Cavalcade of Horseshit Marks A’s Latest Effort to Bamboozle Investors

By Scott Roeben, on March 14 2025
7 min read 14 comments
Las Vegas Las Vegas WTF

The A’s, along with the team’s partners in crime the LVCVA and Las Vegas Review-Journal, are at it again.

The team and its enablers (looking at you, local media) are doubling down on their thirsty attempts to lure investors for an MLB ballpark on the Tropicana site.

Let’s take a look at the flurry of flatulence perpetuated upon the gullible who actually seem to believe PR nonsense is the same as progress.

Fun fact: The A’s organization is the primary producer of methane in the Northern Hemisphere.

First up, new renderings! Renderings are the new paying for and building things, everyone knows that.

Here’s a look at the latest in a never-ending supply of A’s ballpark renderings.

Shout-out to the A’s for keeping those talented kids on Fiverr busy.

Sexy!

Here’s a look at the inside of the alleged ballpark.

Drop and drag this into the same file as All Net Arena, Alon, Dream, Echelon Place, King David Hotel, LVXP, Atari Hotel, Majestic, Skyvue, Kind Heaven, the Las Vegas Spaceport and Brightline’s high-speed train, not happeningwise.

It didn’t take long for baseball experts (we are not one of those, we know Vegas, not sportsball) to realize the roof of the imaginary ballpark (make no mistake, it’s imaginary) is white. Which would make baseballs disappear. Which sounds like more fun that it is.

Anyway, renderings have no bearing on anything, so there’s no point quibbling over details. It’s like debating how many scales the Loch Ness monster has, except the Loch Ness monster might actually exist.

Here’s our rendering of the A’s ballpark with just as much chance of happening in Las Vegas under the current team ownership as the one’s the A’s are foisting on the public.

The chupacabra ballpark renderings were mortifying.

What other silliness has emerged from the recent festival of fabrication from the A’s? Patches!

No, really.

The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) is paying $8.5 million for the A’s to wear Las Vegas patches on their uniforms. Technically, taxpayers are paying this money, as the LVCVA is funded largely by hotel room taxes.

If that seems insane, you’re right and yet that’s not all. It’s not just a patch, according to the A’s. It’s a promise! Promises are the new paying for things, too!

We are not making this up, despite the fact this seems like it might actually have been an article in The Onion at some point.

The A’s are notoriously great at keeping promises like the one where they were in a binding agreement with Station Casinos to build a ballpark on the former Wild Wild West site until somebody at Culinary nixed that idea by calling a politician who apparently wanted to keep their job.

Ultimately, this sponsorship deal is a way for the LVCVA to give more tax dollars to the A’s without just slipping it to them in an unmarked envelope in a shadowy parking garage somewhere.

Here’s the patch the team should be wearing.

We did a whole thing about this and our readers were the recipient of Wynn-quality satire at Casino Royale prices.

First, the A’s aren’t calling themselves the Sacramento A’s, we just call them that to annoy the LVCVA.

Second, in case you missed it, the A’s are more than $1 billion short of the funding needed to build a ballpark in Las Vegas. The team’s owner has said he’s good for it, but it’s hooey, just another bluff in this jamboree of jibber-jabber.

Here’s a refresher on all the things that aren’t happening at the Tropicana site.

But wait, the A’s didn’t stop there trying to convince investors this whole debacle isn’t a debacle! It can’t be a debacle because the Las Vegas Review-Journal publishes stories on an almost daily basis stating how much of a 100% done deal it all is, so it must be real.

That said, one can never have too many imaginary patches for an imaginary ballpark.

It would be funnier if it weren’t so true.

The A’s also announced it has hired a new president, Marc Badain. Badain’s being brought aboard has assuaged many skeptics, but we are not they. Badain isn’t forking over a billion bucks to help build the ballpark. Schmoozing and managing can only take a project so far. At some point, the rubber has to hit the road.

The funniest part of the Badain hiring was the realization he trash-talked the A’s when he was with the Raiders (he was part of their move to Las Vegas from wherever they were before they were interesting, and they’re not even all that interesting now).

In a story in Sports Illustrated, Badain made this incredible statement about the A’s: “You compete on the field, but you expect a level of honesty and professionalism that just didn’t exist.”

The quote is so amazing, we made it into a graphic for posterity.

There are no take-backs in the show.

This is what we’ve been shouting in a wind tunnel all along. The A’s organization is not populated by serious people. Badain agreed until he got on the payroll.

The blizzard of blarney continues.

There was also a season ticket priority sign-up drive. All half dozen of the A’s die-hard fans (they’ve been through a lot) have the opportunity to donate $19.01 (a nod to the A’s founding year of 1901) to the team to be on the “priority interest list” for season tickets should the A’s come to Las Vegas.

That’s right, they A’s are putting out what amounts to a tip jar. Did we mention the deposits are non-refundable?

The Ponzi scheme was trumpeted by local media, of course, and the A’s reported 67% of fans signing up are from Clark County! Very exciting news, except for the fact they didn’t provide the total number of people who signed up (can’t imagine why that would be). That context sort of matters because 67% of 15 people isn’t really a great sign the team will be welcomed with open arms.

Remember, Nevadans are donating $350 million in public support to this dumpster fire.

In addition to all this impotent misdirection by the A’s, the L.A. Times says the LVCVA is vetting parties who have presumably expressed interest in investing in the A’s. They’ve been looking for two years, but nothing. No sponsorship deals, no investors, not even a remote chance of the team’s development partner Bally’s Corp. building a resort on the Trop site. Now, there’s vetting. Vetting is the new investing and paying for things! Sensing a pattern here?

The crazy part? Even if the A’s found a sucker to donate $500 million for a minority stake in the team, the budget shortfall would still be in the range of a billion dollars: $300 million construction loan from U.S. Bank, $350 million from Nevada taxpayers, $500 million from an imaginary masochistic investor, that’s $1.1 billion. The ballpark is likely to cost more than $2 billion. Canadian and Mexican tariff talk isn’t helping and the budget continues to be a moving target. The Sphere cost twice as much as original budget estimates claimed it would.

Moving on, there was much ado made about a Stadium Authority meeting where parking spaces at the imaginary A’s ballpark were discussed. The A’s shared there will be 2,500 spaces, for a venue that’s supposed to hold 33,000 people (if you believe the fantastical projections of the LVCVA’s mouthpiece Jeremy Aguero of Applied Analysis). How did the Stadium Authority express it’s concerns? With smiles and thumbs up, of course! The power of watch-dogging via the timeless tradition of rubber-stamping. According to Badain, Allegiant is “overparked.” It’s great to see Badain adjusting to the alternate reality of the A’s so seamlessly.

Another much-ballyhooed aspect of the Stadium Authority meeting? The A’s filed for a commercial grading permit! If that’s not proof positive this project is absolutely, 100% moving ahead, what is? Here’s what the RJ said, “Last week, the A’s filed for a commercial grading permit, which would let the team to start work on the $1.75 billion, 33,000-fan capacity stadium. The process would include site excavation, some underground utility work and initial foundation work ahead of the team entering into a development agreement with the county.”

A grading permit is evidence of virtually nothing. The All Net site did grading work for 10 years before the project was euthanized. It was all for show to get, well, more permits.

All Net Arena construction
So much grading and permits!

Here’s a photo of the Riviera site which filed for permits galore to flatten out the dirt so it could be used as a parking lot for the past eight years.

Riviera parking lot
They graded the hell out of this vacant lot.

What we’re seeing is cheerleading and grasping at straws. Why would our “paper of record” churn out stories that sound like they’ve been written by the A’s and LVCVA? The answer is access. If the Review-Journal questions any of the mumbo jumbo being peddled by the A’s, their calls don’t get returned. Access is conditional and perceived as invaluable. So, the RJ acts as the publicity machine and the A’s and LVCVA pass along the stories to Galatioto Sports Partners, the company tasked with finding investors for the A’s, and Galatioto Sports Partners waves the stories in front of the faces of eccentric wealthy people, assuring them if they invest John Fisher will not be the same person he’s always been and it’ll be a baseball lovefest the likes of which have never been seen.

The bottom line? It’s all smoke and mirrors, and it’s not even very good smoke and mirrors.

It’s all a continued yanking of the collective chain of Las Vegas residents, sports fans, the media and elected officials, many of whom are so mesmerized by professional sports the critical thinking parts of their brains just cease to function.

John Fisher isn’t contributing a billion dollars to building a ballpark in Las Vegas.

It’s a parade of piffle, a festival of fabrication, a circus of claptrap and a carnival of codswallop, any of which would make a decent name for a high school band, obviously.

The A’s saga is the most confounding “drinking the Kool-Aid” moment in the history of a town that’s guzzled plenty.

Ignore all the stupidity: Watch the money. Gap stock, where the bulk of John Fisher’s wealth resides, has tanked. Fisher’s stock is estimated to be worth about $697 million, so he couldn’t contribute $1 billion to a ballpark even if he wanted to.

He doesn’t want to, and he’s not going to.

If the team sells, anything is possible, the A’s might even move to Las Vegas.

Is it possible the A’s go back to taxpayers to pick up the slack? Anything is possible, but there was a lot of pushback against the $350 million, so that possibility should be a non-starter.

Oh, and before you say, “But the A’s are spending a lot more on players! That’s happening because they’re moving to Las Vegas!” Oy.

This shitstorm in a onesie continues to unfold.

Yes, we ran out of alliterative metaphors.

We’ll come up with more because there’s a lot more WTF to come.

In the meantime, keep your hip boots handy, the dung is being shoveled at a rate even we have trouble keeping up with and we claim to know everything.