Minor-league soccer cost overruns not juicy enough for you? Fine, let’s really settle in to the new year with a former elected official in Nevada calling people names on the internet over the Las Vegas stadium deal* for the Oakland A’s. Take it away, Alan Snel of LVSportsBiz:
It began when [former state senator Scott] Hammond was tagged in this post Sunday:
The Nevada Legislature won’t risk the Trop location failing. Neither will Fisher.
Revenue share stadium deal deadline: 1/15.
I’d watch for @SteveYeagerNV, @JosephMLombardo, and @hammond4nevada to quietly, and once again corruptively enact the change into law.
— letsgooakland (@letsgooak7) January 1, 2024
Then Hammond lobbed back, advising the fan to, “Get off your mom’s couch, leave the basement and learn to live.”
https://twitter.com/hammond4nevada/status/1741650887884652773
Well then! This is clearly the kind of interpersonal skills that got Hammond plucked out of the state senate to head up the Nevada Governor’s Office of Workforce Innovation two months ago. When another Oakland A’s fan followed up by calling it an “embarrassing reply” and asking Hammond why he thinks it was a good deal*, Hammond replied that “If you were not such an idiot you could actually look it up for yourself.”
All of which is great fun, but it feels like we skipped over something — oh yes, that bit about A’s owner John Fisher still not having provided stadium renderings nearly a month after he had first announced he would, which has “sparked concerns” about the entire deal (hence the asterisks above). Following the chain of links gets us to a series of posts from mid-December by the Vital Vegas Twitter account claiming that “there’s no indication they have financing” in place for the stadium and that while Fisher’s execs are showing the renderings in private to casinos and other prospective partners, it’s “still sitting at 60/40 they come to Vegas.”
That’s a whole lot of unsourced vagueness. But! It’s also true that Fisher has delayed publicly releasing the fresh renderings for 29 days and counting for unknown reasons, and still hasn’t said a word about where he’s going to find another billion-dollars-plus in stadium money to go with the $600 million he got from the state last June. It all does seem to point to things still being up in the air, which maybe explains why Hammond is touchy about being called out for acting “corruptively” by approving the public subsidy before the project had the rest of its funding in place or even a real design; or maybe he just only fires up Twitter when he wants to call somebody names, it’s probably that.
Do you suppose they’re having trouble making a believable rendering fit in the small piece of land they’ve earmarked for the stadium? At some point people are going to notice that stadium has no outfield.
Supposedly the casino operators who are seeing the renderings like them? Though maybe casino operators don’t know what a baseball field is supposed to look like.
If I had to guess, I’d say they want to wait until they’ve sold some financiers on the plan before revealing it to the public and letting Twitter tear it to shreds, but that is only a guess.
Hmmmn. That could just mean that fans have to file past slot machines rather than through turnstiles to get to their seats, though… and literally can’t get back out of the stadium until they’ve spent at least $200 on those same machines.
Charging to exit… Fisher has been ahead of the game all this time..
Well, diamonds are a favorite symbol to use in a casino’s one-arm bandits, though, to separate money from the rubes.
Sand falling through the hourglass…
As Fisher is realizing his plan can’t work, the Nevada pols he lured (and yes, you can take that any way you want) into his fiasco are starting to realize what a scumbag they have been dealing with…
Still, it’s Nevada. It’s not like they haven’t dealt with shady people before.
I can’t wait until FishCo launches the “well, if we could only find another way to finance that $1bn that you aren’t giving me” ball back across the net… and it will look like it is all Nevada/Vegas’ fault that this dream project cannot move forward.
Maybe if Hammond wasn’t such an idiot, he would have looked up the parable of Frogs and Scorpions himself…
Hey, I thought the Raiders wanted to get away from Oakland and the A’s wanted them out!? Now, the A’s want to follow them to L.V.!
But why? and why would MLB commissioner let them move!? Legal gambling or not, its’ ridiculous for them to leave a baseball town and a bigger market solely out of greed and silliness!
They were once the outcasts with the city of Oakland putting the Raiders/ Warriors first but after both teams left the A’s acted weird. They had 2 options, the Coliseum was all theirs and there was another site to build a stadium. But instead they caused all this drama trying to leave Oakland.
There are legal firms that helped them to leave Oakland and now, another sports team from Oakland may play in L.V. also ask why the Raiders play in a stadium they don’t own and share with a college team?
You won’t get any argument from me on most of that… the A’s would have been much better off staying in Oakland for almost any reason you care to think of.
It’s a bigger market.
They had more public funding on the table in Oakland than they do in LV (not that I am happy about that, but it is true).
The RSN prospects – although dimming everywhere – are better in Oakland than in Vegas.
The stadium he would have to build in Oakland could cost less than half the price of the (covered and air conditioned) one he will have to build in Vegas.
He had effectively no pro sports competition left in Oakland, whereas in Vegas he will be competing with multiple pro sports, casinos and shows for entertainment dollars.
There is no compelling case for an MLB team in Vegas beyond Fisher’s “I wanna” mantra. Even MLB has admitted it is an iffy market…
And now, thank to the ‘sale’ condition in the relocation agreement he has, he can’t even dump the franchise for a profit once he has moved it out of Oakland without paying the other owners.
Fisher has done a lot of stupid things. This one might be his biggest blunder yet.
Man don’t on Reddit. They consider this a blog with no facts. They even pulled down my MLB pro relegation. A whole bunch of gatekeepers on that site