Is a Las Vegas move really what Major League Baseball should want for the Oakland A's? (2024)

Oakland A’s ownership seems to prefer Las Vegas to Oakland, or at least Vegas’ money for building a new stadium — that much is clear through the haze of news coming out of the Nevada city. In separate statements, Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred seems to suggest that baseball is happy with the team moving to Las Vegas, if still sorry for the fans in Oakland the team would leave behind.

But is Las Vegas really the best new market for baseball? Would this move be good for business for the league and the team? That is much less clear.

During a look at expansion candidates, The Athletic found Vegas had some real shortcomings when compared to other cities that had risen to the top of the list.

For one, the city would immediately become the smallest television market in baseball as judged by the Nielsen DMA ranking. It would also be the smallest television market among the various cities put forth for expansion:

Moving down the list from the 10th market to the 40th seems like a bad move, especially when so many baseball teams get the largest part of their local revenue from their contract with the local TV broadcaster. Then again, the A’s existing television deal is more 20th-best than 10th-best, so the Giants sharing the market has something to do with this. More on that later.

Will the A’s keep any of the Oakland television market when they move to Vegas? Could their television revenue overperform their new market as much as they underperformed their old one? Does the history of the NFL’s Raiders, who also recently moved from Oakland to Las Vegas, tell us anything about this?

Every Raiders game was televised in the Bay Area the year after they left, but that didn’t benefit the Raiders directly because of how NFL television deals work, and the number of their games shown in the Bay Area has decreased each year since they moved to Las Vegas in 2020. Given that understanding, as well as baseball’s relative television value compared to the typical football game, there’s virtually no chance A’s games would continue to air locally on NBC Sports California if they move to Las Vegas. It’s also unlikely any other existing regional network would pick up the games, given the current cord-cutting environment. The NHL’s Vegas Golden Knights recently left cable behind and are broadcasting for free on local television, which may be an ominous sign for the A’s pending the unknown details of their arrangement.

In other words, if the A’s intend to succeed financially in Las Vegas, it will largely depend on how they draw along with revenue streams like advertising and other partnerships. They won’t be able to count on Oakland fans for any of this, by the way. They aren’t attending games at the Coliseum, to the point now where it’s essentially a John Fisher-fueled boycott.

The demographics in Vegas are also not great for a league trying to get younger and capture growing markets. Vegas, one of the smallest cities in the expansion candidate market, was one of the 20 fastest-growing cities last year, but it is interesting to see Charlotte, Orlando, and Raleigh-Durham all ranked higher than the city in terms of year-over-year growth. And it’s an old city, comparatively.

There’s only one city bigger than Vegas that’s older, on average. Perhaps the growth will push the age down, but that is not yet reflected in the median age in the market over the last few years. In terms of density and per-capita income, Vegas didn’t seem as interesting a location for expansion as the Raleigh-Durham and Charlotte areas when we last checked. (Yellow is higher income, further off the map is more density.)

Local industry size in Las Vegas was smaller than any other expansion candidate when we last checked, and perhaps that’s why the Golden Knights have announced a plan to try to attract national advertisers, suggesting some trouble attracting the same local sponsors bigger markets enjoy. But of course the industry is almost all tourism, and that’s a special type of industry that brings people into the city, and does so more successfully than in any other city in America. That’s Vegas’s ace in the hole, as they like to say: Casinos will buy tickets, and theoretically tourists will put butts in the seats in Las Vegas, more than they did in Oakland.

So, what has that meant for attendance figures for the other teams that jumped to Las Vegas in recent times?

• The Golden Knights, founded in 2017, were 12th out of 32 in the NHL this past regular season
• The Aces, who moved to Las Vegas in 2018, were 7th out of 12 in the WNBA last season
• The Raiders, who moved to Las Vegas in 2020, were 30th out of 32 in the NFL last season

The Golden Knights are Vegas’ team from inception, have been embraced by the city, and hit the ground running due to the way the NHL handles expansion, with a Stanley Cup Final appearance in their first season. Their TV ratings have sunk about 25 percent from where they were a few years ago.

The Aces have had four great seasons out of five since they moved to Las Vegas. The Raiders have been bad, and aren’t particularly drawing well when compared to NFL teams — though it’s important to note they did better by percentage of capacity, as they had a smaller stadium than many of their peers — and their TV ratings have been less than impressive during their entire Vegas tenure. Since team quality is a large driver of attendance, even this look at what has actually happened doesn’t produce a straight answer.

The A’s could be leaving a crowded big market for a crowded small market, considering the other teams already in Vegas. A family’s budget for travel and sports and entertainment is mostly a fixed thing, and so every sport is competing for that same dollar.

Attendance at Allegiant Stadium is buoyed in large part by fans of visiting teams, so some fans are definitely spending their budget on a combined sports/gambling trip to Las Vegas. The A’s would love a similar outcome in Las Vegas, of course. Money is money. But a baseball team has roughly eight or nine times more games than an NFL team, and the A’s would be playing in an enclosed stadium during oppressively hot summers. Counting on tourists to come to Las Vegas to watch their favorite team play in a dome, when there are a wealth of beautiful ballparks throughout the country, might not be the right reasoning.

Put another way, why wouldn’t someone make a trip to outdoor parks like Wrigley Field or Fenway Park during the summer, unless they really love the gambling and entertainment options in Las Vegas? And if they really love those aspects of Las Vegas, how much time would they want to spend watching baseball?

And other sports exist in Vegas that could end up fighting for that same travel and entertainment budget. Does the history in Vegas suggest each additional sport is just cutting that same pie up into more pieces? And how does this competition square up going up against another team in the same sport in a bigger market? In other words, should the A’s (and MLB) prefer to compete with three other sports in a much smaller market? Or stay in the bigger market and compete with the Giants?

The available research doesn’t necessarily give us a concrete answer. For example, there’s evidence that the A’s and Giants can actually benefit when both teams are very competitive. When Brian Mills, Michael Mondello and Scott Tainsky looked at multiple-team markets for published research on the subject of intra-market competition in the same sport, they found that teams do compete for fans when there’s a large discrepancy in their quality.

But they also found that “when both teams are of high quality, viewership increased beyond what own-team success would predict alone for the competing team” — when both the Giants and A’s are good, they can be more successful in terms of attendance than expected. Right now, things look bad because the A’s are very bad, but in the early 2000s, the A’s and Giants were both good, and the A’s had median-level attendance in the American League.

As bad as it looks now, there were times when the A’s actually benefited from the Giants also being good in the same market. What happens in the smaller market when they are competing, at least theoretically, for travel and entertainment dollars with other sports? A Chicago sports fan planning a single trip to Las Vegas may consider going when their favorite hockey, basketball, football, or baseball team is in town.

What does the research say about that sort of competition? Mills did more work on the subject, studying the interaction between the Buffalo and Toronto markets with regard to within-sport and sport-to-sport competition. Within the same sport, he found the Buffalo Sabres and the Toronto Maple Leafs competed for fans with respect to their quality and their ticket prices. It makes sense that the A’s and Giants are competitors on some level. But he also found the Buffalo Bills competed for fans with the Toronto Maple Leafs and Toronto Raptors, and in that competition, the quality didn’t matter — only price.

“They marketed the team as ‘Rooted in Oakland,’ that’s been their mantra through the whole thing,” Raiders owner Mark Davis said recently. “Well all they did was (expletive) the Bay Area. For them to leave Oakland without anything is pretty (screwed) up, because that site that the stadium was on was a good site.”

Those sentiments make sense coming from the owner of the Raiders. If competing on quality has been shown not to matter between sports, the A’s coming to town will just put downward pressure on ticket prices for all of the competing sports. But that downward pressure seems to also be evidence that the A’s will be competing with other sports for entertainment dollars, and doing so in a much smaller market, albeit propped up by tourist traffic.

When asked to sum up what he thought might be the interaction between the Golden Knights, Raiders and A’s in Las Vegas versus their current situation, Mills wasn’t completely sure.

“The A’s are at worst looking at competing with an NHL and NFL team currently in Vegas,” he said. “Both are off-season from them. This is fewer competitors than in the Bay Area/Sacramento (I’m combining these a bit), albeit with a smaller population.”

“In Oakland, up until the recent move of the Raiders, they were already competing with two NFL teams, another MLB team (which competes in a simultaneous season), arguably two NBA teams (Golden State and Sacramento), an NHL team in San Jose. Even with the Raiders’ move, all those other teams are still around.”

“The empirical work suggests that teams compete with one another more directly for fans *within* their leagues than they do for fans with other sports leagues,” he said. “Especially given the lack of season overlap between MLB and NHL/NFL. But I would still expect there to be *some level* of competition/interaction between these teams to attract fans in Vegas.”

There’s one more study that contains language that may sum up both the positives and the negatives of a possible move to Las Vegas for the A’s. When looking at location and attendance in MLB, a study found “the closer two teams are, the lower attendance is at each team relative to two teams that are farther apart,” which is a point in favor of moving. The last line of their abstract, though? “Fan loyalty is a significant contributor to the estimation of gate attendance.”

Is the reality that fan loyalty is already destroyed in Oakland, making a move more palatable? That certainly seems possible, as black armbands, sell-the-team chants, signs targeting ownership, and attendance figures so low they haven’t been seen since the late ’70s are the norm at the ballpark this season.

Loyalty aside, is less competition in a smaller market more enticing for a team than more competition in a much bigger market? What about leaving behind the synergy the Giants can provide when they are both good? Can the A’s improve on their existing $48 million a year in television money in a smaller market somehow? Will more tourist butts in seats make up for fewer local butts in seats if there’s more competition for those tourist butts? Is this whole thing just about how much money the taxpayers will put forward for the new stadium?

However MLB and A’s ownership navigate these findings themselves, the answers to these questions seem less clear than their obvious desire to move this baseball team to Las Vegas.

— The Athletic’s Daniel Kaplan and Bill Shea contributed to this report.

(Photo of A’s fans protesting the move: Thearon W. Henderson / Getty Images)