While we’re at it with the unnamed sources, one “close to the Oakland Athletics” tells the Nevada Independent that team owner John Fisher does too have $1.1 billion in private financing lined up for a new Las Vegas stadium, he just won’t tell anyone what it is for a couple of months yet:
The financing plan covering a $1.5 billion baseball stadium on the Strip “is in place,” according to sources close to the Oakland Athletics, but any public discussion of funding will wait until December…
In December, the A’s are expected to provide written confirmation of the financing for the ballpark, according to a team source. The financing needs to be in place before construction can begin on the ballpark.
Seriously, Nevada Independent, why is this news? “A’s officials say Fisher will be able to pay for his share of Vegas stadium” has already been reported, so what’s new about different A’s officials (or the same ones, who knows?) saying so again, this time on condition they not be identified? Did you only watch “All the President’s Men” while looking at your phone and come to think that the reason Deep Throat was to be believed was that he was standing in a shadowy parking lot, not that he had provided verifiable information previously?
Fisher’s people did provide some information yesterday, but it wasn’t about the finances. Rather, they released new draft development and lease agreements for discussion at today’s Las Vegas Stadium Authority Board, which included some fresh stadium schematics:
It’s still a little tough to tell exactly how Fisher plans to fit an entire stadium onto a 9-acre site, but it looks like part of it will be keeping the actual seating section relatively small — only 30,000 actual seats, plus 3,000 standing-room spaces — and limiting the concessions areas to the spaces under the seating decks, which goes against current trends and could limit his ability to create massive food courts and club spaces that have helped boost revenues at other new stadiums. I’d also be interested to hear from any engineers about whether that massive roof has enough support structures planned to hold it up — it would be weird for schematics like these not to include that, but given the massive columns that other stadiums’ roofs need, it’s a question worth asking.
The interesting thing in the article is GLPI saying the master plan isn’t finished. As a publicly trade company they have to be somewhat truthful.
It’s going to be funny when Fisher backs out, MLB forces a sale. All while the twins are looking for a buyer, reinsdorf is looking to sell, 1/2 dozen owners seem to be using Nashville as a stalking horse for new stadium deals, the MLB will have to be producing 15 or so of the local tv broadcasts, and 2 franchises playing in minor league/spring training facilities.
How did MLB collapse? Gradually then. Suddenly
“MLB will have to be producing 15 or so of the local tv broadcasts” — hmmm, that’s another reason to be skeptical about the finances of a potential A’s move to Vegas, where the A’s would have only MLB-produced streaming-casts and/or local over the air broadcasts that generate little or no net revenue. In Sacramento, on the other hand, there is (for now) still a viable RSN that would pay millions to the A’s every year.
Since MLB clearly doesn’t care about the game anymore, maybe they’ll allow the A’s to just fold? If they just did a museum, it would take way less than 9 acres. Maybe a museum with a few rides for when the kids get bored. Just thinking out loud.
Las Vegas is in a high risk seismic zone, after the 1989 World Series and 2 hurricane proof stadiums getting their roffs ripped open, the engineers better get this goofy design right. So the hotel towers will be separated from each other and the casino by a baseball stadium. In honor of Pete Rose, instead of a club under the seats, that would be a great location for the sportsbook, right Shoeless Joe Jackson?
The hotel towers on the schematic look very similar to The Harmon
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Harmon
I said it in the last A’s discussion, I will say it again — if they do present a complete financing plan in December, I expect there will be substantially more than $300 million in debt involved.
Looks like there’s one more Fed Open Market Committee meeting between now and the December 15th meeting they (apparently) need to have this done by. I suspect the firm details are being held up because Fisher, like every other less-competent real estate gambler before him, has his fingers crossed for another interest rate cut to make his life less painful.
I can see them making a big deal out of in-seat service for concessions. File in, get your first round of drinks and snacks from the stands below, order the rest from your phone. I’m more interested in the climate-control systems… if the AC blows up mid-season, how much would that cost to fix? If Vegas does suffer a freak wet-bulb heatwave during the lifespan of this big tent, are they still gonna be able to play baseball?
No matter what, this thing won’t be financed at the prime rate. If the Las Vegas Athletics do come to pass, they’ll be laboring under distressed debt from day one.
The HVAC is a big question. The only comparable facility is Chase field (hot dry summers with crowds). There was discussion about some kind of state of the art system where each seat is cooled individually. That sounds expensive.
No matter what a big part of the 9 acres will be some power generating/hvac facility.
I’m sure technology has come a long way since the Chase field system was built but that system started crapping out about 20 years in and now is the driving force behind more stadium funding or a new stadium altogether. If temps continue to increase are we looking at a similar shelf life for a Vegas stadium?
1) If the designers are smart, the ballpark will not have any external entrances, i.e. customers will have to walk through a hotel, casino, or retail building to enter the ballpark. That will lessen the burden on HVAC somewhat.
2) Power generation and HVAC equipment will, presumably, not be part of the mythical 9-acre ballpark footprint.
3) If a ballpark is built on this site, the ballpark footprint will absolutely be greater than 9 acres.
Considering that there’s no master plan for the site and Bally’s seems less likely to build then the A’s, I would guess your first point isn’t happening
“I suspect the firm details are being held up because Fisher, like every other less-competent real estate gambler before him, has his fingers crossed for another interest rate cut to make his life less painful.”
That’s an excellent point, especially since Fisher has to be very aware of how sensitive budgets are to interest rates after Howard Terminal blew up on him. The Fed said in September that it plans on another 0.5 points in rate cuts by the end of the year, right?
Dot Plot page 4: https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/files/fomcprojtabl20240918.pdf
Word on the [Wall] Street is 25 to 50 bps. I’d wager 25, if I wagered on such things.
Junk bonds don’t necessarily follow prime rate cuts, the risk involved and investors willingness to take risk is determines junk bond yields more than fed funds rates. Portland and Salt Lake look more likely destinations for the A’s than Vegas.
Exactly. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if Portland or Sacramento ends up with them. Also Fisher needs RSN money. That’s why he didn’t move the team temporarily to Salt Lake or Vegas. He’s not getting that kind of TV money in Las Vegas. The Knights went the independent route and the Raiders are in the NFL.
Long story short I highly doubt the A’s will step foot in Las Vegas. There is zero demand for them here. The demand is hot for the NBA and soon Silver will make it official when he announces Las Vegas and Seattle as the 2 new expansion cities, which brings me to this…
One league commissioner completely gets it (in terms of economics) and one doesn’t. Silver put the kibosh on Memphis and New Orleans from relocating to Las Vegas because he knew the expansion fees would be in the billions and he has deep-pocketed individuals lined up itching to get in. He’s right, as estimates are north of $3 billion for expansion into Las Vegas. Then you have Manfred. He waived the relocation fee for the A’s, so MLB gets zero money. MLB could have gotten at least a billion in expansion fees. And the MLB owners aren’t upset about this?
Getting to stay on NBC Sports California certainly helped, but the A’s mostly didn’t move temporarily to Salt Lake or Vegas because nobody offered a stadium with free rent there.
Agreed Jay. They will get to Sacramento. If they ever leave, I would bet it will be when they are owned by someone else.
This plan was always bat shit crazy.
Classic Fisher.
Dangle a move threat to extract a better deal.
Do zero homework on how viable the threat actually is.
When someone calls your bluff just announce you are moving without doing any research (what? I mean, he sent Kaval there to tweet about how great it is… what more research do you need?)
Classic Billionaire failson folly.
No way Portland ever supports the MLB. They’re too small a metro to risk building an MLB stadium on the potential for there to be a fanbase.
Sacramento actually makes sense because they’d still be on the same RSN, are a relatively big city population wise, and can draw from the existing As fan base who would probably travel to their share of games.
I actually originally came to comment this very thing, that I think they will ultimately end up in Sacramento.
It also makes zero sense to take teams with existing fanbases in Memphis -that can draw from Tennessee, Kentucky, and Arkansas- and New Orleans -that can draw from the entire deep South- and putting them in Vegas where an NBA fanbase is nonexistent.
It makes zero sense to put an NBA team in Vegas at all but like Seattle is probably inevitable due to there being an NHL arena there.
Funny how that arena in Seattle was such an issue twenty years ago but now is suddenly enough to get an NBA expansion franchise and an NHL one.
Both will inevitably flop because Seattle is not the city it was when the Sonics were a big deal. It’s unaffordable for the actual fans who used to support the Sonics or the type of people who actually would. The new Sonics will be like if the Nets had moved to Brooklyn but Brooklyn didn’t have over a million people.
You’re talking about possibly the most transient metro in the entire country these days and one that is decidedly anti establishment and loves to dump on capitalism.
Both will fail hard while actual potentially deserving markets get the shaft for another thirty years.
Neither will ever support the MLB and don’t have the potential money Vegas does. They make no sense.
Salt Lake is also one of the smallest metros by far out of all of the pro sports markets.
Funny you say that because there is an article in the local newspaper intimating that very fact. The politicians on the grift will be getting voted out next month, so they need to make sure this gets pushed through.
Hardly anyone (sans said politicians) want the A’s here. Fisher’s plan of enticing local investors flopped. Fisher isn’t offering ownership in the team itself; he’s offering ownership in the stadium company. Who in their right mind would want to own a building on land owned by a gaming REIT?
This is a complete embarrassment on MLB (bypassing at least a billion in expansion fees), the City of Las Vegas (still on the hook for at least $1.2 billion in bond fees), the State of Nevada (refusing to cover the shortfall in educational funding) and the A’s organization (they’re still broke).
I’m not familiar with the term. What is a freak wet-bulb heatwave?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature
Hasn’t happened in the US yet, but I would rank it the most likely “black swan” climate event to affect a place like Vegas. Typically arid, so it’s hard but not impossible for the humidity to build up to that level. Good chance the surrounding mountains could trap a significant high pressure front at a bad time of year, though.
Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel Ministry for the Future opens with a depiction of such a heatwave happening in India. The central subcontinent is currently the area of biggest concern for climate events like this.
The black swan climate event most likely to affect Vegas would be high winds and lengthy dust storm. Vegas more then most cities is really dependent on air travel and something like that lasting more then a few days would pretty catastrophic.
While there are mountains around the valley and maybe on paper some kind of humid/pressure event is possible, it seems pretty remote, the mountains to the east and south aren’t very formidable.
We’re out into the weeds here, but I would think that such an event would in fact be driven from the southeast, by a high-pressure front driven up through Texas/NM/Arizona or possibly the Gulf of California. Similar to how Helene just reached much farther inland than anyone anticipated.
It’s something of an abuse of the term “black swan” as Taleb originally conceived it, which was to describe models being invalidated by long-tailed events they completely failed to predict. We’ve just seen an example of tropical weather causing unprecedented devastation far inland, so I don’t think such a scenario is completely unexpected or unpredictable in other regions of the country any longer. Very likely that it would crop up first in desert regions closer to the Gulf, though.
See this kind of annoys me.
If you looked at the track, it wasn’t exactly difficult to predict that Helene was going to be bad for the remote mountain regions inland because that’s exactly where it was headed for.
It’s not anything close to unprecedented. It happens all the time further north.
Helene was a depression or maybe a weak tropical storm by the time it actually reached Asheville and other nearby areas. That’s pretty normal for a strong major hurricane making landfall where it did. They last as depressions for many hundreds of miles after being tropical storms and hurricanes.
What made it so bad for these places wasn’t any kind of uniqueness to this particular hurricane but was the fact that they already got a major rain event a few days before that and are only accessible from the outside world by a few roads while being cut off by mountains and a river.
There should have been mandatory evacuations and serious preparation that clearly didn’t happen on the part of their local and regional government. They just assumed it could never happen there despite the many stories of landslides and floods trapping people in remote mountainous regions worldwide over the years.
The only thing that was unusual was the track but that track is explained by meteorological factors like every other hurricane track.
Well, that and the fact that Helene was more powerful than it would have been otherwise because the Gulf of Mexico is hot soup now:
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2024/10/climate-change-made-hurricane-helene-and-other-2024-disasters-more-damaging-scientists-find/
Yes that is true, Neil.
That is one thing we can actually point to as being affected by climate change. The oceans are indeed warmer longer and warmer further up.
It just annoys me when people act like land barriers are supposed to make a hurricane or a front of moisture dissipate even when it is in relatively close proximity to the Gulf.
Heck, tornadoes happen as frequently as they do where they do because of the moisture from the Gulf coming up and being countered by cool dry air. We’re talking many many hundreds of miles from the coast up in the Midwest and Plains.
Hurricanes are literally groupings of the strongest thunderstorms in existence. Expecting them to dissipate over mountains or any other land mass like some weak storm system is beyond ignorant.
I agree, Ian. If it is ever built (and every day it looks more and more like i will not be built), it will have much more than $300m in debt on it.
I would say though that as far as I can see Fisher has committed to the stadco only having $300m in debt financing.
He hasn’t, to the best of my knowledge, warranted that he will not use debt financing himself. Even if he did, it is a relatively simple matter to set up a shell company as a financing “equity partner” and hide your debt as a capital contribution from the “XYZ venture capital LLC”, of Delaware (naturally).
With the ballpark being on the back side of the lot after sharing a stadium with the River cats, I’m gonna start calling them the Vegas Alley Cats.
RE: the support system – it’s a good question.
Check out the anchor blocks for the supertrusses at Jerry World.
Unless the hotels are being built as Notre Dame Cathedral-style buttresses (architectural features/engineering mistakes), the concrete (? It’s still concrete shells, right?) roof panels/shells are going to be problematic…
Unless Fisher and Kaval have come up with an air supported concrete roof plan, of course. It should be at least as sound as their “financing plan” seems to be.
John they are throwing anything against the wall and hoping it sticks. I live in Las Vegas. Born and bred. I used to host events at the Trop. It is not nearly big enough to construct a baseball stadium AND have adjacent hotel towers. Furthermore, the airport isn’t too far behind so airspace has to be considered. Also what about parking? The nearby casinos (who refuse to get involved with this farsical plan) aren’t going to share their parking revenue. Tail-gating will be non-existent. All there will be is a 30k capacity baseball stadium, by far the smallest in MLB. Oh and based on the A’s own renderings, it doesn’t appear said stadium will be fully-enclosed. Whose going to watch a baseball game in the dead of summer? Heck in other parts of the country where the weather is nice (like Los Angeles), they don’t sell out their home games.
This is and has been a horrific idea. I would have been keen to it if a team with a deep-pocketed owner and one who cared about putting a quality product on the field and if the original site was kept than this. It’s been almost 2 years and Fisher still hasn’t submitted a financing plan. Why don’t MLB step in and assist Fisher like the NFL did with Mark Davis when the Raiders relocated here?
The NFL will assist any team with a limited amount of financing. What the NFL did for the raiders was not unique
The draft contracts have been posted here, items 8, 9 & 10:
https://www.lvstadiumauthority.com/meetings/index.php?mtgID=87
But I can’t seem to find the source document with all the pretty pictures. If anyone can find a link to that, please let me know.
With the dry air, I assume the ball will carry similar to Phoenix… so 372 to LF power alley, 379 to RF Power alley and 396 to CF, boy will this be a HR paradise.
Actually I just looked and Vegas is at higher elevation than Phoenix so ball should travel even farther… are they insane with those dimensions?