The Oakland Athletics relocation to Las Vegas is an effort by the owners of the Athletics of Major League Baseball (MLB) to move the franchise from Oakland, California, to the Las Vegas metropolitan area in Nevada. The team was based in Oakland from 1968 through 2024, during which it won four World Series titles. The move would make them the second major sports franchise to move from Oakland to Las Vegas, after the Oakland Raiders of the National Football League (NFL) had done so in 2020. With four locations, the Athletics have had the most homes of any MLB team.
The effort follows years of failed attempts to replace the outdated and crumbling Oakland Coliseum with a more modern stadium in the Bay Area. In 2023, the team announced it would build a new ballpark in the Las Vegas Valley. On June 15 of that year, Nevada governor Joe Lombardo signed an MLB stadium funding bill worth $380 million, known as SB1. In August, the team sent MLB its formal application to move, which received unanimous approval at the November owners meeting in Arlington, Texas.
The Athletics' lease with the Oakland Coliseum expired at the end of the 2024 season. During the 2025 season, and again in 2026, they played at Sutter Health Park in West Sacramento, California. The move to Las Vegas would mark the third intercity move for the franchise, which played in Philadelphia and Kansas City before their 1968 move to Oakland. The team will be the first American League team to move since 1972, when the Washington Senators moved from Washington, D.C., to the Dallas–Fort Worth suburban city of Arlington, becoming the Texas Rangers; and the first MLB team since 2005, when the Montreal Expos left Montreal for Washington, D.C., to become the Washington Nationals. The proposed move has drawn severe community criticism at Athletics owner John Fisher.
Background
The Oakland Athletics were founded as a charter member of the American League (AL) in 1901 as the Philadelphia Athletics and shared the same city with the Philadelphia Phillies of the National League (NL). Between 1901 and 1954, the Athletics played their home games at Columbia Park and Shibe Park in Philadelphia under the ownership of Connie Mack. In 1955, Mack sold the Athletics to Chicago businessman Arnold Johnson, who moved the team to Kansas City, Missouri, to become the Kansas City Athletics and play at Municipal Stadium. After Johnson died from cerebral hemorrhage while watching the Athletics' spring training in Florida, the team was sold to another Chicago businessman, Charles O. Finley.
Finley sought to move the team out of Kansas City as early as 1961, when he courted Dallas-Fort Worth. Four years later, he signed an agreement to move the team to Louisville, proposing to rename it the "Kentucky Athletics," but the American League blocked the move. Finley also considered moves to Atlanta, Milwaukee (home of the Atlanta Braves from 1953 to 1965), New Orleans, San Diego, and Seattle. In 1968, Finley chose to move the Athletics to Oakland and share the newly built Oakland Coliseum with the American Football League (AFL)'s Oakland Raiders.
The Athletics became Oakland's third professional sports team, after the Raiders and the Oakland Seals of the National Hockey League (NHL), who had begun play a few months earlier as part of the 1967 NHL expansion. Oakland would become a four-sport city in 1971, when the San Francisco Warriors of the National Basketball Association (NBA) moved across the San Francisco Bay from San Francisco to Oakland and renamed themselves as the Golden State Warriors. It lost this status after five years, when the Seals (by then renamed the California Golden Seals) moved to Cleveland, Ohio, and became the Cleveland Barons that eventually folded in 1978.
The Athletics' streak of success in the city in the early 1970s, known as the "Swingin' A's" era, saw the team win three straight World Series titles in 1972, 1973, and 1974. By the end of the decade, the team was in a full-fledged rebuild as Finley had considerably reduced investments into the team and many star players left to other teams via trades and the new free agency process. To save money, Finley severed the team's local television and radio broadcasting contracts, making it more difficult for fans to follow the team. Attendance plummeted at the Oakland Coliseum, reaching a low point on April 17, 1979, when only 653 fans attended a game against the Seattle Mariners.
Finley, by this point, had begun to explore selling the Athletics to another buyer who would move the team from Oakland, with Denver and the aforementioned New Orleans as options. Louisiana Superdome officials pursued negotiations with Athletics officials during the 1978–79 baseball offseason about moving the Athletics to their facility, but Finley despite great efforts failed to terminate the team's long term lease at the Coliseum and the A's remained in Oakland, effectively foiling the plot to move the team to Louisiana. In 1980, Finley agreed to sell the team to a Denver interest in industrialist Marvin Davis, but when the Raiders announced their move to Los Angeles shortly after that same year, the city of Oakland and Alameda County refused to allow the Athletics to break their lease at the Coliseum. Finley was forced to sell the team in August 1980 to Levi Strauss & Co. CEO Walter A. Haas Jr., who promised to keep the team in Oakland.
Haas dramatically increased spending on the Athletics, which made three consecutive trips to the World Series and the title in 1989 over the cross-bay San Francisco Giants in the notorious 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake-interrupted series. When the Raiders returned to Oakland in 1995, the Coliseum was renovated to increase its capacity for football with a structure known as Mount Davis, which made the facility less than ideal for baseball as the large section of seats above forced them to add tarpaulin and obscured the picturesque view of the hills of Oakland. After Haas’ unexpected death in 1995, the team was sold to Stephen Schott and Ken Hofmann. In 1999, Schott and Hoffman put the team up for sale and had an agreement to sell the team to an ownership group led by the Save Mart Supermarkets CEO Robert Piccinini and sports executive Andy Dolich, who planned to build a new, more modern ballpark in Oakland. MLB commissioner Bud Selig thwarted the deal by ordering the owners to table the vote.
In 2001, the Athletics began looking at Oakland sites for a new ballpark, starting in Uptown and the Estuary, but neither those nor another at 66th Avenue gained traction. In 2005, the Athletics were sold to Lew Wolff and John Fisher in what turned out to be a controversial move. Joe Lacob, who would become the owner of the Warriors in 2010, later revealed that he had an agreement with Schott and Hoffman to purchase the team, but Selig had blocked that sale so the team could be sold to Wolff, a college fraternity brother. After the sale, a plan for a ballpark in Fremont known as Cisco Field to replace the aging and outdated Coliseum was proposed and failed. Wolff and Fisher turned their attention to a possible move to San Jose with the same proposal, which was blocked by the Giants owners who had territorial rights to the city. Around this time, the Raiders announced their impending move to Las Vegas and the Warriors moved across the Bay again to the Chase Center in San Francisco, leaving the Athletics as Oakland's only major professional team. The Athletics renewed their attempts to get a new stadium solely in Oakland, with the Coliseum, Peralta's Laney College and Howard Terminal considered, but the lack of progress derailed these proposals. It was this lack of progress that led the franchise to pursue Las Vegas as their new home.
Planning the move Early stages and negotiations
On May 11, 2021, MLB permitted the Athletics to explore moving if the team failed to get a replacement stadium from the city of Oakland by 2024. Among the cities and regions under consideration by the team was the Las Vegas area, the home of the National Hockey League (NHL)'s Vegas Golden Knights and National Football League (NFL)'s Las Vegas Raiders. The A's organized meetings with local government officials and toured potential sites led by Fisher. After a presentation at a June MLB owners meeting in New York City, team president Dave Kaval said that the A's were considering ballpark sites in the Resort Corridor, the Cashman Field site, and the Valley cities of Henderson or Summerlin, Nevada. Kaval also said that the team was still continuing to explore "parallel paths" in Oakland and elsewhere.
In September 2021, Kaval said that the Athletics would finalize the list of possible ballpark sites in Las Vegas by November. In November, the A's launched a survey for fans of the Las Vegas Aviators, the team's Triple-A affiliate, to determine interest for an MLB team in Las Vegas and a new ballpark. The survey's results, released a month later, indicated that most Aviators fans and Las Vegas residents were interested in having an MLB team in the city. That same month, the A's made an offer for an undisclosed plot of land in the Valley as the site for a $1 billion ballpark. The Howard Hughes Corp, the owners of the Aviators, offered free land for the A's to build a new ballpark. Previously, team representatives had met with the Hughes Corp. in Summerlin.
In April 2022, the A's narrowed the list to two sites in the Las Vegas Strip: the Tropicana Las Vegas resort and the Las Vegas Festival Grounds. Around the same time, the Tropicana's non-land assets were sold to Bally's Corporation and approved by Nevada state regulators later that year. Before the Bally's acquisition, in December 2021, the A's had submitted a bid to acquire the Tropicana site and build a ballpark. MLB, in reaction to the A's interest in Nevada, decided that no moving fee would be charged to the A's if they moved to Las Vegas. In August, A's officials held two meetings with casino owner and financier Paul Ruffin to talk about ballpark on the Festival Grounds.
In October 2022, Oakland missed a deadline to reach an agreement on a ballpark in the Howard Terminal, with negotiations pushed back a year. Kaval said that the delay in negotiations would "all but doom our efforts" to keep the team in Oakland. On October 29, Commissioner of Baseball Rob Manfred said that he was "not positive" the A's could remain in Oakland and that the team had made progress in exploring a possible move to Las Vegas.
In November 2022, a source familiar with the Athletics' negotiations with Las Vegas said that even if the team were to move to the city, the Triple-A Aviators would stay put and temporarily share Las Vegas Ballpark with their MLB affiliate while a new ballpark was under construction. On November 3, Bally's CEO Lee Fenton said that the Tropicana site was "very much in the cards" as a ballpark site and revealed that Bally's had held talks with the team. On November 7, then-Nevada Governor Steve Sisolak and other officials said that the state would not use a hotel room tax to fund a Las Vegas ballpark for the A's as they did with Allegiant Stadium for the Raiders; he did not rule out other ways of publicly financing the ballpark, such as infrastructure improvements or tax-increment financing.