Rob Manfred expressed enthusiasm for the Athletics’ hopes of finally getting a stadium deal in Las Vegas, but said Oakland was not entirely out of the picture.
Major League Baseball is hoping to become the latest major sports league to enter the Las Vegas market. The Oakland Athletics announced last week that they had agreed to purchase land near the Las Vegas Strip in hopes of building a ballpark there by 2027.
It would be the fourth home for the A’s, a vagabond club that was an original American League franchise in Philadelphia in 1901 and then moved to Kansas City, Mo., in 1955 and to Oakland, Calif., in 1968.
While leagues like the N.F.L. and the N.H.L. have been met with great fanfare (and generous funding) in the Las Vegas market, baseball may have trouble drumming up enthusiasm for a project that requires hundreds of millions of dollars in public financing. The Athletics, stripped of any recognizable talent, were 4-18 entering Monday’s action and had been outscored by an M.L.B.-high 103 runs. They appear headed to a second consecutive season of 100 or more losses.
Yet to Commissioner Rob Manfred, who sat down with a group of sports editors and reporters at M.L.B.’s offices in New York on Monday to discuss league issues, including the recent success of the World Baseball Classic and the popularity of baseball’s new rules, there are plenty of reasons for Las Vegas to be excited about the team, even as the A’s struggle.
“I can tell you, and will vouch for it personally, that John Fisher wants to win,” Manfred said of the Athletics’ principal owner, who has come under fire for the extreme cost-cutting that has turned his team from a perennial postseason contender into a basement dweller.
As the team has faded on the field, with an M.L.B.-low payroll of $58.2 million this season, attendance at Oakland Coliseum, which has never been strong, bottomed out in protest: Last year, the A’s were the only team in M.L.B. to average fewer than 10,000 fans per home game, and this year’s average of 11,025 was inflated by the 26,000 fans who attended on opening day, many of them to see Shohei Ohtani, the two-way superstar of the Los Angeles Angels.
Things had gotten so bad that Rooted in Oakland, a fan group dedicated to keeping the A’s in the city, tried to organize a reverse boycott in which fans would show up en masse to a Tuesday game in June to remind M.L.B. and the franchise that they would come out in droves if the team ever decided to be competitive again. The group is now trying to organize a protest of the team for Friday, which marks the A’s first game back after a seven-game road trip.
Manfred suggested the pieces were in place for the A’s to recover as a team once their stadium issue was settled.
