With the approval pending and all but certain for the funding deal to build a new stadium on the Las Vegas Strip, the Oakland Athletics will be moving to southern Nevada sooner rather than later—even though the new ballpark won’t be ready until at least 2027. The A’s lease with the Coliseum facility in Alameda County, where the team has played since moving from Kansas City in 1968, ends after the 2024 season. Do the math.

The Athletics need a place to play for at least two seasons, and it’s not going to be in Oakland. It’s not going to be in San Francisco, sharing The House That Steroids Built with the Giants, either. No, especially considering so many Oakland fans are pained by the departure of the Golden State Warriors, the Oakland Raiders, and now the A’s, too, there is nowhere in the Bay Area for the team to find short-term relief.

They will go to Vegas for the 2025 season and play for as long as they have to in the Triple-A stadium there: the Las Vegas Ballpark. It’s a nice facility, although it will present some challenges for the Athletics organization—the least of which is the seating capacity (10,000). The team surely will sell that out every night as fans come from all over the country to see their teams play in Vegas, not to mention the locals.

It has outstanding amenities, despite its small attendance maximum: 22 suites, a center field pool, a kids’ zone, and several bars. What else does it need? Well, a roof, for starters, as it might get kind of hot in mid-July. We’ve been in Vegas during high summer, where it gets to be 120 degrees in the daytime—and still around 100 degrees at midnight. Not exactly baseball weather, for the fans or the players, really. Hot!

But it’s a reality now: MLB has not wanted two teams in the Bay Area market since it stopped the Giants from moving to Florida after the 1992 season. Bud Selig chose the sad-sack San Francisco franchise, with just four playoff appearances in 35 seasons by the Bay, instead of the thriving-at-the-time Athletics, with their four World Series titles in 25 seasons on the Bay. And then he enabled Barry Bonds; the rest is history.

It’s funny how so many mediots and others are blaming the current A’s ownership for this, when the MLB writing has been on the wall for a long time—not to mention the other pro sports teams leaving Oakland, too. Even with limited/small payrolls, the Athletics have made the postseason 11 times since 2000, and even with the PED enablements in S.F., the Giants have only made the playoffs 8 times in the same time frame.

Which team deserved better? The A’s. Yet it also has been a vagabond franchise always, moving from Philadelphia to K.C. to Oakland over the course of the twentieth century; perhaps now the Athletics will find a long-term home in Las Vegas. We look forward to visiting the team in Nevada when we go to Sin City, both at their small, temporary home in Summerlin … and at their cool-looking, future home on the Strip.