It had just turned 8am on a crystal clear, late June Monday morning, but it was already 85F (29C). Despite the tolerable heat (for the desert), a giant air-conditioned tent had been erected on the former site of the Tropicana, the famed hotel which was demolished in a controlled implosion last October. Athletics owner John Fisher, Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred and a gaggle of politicians had gathered on the compact, nine-acre site for a ceremony more than two years in the making: the groundbreaking for the new A’s stadium on the Las Vegas Strip, coming your way in 2028.
On the surface, it was your run-of-the-mill pomp and circumstance: a series of uneven speeches mixed in with a few kids gushing over how much they can’t wait to have the former Oakland and current A’s in Las Vegas. But if you had been following the long-running A’s stadium saga, one which led them to a temporary minor-league residency in Sacramento this season, you didn’t have to look far beyond the rented heavy-duty construction props to see the farce, and you didn’t have to dig much deeper than the dignitaries shoveling into the makeshift baseball diamond to understand what this ceremony really was: the latest stop on Fisher’s neverending, would-be stadium tour.
