Major league baseball is heading to Las Vegas, and it’s not a rumor anymore. It’s real, it’s funded, and it’s already under construction right on the Strip. For a franchise with over a century of history, first in Philadelphia, then Kansas City, and for decades in Oakland, this is nothing short of a seismic shift in American sports geography.
The story of how we got here, and where it’s all going, is messier, more dramatic, and honestly more interesting than most fans realize. From tearful goodbyes at the Coliseum to a green concrete cylinder marking home plate in the Nevada desert, every chapter of this saga has something worth knowing. Let’s dive in.
Goodbye, Oakland: The End of 57 Years at the Coliseum
There’s something genuinely heartbreaking about the end of the Oakland chapter. The A’s left Oakland after playing there for 57 years. The move to a minor league ballpark is a vast difference for the A’s, who previously called the Oakland Coliseum home for all that time.
The last time we saw the A’s play a game in Oakland, it was September 26, and their manager Mark Kotsay emotionally said goodbye to heartbroken fans at the Coliseum. It was one of those rare sports moments that cuts right through the business and gets to the human side of things. The move left Oakland with no major league sports teams, as the NBA’s Golden State Warriors had already returned to San Francisco. A major American city, suddenly without a single major league franchise. That’s worth sitting with for a moment.
Sacramento Steps Up: A Minor League Ballpark Gets a Major League Tenant
Between the farewell to Oakland and the grand opening in Las Vegas, the A’s needed somewhere to play. On April 4, 2024, the Athletics reached an agreement with the San Francisco Giants and their Triple-A affiliate, the Sacramento River Cats, to play at Sutter Health Park in West Sacramento, beginning in 2025.
The Sacramento Kings announced that Sutter Health Park would host the Athletics for three MLB seasons, starting in 2025 with an option for a fourth year, ahead of the team’s planned move to Las Vegas. Here’s the thing: Sutter Health Park was built for minor league baseball. Sutter Health Park has roughly a quarter of the capacity of the A’s former home at the Oakland Coliseum. The West Sacramento ballpark has a capacity of 14,014, with 10,632 bowl seats and space for about 2,566 on the Toyota Home Run Hill. Think about that. A major league team crammed into a 14,000-seat facility for three full seasons. That’s quite a detour.
Making It Work: Upgrades at Sutter Health Park
The A’s didn’t just show up and hope for the best in Sacramento. They invested real money to bring the facility up to major league standards. Planned upgrades to the park included new turf, a new home clubhouse, upgrades to the scoreboard, and upgrades to the visiting clubhouse. These upgrades were paid for by the Oakland A’s.
The two-story facility beyond the left field wall features all the amenities of a typical major league clubhouse, including a dressing room, training facility, full gym, manager and coaches’ offices, kitchen, dining room, and dual batting cages. Sutter Health Park also replaced their previous scoreboard with a state-of-the-art video experience featuring a 75-foot by 32-foot main display, located in right-center field, with nearly twice the resolution and improved visibility for fans throughout the ballpark. It’s still a minor league setting, but they clearly tried hard to make it feel like something bigger.
A Taste of Things to Come: The A’s Play Las Vegas in 2026
Even before the new stadium opens, Las Vegas is already getting real, regular-season baseball. The Athletics will play six games in Las Vegas in June 2026, setting up the relocating baseball team’s first regular-season home games in Southern Nevada two years ahead of the expected opening of the team’s ballpark on the Strip.
The A’s will settle into Las Vegas Ballpark for back-to-back series from June 8 through June 14, pitting them against the Milwaukee Brewers and the Colorado Rockies. The schedule includes three games against the Brewers from June 8 to 10, followed by a three-game series against the Rockies from June 12 to 14. Think of it as a soft launch, a way for fans in Nevada to get their first real taste of their future team. The Athletics’ arrival will make them Las Vegas’ fourth major pro team, joining the Raiders, Golden Knights, and WNBA’s Aces.
Where the Stadium Stands: The Tropicana Site and Its Transformation
The story of the land itself is almost as dramatic as the relocation story. On April 2, 2024, the Tropicana Las Vegas closed after 67 years. Then, on October 9, 2024, the Tropicana Hotel was demolished by implosion, and site-leveling efforts began.
The New Las Vegas Stadium is the project name of an indoor ballpark under construction on the site of the former Tropicana Las Vegas on the Las Vegas Strip in Paradise, Nevada. Plans submitted to Clark County project three 495-foot hotel towers housing more than 3,000 hotel rooms on the northeast and southwest corners of the lot, beside the 290-foot-tall stadium. It’s not just a ballpark being built. It’s an entirely new entertainment district rising out of the rubble of a legendary Las Vegas landmark.
The Design: An “Armadillo” on the Strip
Let’s be real, the design of this stadium is unlike anything else in Major League Baseball. The stadium is being designed by Danish firm Bjarke Ingels Group with HNTB, Thornton Tomasetti, and Henderson Engineers. The form, nicknamed the “Armadillo,” is five overlapping arched volumes clad in square metal panels and wedge shapes meant to evoke baseball pennants.
Updated renderings showed a fixed roof inspired by baseball pennants, multi-tiered seating, the world’s largest cable-net window facing Las Vegas Boulevard, a jumbotron, and a three-acre plaza. The ballpark was announced to be climate-controlled and contain a retractable roof to allow for an open-air atmosphere and protect spectators from the heat. That last part matters enormously. Anyone who’s spent a July afternoon in Las Vegas knows exactly why you can’t play outdoor baseball there without serious climate engineering.
Construction Progress: What’s Actually Happening on the Ground
This is where skeptics and believers part ways. For years, people wondered if any of this was actually real. Well, the cranes and concrete don’t lie. Construction on the ballpark began in May 2025 with foundation work. A groundbreaking ceremony was held on June 23. Work done by late September included pouring concrete for the foundation and elevator cores, erecting rebar cages and columns, and groundwork.
Athletics president Marc Badain led the first media tour of the team’s under-construction Las Vegas ballpark in December 2025, giving a firsthand look at the progress. After six months of heavy construction on the site, the project was between 10 and 15 percent complete. Crews continue to build out the lower concourse of the 33,000-fan capacity stadium. Looking ahead, steel work in the bowl is slated to begin in March 2026, with the sixth of six buttresses supporting the roof scheduled for spring and roof steel installation anticipated to begin in June 2026.
The Money Question: Public Funds and the Debate Around Them
No stadium story is complete without talking about who’s actually paying for it. The stadium is projected to cost roughly two billion dollars, up from initial estimates of one and a half billion, including 380 million dollars from taxpayers.
On June 15, 2023, Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo signed an MLB stadium funding bill worth 380 million dollars, known as SB1. Not everyone was thrilled. The Nevada State Education Association opposed the ballpark-funding legislation, arguing it amounted to a giveaway while Nevada school funding fell short. Nevada has a long track record as one of the worst-performing states in the nation for education. Supporters frame the public contribution as an investment in jobs and tourism; critics point to the perennial debate over public subsidies for private stadiums and call for accountability on projected returns. It’s a familiar argument in American sports, and it’s not going away anytime soon.
What It All Means for Las Vegas: A Sports City Leveling Up
Vegas has been building something remarkable over the past decade, and the A’s are the latest piece of that puzzle. Las Vegas is currently undergoing an economic renewal based on the continuing growth of its sports industry. The city is working to become an authentic global sports destination that can transform the nature of tourism and community development.
According to a white paper from UNLV, 41 sponsored sporting events from July 2021 through June 2022 attracted 1.8 million attendees, representing more than five percent of all visitors to Las Vegas during that timeframe. Each attendee spent an average of almost eleven hundred dollars in Las Vegas. Still, it’s hard to say for sure how a baseball team fits into this equation long-term. One reason there’s been heightened skepticism surrounding the move is the open emphasis on tourism as an economic driver for the team. In decades of modern sports business research, the lesson has been that a team should never rely on tourism, meaning visitors arriving from out of market. The Raiders proved that model comes with real risks. The question is whether baseball can prove different.
Conclusion: A Franchise Reborn, a City Ready
What we’re witnessing with the Oakland Athletics is one of the most consequential franchise relocations in modern sports history. A beloved team torn from its roots, playing in a minor league ballpark as a halfway house, while a gleaming two-billion-dollar stadium rises from the ashes of a demolished Las Vegas casino. It sounds like fiction, but every brick being laid on the Strip says otherwise.
The new Las Vegas stadium is to be the home venue of the Las Vegas Athletics of Major League Baseball upon their move to the city in 2028. The Athletics franchise has not played in a new stadium of their own without another sports team tenant since the 1909 completion of Shibe Park in Philadelphia. That’s over a century in the making. Whether you’re an Oakland fan mourning what’s been lost, a Las Vegas local curious about your new team, or just a baseball purist trying to make sense of it all, one thing is certain. When the A’s finally take the field in their Strip ballpark in 2028, it will be one of the most watched moments in the sport’s recent history.
What do you think, will Las Vegas embrace baseball the way it embraced hockey and football? Tell us in the comments.
