After months of prep work and site demolition, crews are laying the foundations of a new Vegas ballpark for the relocating Athletics, with a Las Vegas groundbreaking expected in June.
If you lived an online life and consumed all your news via Baseball Twitter, you’d conclude that the new Vegas ballpark was inexorably doomed, that John Fisher would just hand the franchise to MLB, and that MLB would move the team back to Oakland. Now, while it is true we’ve talked with some MLB types who rue the decision by Fisher to play three seasons in Sacramento, the rest of these Baseball Twitter fever dreams are highly unlikely to happen. Like it or not, in MLB Oakland is salted ground right now.
So that’s why it’s an important piece of reality to note that the foundations of the new Vegas ballpark are being laid at the old Tropicana Resort site. From the Las Vegas Review-Journal:
Crews are drilling holes that will be filled with reinforcing steel and concrete and serve as the foundation for the 33,000-fan capacity ballpark, according to Steve Hill, president and CEO of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.
“As you can see, they are in the ground,” Hill said, displaying a photo of large caisson drills on the ballpark site. “We have said for over a year, maybe two, that construction would start in April of 2025 — and thanks to the county’s work and all of your (LVCVA) staff, that construction started in April of ’25.”
Crews also are installing turnstiles along the property’s perimeter to allow workers to access the construction site. Some temporary office buildings also are on site. The Mortenson-McCarthy joint venture leading the ballpark’s construction and other contractors will operate out of those buildings.
And the promised groundbreaking for the new Vegas ballpark is still being planned for June.
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