“A’s Tell Las Vegas Baseball Fans They Can Spend $19.01 To Secure Priority Access To Buy Season Tickets At Planned Stadium On Strip” is a perfectly cromulent headline; so is “A’s Open Ticket Deposits for Las Vegas Stadium That Doesn’t Exist Yet.” Choices! It’s all about choices.
For A’s fans, or Las Vegas baseball fans, or just fans of baseball who want to visit Las Vegas a whole lot, the choice is whether to spend $19.01 (because the A’s were created in 1901?) to get on a “priority list” for tickets at the team’s new Las Vegas stadium, if there are ever tickets, if there ever is a stadium. Front Office Sports describes this as a “deposit,” but there’s no indication on the team website that you can apply the $19.01 toward the price of tickets if you buy them or get it back if you don’t, so this appears to actually be one of those “fan club membership” type deals that let you get in on the presale before the general public.
And, you know, John Fisher needs all the money he can get, so another, say, 30,000 payments of $19.01 each would raise … okay, $570,300 isn’t all that much, but every dollar counts! Plus there’s nothing stopping Fisher from accepting more season ticket “priority list” members than seats exist, maybe this is the new market inefficiency! Gotta be lots of people who want to see Aaron Judge or whoever hit home runs!
In other pretending-the-A’s-are-moving-t0-Vegas news, the team has announced its games will be broadcast on a Las Vegas radio station this year, in addition to in Sacramento and the Bay Area, and also recently filed a permit to clear and grade the proposed stadium site. Whether all this is in actual preparation for a Nevada move or just an elaborate shadow play intended to entice some “investors” to come out of the woodwork and give Fisher a pile of money for no good reason remains unknowable, maybe even to Fisher himself — groundbreaking or it didn’t happen at this point, so might want to save yourself $19.01 for now.
While I agree that the $19.01 deposit does not clarify where the money will go if a person chooses not to buy tickets, I don’t think that you should be so dubious about this stadium getting built. Those on the stadium authority board in Nevada and other people who support them, always seem to get what they want, no matter how much they’re going to have to finagle money or deal with other issues. They will figure out a way to get this done and so will John Fisher because he knows that once the stadium is built and the team moves here, it’s value increases tremendously, same thing that happened to the Raiders football team.
NFL team value doesn’t depend nearly as much on media market size as MLB team value. It’s unlikely in the extreme that Fisher could recoup $1B plus by moving from the 10th-largest market in the U.S. to the 40th.
Not saying a Vegas stadium is impossible, but it’s still in believe-it-when-we-see-it territory. Lots of people say they’re going to build sports venues and never actually do it — including people in Vegas, remember Jackie Robinson?
The Bay Area maybe a bigger market but they have to split it with the Giants. I don’t think Vegas makes a lot of sense since they would be relying on tourists to fill the park so TV revenue wouldn’t be there
Did Jackie Robinson ever clear land though?
I’m not sure filing a permit app to do something after someone else demolishes an existing structure qualifies as “clearing”.
What Fisher & Co have actually done is print and sign a piece of paper. On second thoughts, they probably didn’t even have to print it, just email it to city hall and pay a fee (maybe. An opportunity for administrative failure there… ‘we meant to drop off the payment, just forgot it… so busy, you know how it is…”).
Sure, he MIGHT use some of the $500k he could (at best) raise from the holographic seat pre-sale to hire a bulldozer for a few days, but think of who we are talking about here…
Attention Vegas area bulldozer owner/operators: Look at this franchise’s record of paying it’s contractors and partners.
I’d require at least enough money for fuel and dozer transport (in both directions) up front.
I was actually just asking a question about how far Jackie Robinson got. I remember a bunch of statements and supposed agreements but I didn’t know if there was ever any movement on the site. Add to that he didn’t actually have any commitment to receive a team while Fisher owns one.
That being said this whole thing really is stupid. MLB forced the Giants and Mariners to be sold to local groups when they were on the verge of moving. The Rays are being pushed to selling to the local interests. Joe Lacob publicly stated he told Fisher to call him if he was ever ready to sell
Ah, I see. Sorry, I misunderstood your point.
As far as I recall he got nowhere…. but I don’t recall there being a ton of coverage about his plans.
Small problem with the Raiders’ Comp. The Raiders value went up proportionately with the rest of the league. So not really at all.
Markets in MLB work differently. They’re going from a 1.2BN value in an aging stadium in a premium market to a significantly weaker market where they won’t own the stadium but will need to service over a billion in debt. Their best value Comp is Miami who’s stadium is newish and has a value of under 1BN. They’ll be deep in the red with this move, not seeing a dramatic increase. They may, in fact, see a degree in franchise value with this move.
MLB’s national TV deals are getting worse, as are their local TV deals. They won’t see a league wide boost like the NFL saw.
There’s a reason this has been slow to move forward. Everyone can do the math and Fisher is on his own. Which means a willingness to go into a debt beyond any value he could ever realizd.
I think you summed it up. Baseball markets are much more localized, pretending that the Vegas team is going to get national attention in the off-years (and I’m willing to bet there will be a lot more off-years) is a fool’s gambit. And even then, it seems like national attention for the winning teams still doesn’t quite measure up to NFL and NBA playoff teams these days.
I’ve maintained all along that building back up from the remaining fanbase in Oakland, especially by pitching to the exurban NorCal markets that a lot of formerly Bay Area families decamped to, was their best path to success. It would be possible to pick some of those people up even in Sacramento. Nobody is going to fly to Vegas for this team, even if they’re right next to the airport. (How well is Fisher’s soccer franchise right next to the San Jose airport doing?)
But the simple fact of the matter is that neither Fisher nor the league can allow themselves to believe they might end up underwater on this thing. Reality is now knocking softly at the door, but I’m guessing we have another year or two to go before it’s clear if they’re going to crap or get off the pot.
Is anyone else thinking that we may have overestimated how much money this particular failson can raise… even though most were pretty sure he couldn’t raise enough to do this before now?
It seems to me it used to be illegal to sell things you don’t own. What funny old days they were… I guess at least here he can claim he is selling a spot on a list that he does own, even though the list is based on seating that does not exist in a space that may, one day, be occupied by a stadium that may or may not feature major league baseball in it.
If more than 10,000 people give this charlatan $19.01 I will be shocked. They should know by now who they are dealing with.
Maybe this is just the first salvo in a new pyramid… like streaming tiers, except this one consists of 7 levels of waiting lists for tickets for seats that don’t exist in a stadium that hasn’t been built and is not yet funded.
Fyre Fest II tickets just went on sale. It’s suckers being born every second now.
Marc Baiden is a serious executive despite his strange ouster from the Raiders. I bet Fisher is hiring him to go back to Carson city to beg for money.
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6181684/2025/03/06/athletics-raiders-marc-badain-president/
Badain may have just signed on with a franchise even more dysfunctional than the Raiders.
It’s weird that Neil is still selling, “the Vegas stadium isn’t happening” three years on. I guess this gets clicks from raging Oaklanders who are still in denial?
They break ground next month.
This used to be a place for rational analysis, not wishcasting disaster for unpopular owners.
It hasn’t even been two years since the Nevada legislature passed the stadium bill. In that time, Fisher has done nothing to put together any financing other than get his family to sign a note that says “Yes, we are rich.” So while I don’t think it’s impossible that he’ll get it built, it’s only reasonable to say we’ll believe it when we see it.
And for the record, most sports business experts seem to be even more pessimistic than me that it’ll happen. (I’ve seen too many rich people make dumb decisions out of hubris or stubbornness to ever say never.)
It’s not happening until Fisher puts his money up. Hasn’t happened yet, is very unlikely to happen unless he finds a partner, the stadium site changes and/or more public money is found.
My guess is Baiden is hired to go to Carson city to get more money and possibly switch the site to the Rio. He had been working at Oak View and they were working with the Rio on an NBA arena.
Umm they are not breaking ground next month. They haven’t even cleared the site yet. I just went by there earlier in the week. They’re not even close. Also funding hasn’t fully been secured. Fisher hasn’t shown he has money. All he’s done is talk.
This is a stadium no one locally wants. It’s politically driven. I also blame MLB for allowing this to happen in the first place. They are sacrificing at least a billion dollars in expansion fees (Manfred wants to expand to 32 teams before 2029) in relocating a team that has a cash poor owner.
If Vegas were to get an expansion team, there would be at least a half dozen people lined up for it. No one of wealth in this town wants to give Fisher money because they know he’s broke. Furthermore, him attempting to share equity stakes in his stadium LLC isn’t going to work either. The stadium will sit on land owned by a REIT and the stadium itself will be owned by the Stadium Authority (trade-off in avoiding property taxes). In other words, investors would be investing in the sports industry’s equivalent of a record label imprint. Nothing in value but the name.
Someone had an excellent point about the bad comparison between the NFL and MLB. The majority of the top teams in the NFL (Green Bay, Pittsburgh, Kansas City, Buffalo, Las Vegas) are all small markets. Plus, the NFL shares its national media rights equally, regardless of market size, there are no RSNs (due in part of the scarcity of game inventory) and they have a hard salary cap and a minimum spending floor of 95% of the cap. MLB is regionalized, heavily dependent on RSN revenue, steered towards large markets and has no salary cap or minimum spending floor. Two completely different business models.
I think your last point is the big one Jay. The A’s will be getting nowhere near the RSN money they had in the Bay Area (about $67 million per year if reports are to be believed). The RSN money is why the A’s stayed in Northern California as moving to Las Vegas now would have killed the A’s current RSN deal immediately
The terms clearly state the $19.01 “fee” is not a guarantee to getting tickets. A chump change grab from a pathetic owner. What a joke. Sell the team loser.
It was cited at the latest LVCA meeting as a way to gauge interest! Hahaha, they’re supposed to be breaking ground now and Fisher is still gauging interest. The incompetency here is staggering.