The 30 owners of Major League Baseball unanimously voted to approve the relocation of the Oakland Athletics to Las Vegas on Thursday, according to multiple reports.
The decision, which came on the final day of the club owners’ meetings in Arlington, TX, all but seals the first relocation in baseball since 2005 when the Montreal Expos moved south to Washington, D.C. to become the Nationals.
Oakland’s lease with their current stadium, the dilapidated Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, ends next year. The move will likely come after the 2024 season, but it remains to be seen where they’ll play in the interim.
The Athletics initially purchased land in Las Vegas in April before switching things up a month later by striking a deal with Bally’s and Gaming & Leisure Properties to construct their new home — a $1.5 billion, 30,000-seat venue with a retractable roof — on the Tropicana Hotel site along the Las Vegas strip. That stadium, however, is not expected to be completed until the start of the 2028 season.
Here are the first renderings of the Oakland Atheltics’ Las Vegas ballpark. The A’s plan to build a $1.5 billion, 30,000-seat retractable roof stadium on 9 acres of land on the Tropicana’s Las Vegas Strip site. #vegas #oakland #athletics pic.twitter.com/wXJUDLZTUG
— Mick Akers (@mickakers) May 26, 2023
This will be the third professional team to make its way to Las Vegas since 2017 as the Athletics join the NHL’s Golden Knights and the NFL’s Raiders, who also relocated from Oakland in 2020. It’s another massive blow to the city of Oakland, which now loses a third professional sports team in five years. The Golden State Warriors moved to San Francisco in 2019 before the Raiders left town the following year for Sin City.
As for the Athletics, this is the third time in the franchise’s 123-year history that it’s switching cities. Founded in Philadelphia in 1901, the American League club moved to Kansas City in 1955 and again to Oakland just 13 years later in 1968.
