The Athletics want to sell PSLs for their Las Vegas ballpark

The seemingly never-ending saga of the Oakland Athletics’ proposed move to Las Vegas took another odd turn over the weekend, as reported by Maury Brown:

There are no MLB teams currently selling personal seat licenses, which basically ask you to pay up front for the right to buy tickets. Quite a number of NFL teams do this, including the Chicago Bears. That works largely because of the smaller number of games, meaning the total number of tickets available is quite a bit smaller — for the Bears, about 600,000 tickets.

The A’s are going to need to sell a lot more tickets than that to make things financially viable in Las Vegas. The stadium rendering above looks kind of cool — here are more renderings:

Courtesy Oakland Athletics

Courtesy Oakland Athletics

The first one above is actually kind of odd. Look closely at it — it’s basically what the A’s ballpark in Oakland looks like, only with the Vegas strip skyline in the background and a weird, translucent roof. (How’s that going to keep the heat out when it’s 110+ degrees there in the summer?)

The A’s have said this will be a 30,000 seat stadium and they’ll need to sell 2.6 million tickets to break even, which means they’d have to sell out every single game to do that — I think you can imagine, especially with the state of the A’s on the field right now, that’s not going to happen. As stated by Maury Brown:

Also, here’s more dreaming of things that aren’t likely to happen:

The WBC? In Vegas? Dream on.

Here are some details of the deal that’s supposedly been made to move the A’s to Las Vegas:

That agreement includes up to $380 million in public financing, including $180 million from the state and $145 million from Clark County. Of those amounts, $90 million of the state’s contribution would be repaid via tax revenues generated on the ballpark site, while $120 million of the county’s portion would be paid by the tax district.

The deal has not yet been approved by the Nevada legislature. As usual, taxpayers are on the hook for this — and “repaid via tax revenues” is no guarantee. Beyond all this, there’s leaving a share of the No. 10 TV market for the No. 40 TV market, and no assurance of TV rights fees from a local RSN. Sure, the A’s could try streaming in Vegas, but there’s no way that generates as much revenue as TV rights fees.

Lastly:

It’s worth reading Tabitha Mueller’s entire Twitter thread. Lawmakers seem skeptical. Who knows? Maybe the A’s wind up in Nashville, or Charlotte, or Sacramento...

As always, we await developments.