Las Vegas Mayor Says A’s Should Stay In Oakland

Photo of Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman by Airman 1st Class Haley Stevens. A’s logo wallpaper by Michael Tipton

Whoa Nellie! Wait, wrong sport, wrong Oakland icon. Let’s go with whoa Ricky! On Tuesday leading up to the first Super Bowl being held in the once banned sports city of Las Vegas mayor Carolyn Goodman took to the Front Office Sports Podcast on Tuesday to share her thoughts on the rise of professional sports in Las Vegas but when it came to the current Oakland Athletics, boy was she ever candid. This was unexpected to say the least.

“I personally think they’ve gotta figure out a way to stay in Oakland and make their dream come true,” Goodman said. Wait did I hear that correctly? This is in reference to what she believes is John Fisher and A’s management wanting a waterfront ballpark in Oakland. She must know more than we do because the A’s management and ownership has given Oakland and the fanbase no such inclinations.

Goodman and the city of Las Vegas originally offered the A’s 60 plus acres of city owned land at an extreme discount on the northern end of the city in the old historic district. The A’s however have opted for 9 acres on the site of the Tropicana right on the strip.

“I thought, this does not make sense, and so why is it happening? Then I thought, (The A’s) really want to stay in Oakland. They want to be on the water,” Goodman told the podcast hosts. “They have that magnificent dream and yet they can’t get it done. “I just think there’s an appetite there. I run into people from Oakland all the time. They want to keep the team and it’s just the government up there. It costs money…. I love the people from Oakland. I think they deserve to have their team.”

Whoa, this is not what you expect from a city official let alone the mayor of a sports hungry town.

According to the Las Vegas Review Journal, Gaming and Leisure Properties Inc. owns the 35-acre Tropicana site at the southeast corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and the hotel’s namesake Tropicana Avenue. Bally’s entered a 50-year ground lease with GLPI for the site in 2021 for $10.5 million annually. GLPI is contributing 9 acres of the site for the A’s $1.5 billion, 33,000-seat ballpark. Plans call for construction to begin in April 2025 and be completed in time for the 2028 season.

“There are a lot of questions about whether that’s going to fit,” Goodman said, referring to an already overly congested Las Vegas Strip. There are already legal pushbacks in progress in regards to the city funding a portion of construction costs. Residents are miffed at the lack of promised artist renderings for the ballpark. As we all know this whole thing has been one sad shit show.

I don’t know who got to her first Bally’s or baseball commissioner Rob Manfred, but I can only imagine they were not thrilled about her hot take. She took to X to back track while still kind of doubling down on her comments.

Don’t ask me what this means in the grand scheme of things but this is a mayor who sounds like she does not want the A’s on the Las Vegas strip and laid it out in a very politically correct governmental way. We can all agree the money handlers in Vegas just had a WTF moment after hearing her comments. So you’re saying there’s a chance? Stay tuned my friends. 

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