The Complete Story of the A's Relocation: From Oakland to Las Vegas
The failed ballpark deals, John Fisher's decision, the MLB vote, and what comes next. Everything that happened, in order.
The story of how the Oakland Athletics left their city does not have a single villain or a clean narrative arc. It is instead a twenty-year accumulation of failed negotiations, bad faith, misread political signals, and a fundamental mismatch between what a franchise needed and what a city could reasonably provide. By the time the MLB owners voted 27-2 on November 16, 2023 to approve the team's relocation to Las Vegas, the outcome felt both shocking and entirely predictable.
To understand how it ended, you have to go back to the beginning.
The Coliseum Problem
The Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum opened in 1966, and by the mid-1990s it was already aging out of relevance. When the Raiders returned from Los Angeles in 1995, the stadium was reconfigured to accommodate football, adding the infamous Mount Davis section that blocked the previous views of the Oakland hills and created the largest foul-territory outfield in baseball. It was universally described as ugly. It was functionally disastrous. The A's attendance, which had been one of baseball's best in the early 1990s, began a long decline.
What followed was two decades of proposals, task forces, stadium committees, and announced plans that never became buildings. A waterfront park at Howard Terminal, first seriously proposed in the early 2000s, kept resurfacing. The site sits on the Oakland estuary along the Port of Oakland and would have required resolving overlapping jurisdictional issues between the city, the port authority, and numerous freight and shipping stakeholders. Every few years, it became the center of a new stadium conversation. Every time, the conversation eventually collapsed.
The A's under Lew Wolff, who purchased the team with John Fisher in 2005, spent years pursuing a stadium in Fremont, then San Jose, before returning to Oakland. The San Jose pursuit became particularly bitter. Wolff spent years trying to get MLB to waive the territorial rights the San Francisco Giants held over Santa Clara County. The Giants refused. Commissioner Bud Selig appointed a committee to study the question in 2009. The committee sat on the question for four years without issuing a recommendation. When Rob Manfred succeeded Selig as commissioner in 2015, he essentially shelved the San Jose question and redirected the A's toward Oakland.
Howard Terminal and the Final Chapter
The Howard Terminal project became the focal point of the final years of Oakland baseball. The A's under new president Dave Kaval announced an ambitious ballpark village concept: a privately financed stadium at the Port of Oakland site, surrounded by 3,000 units of housing, 1.5 million square feet of commercial space, a hotel, and public amenities. The project's estimated price tag reached $12 billion in total development value.
For several years, the project moved through the Oakland political process. In 2021, the Oakland City Council voted to certify the project's environmental impact report, a significant milestone. The A's and city negotiators worked toward a term sheet.
Then things fell apart.
The sticking point was infrastructure. The Howard Terminal site requires tens of millions of dollars in site preparation, transportation improvements, and utility work. The A's wanted the city and Alameda County to fund that infrastructure. The city, facing a severe budget crisis that would eventually lead to significant layoffs of police and fire personnel, struggled to identify the funding. Negotiations dragged through 2022 and into 2023.
In April 2023, the A's announced they had signed a binding agreement to purchase land in Las Vegas near the Strip for a new ballpark. The Howard Terminal process was not formally abandoned -- the A's continued to say they preferred Oakland -- but the momentum had shifted decisively. By July 2023, when Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo signed the stadium funding bill that included $380 million in public financing, the Oakland chapter was effectively over.
The city of Oakland made a last-ditch counter-proposal in September 2023. It offered the A's a deal that included $450 million in infrastructure funding, to be drawn from a financing mechanism tied to the development itself. The A's rejected it. On September 28, 2023, Fisher announced the team would be leaving Oakland.
The MLB Vote
The formal relocation vote happened November 16, 2023, at MLB's owners meetings in Arlington, Texas. The vote was 27-2 in favor of allowing the move. The two dissenting votes were not publicly identified; speculation centered on Oakland-affiliated owners or those with concerns about the Las Vegas market.
The vote was not a surprise. MLB had been signaling its support for the Las Vegas move throughout 2023, and Manfred had praised the Nevada stadium deal publicly. The commissioner's office had grown frustrated with the Oakland situation over many years and saw Las Vegas as a growth market with demographics that skewed younger and more diverse than many existing MLB cities.
What the vote meant practically was that the A's would begin a transitional period in Sacramento while the Las Vegas ballpark was built, with a target opening of 2028.
The Sacramento Bridge
The decision to play in Sacramento during the construction period was unusual by any measure. Sutter Health Park is a Triple-A facility, home to the Sacramento River Cats, the A's top affiliate. Its capacity is approximately 14,000. The A's became the first MLB team to play in a stadium of that size since the earliest decades of the sport.
The 2025 and 2026 seasons in Sacramento have been marked by genuine oddity. Big-league players taking the field in a minor-league park. Visiting teams adjusting to cramped clubhouses and travel logistics designed for minor-league road trips. Attendance that has been solid by Triple-A standards but invisible by MLB standards.
The A's have maintained that the Sacramento arrangement is temporary and that Las Vegas is the destination. They have played down the weirdness of the situation with varying degrees of success.
Las Vegas and What Comes Next
The new ballpark will be located at Tropicana Avenue and Dean Martin Drive, on land that was once occupied by the Tropicana Hotel. The stadium design, developed by Gensler, calls for a retractable roof -- essential given Las Vegas summer temperatures that regularly exceed 110 degrees -- and a capacity of approximately 33,000. The total project cost is estimated at $1.5 billion.
The public financing piece, $380 million from the Las Vegas Stadium Authority funded by hotel room tax revenue, was structured similarly to the funding mechanism used for Allegiant Stadium, the Raiders' facility. The A's are responsible for the remaining construction costs and have secured private financing commitments.
MLB has assigned the team the name "Athletics" in Las Vegas, dropping any Oakland reference. The uniform colors remain green and gold. The team applied for a trademark on "Las Vegas Athletics" and encountered complications with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, a dispute that remains unresolved as of early 2026.
The A's are scheduled to open in Las Vegas with the 2028 season. Between now and then, they are playing out their Sacramento residency while finalizing stadium construction and building a fan base in a city that has never had major league baseball. Whether that project succeeds depends on factors that no one -- not the team, not the league, not Las Vegas itself -- fully understands yet.
What is certain is that Oakland is gone. The last game at the Coliseum was played September 26, 2024, a 3-2 loss to the Texas Rangers. The crowd was announced at 46,889, which was almost certainly not accurate but which captured something true about what that night meant to the people who were there.
They stayed until long after the game ended. Nobody wanted to be the first to leave.
Support LV Athletics Nation by shopping through our affiliate links. Every purchase helps fund independent coverage of the A's relocation story.
Affiliate links. We may earn a commission at no additional cost to you.