We are here on a Sunday Surmising in Sin City, with the second part of our Las Vegas Athletics local update. The Athletics organization held an official groundbreaking event last Monday for the new ballpark, and we report that there is little to see so far in the old Tropicana Hotel site where the new stadium slowly will rise over the next few years. Why does it take so long to build? Well … everyone has to get paid, of course. Duh.

For comparison’s sake, the off-Strip construction of the Las Vegas Raiders’ stadium began on November 13, 2017, and its certificate of occupancy was issued on July 31, 2020. Do the math, folks. Stadiums are not pop-up facilities these days; there are people who insist the A’s-to-Vegas thing will never happen, yet MLB has invested too much in this enterprise to end up with egg on its collective face. Think about it, people … yes.

Haters are gonna hate, but the stadium renderings look pretty sweet. Again, there is nothing there now but some rearranged piles of dirt, but we will be back here next February to check on the progress. You can’t get very close to the site now, as it is boarded up on both Tropicana and Las Vegas boulevards, currently, and even the sky ramps over the respective roads are temporarily closed from the MGM Grand and Excalibur.

We walked down the Strip on Saturday morning from the Bellagio block of the Strip, to see for ourselves, and there was nothing to see, really. Even the best vantage point, from the NY/NY sky ramp to the Excalibur, didn’t give us much but the aforementioned dirt mounds. We walked right up to the closed sky ramp from the Excalibur across Las Vegas Blvd., but again, the boarded-up sidewalks hindered sightlines.

Las Vegas Stadium (2028)

However, again, if the ballpark renderings are even close to being what the stadium ends up presenting, it will be a stunning stadium. Las Vegas is the No. 40 TV market in the country, and as we reported a long time ago, the A’s will rely, no doubt, on out-of-town fans to fill the small stadium (33,000 est.) when the time comes in 2028 and beyond. The Athletics organization perhaps can escape its lifelong cycle of frugality, too.

As we reported on Friday, many locals are more excited about this than the local media is letting on. Why the pushback from other locals? We don’t know, other than the committing of public dollars to the project. We fully agree with that sentiment ourselves, of course, but to cling to some notion that this project will fail is silly. Yes, the local businesspeople may be misled about the economic impact, but again, it’s Las Vegas, yo.

America’s Playground is literally the origin of the phrase, “If you build it, they will come.” Sin City got a hockey team in 2017; it got a WNBA franchise in 2018; it got an NFL organization in 2020; and it’s getting an MLB club in 2028. The only left on the slate of wishes for Vegas is an NBA team, which everyone always assumed would be the first league in town. Alas, men’s professional basketball will be the last arrival now.

Nothing ever goes as planned, right? We will see how this plan unfolds in the next couple of years, for sure.