first month of the season behind them, their record sits at 5-21, and it’s a deserved record, too. Their pythagorean record, which is based on runs scored vs. runs allowed, is also 5-21. They haven’t scored 100 runs yet, but they’ve given up 212 of the things. You’re just not going to win very many games when that’s the case.

Back in February, I wrote that “The A’s have been busy, but only relatively speaking”. Everything in there is still pretty spot-on now that games are being played, with one exception: I did write that they might be better than they were last season given their various moves. In my defense, I said that because of how awful they were in 2022, when they went 60-102 and had a pythagorean record of 59-103. When I said their moves “probably made the A’s better” I meant in the sense that maybe they’d avoid 100 losses this time around. Which is to say, not much better!

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The A’s are moving to Las Vegas, probably

Nothing is official, except for that Oakland told the A’s to get out and never come back.

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The A’s and Oakland have been at odds over a taxpayer-funded stadium and whether the team would stay or go for… Jesus, the entire time I’ve been writing professionally? I’ve been at this for longer than I haven’t been at this point, you know, this is like the Big Dig of stadium talks. And all of it for naught, too, as the A’s have decided to take their ball and go to a new home, this one in Las Vegas. Or, well, it was sort of decided for them, in a way. The A’s agreed to purchase land in Las Vegas with the intent of building a stadium on it, and the city of Oakland found out nearly the same way everyone else did: when they were told it was happening.

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