Operators of the Tropicana Hotel and Casino said the Las Vegas Strip property was performing above expectations until the announcement three months ago that the site would become the future home of the Oakland Athletics.

“We ran into a headwind,” George Papanier, president of Bally’s Corp., said Thursday during the Rhode Island-based company’s second-quarter earnings conference call.

Company executives said the Tropicana’s future is in a holding pattern until Major League Baseball owners approve the team’s relocation to Las Vegas from Oakland, the team’s home for the last 55 years, for a planned $1.5 billion, 30,000-seat stadium on 9 acres of the Tropicana site.

Papanier, one of three Bally’s executives to address the A’s stadium plans on the conference call, said the timing is the largest hurdle as the company plans the future of the aging Rat Pack-era resort. Bally’s plans to demolish the Tropicana ahead of the stadium construction, but has not finalized what it will build on the site with the stadium.

“We're waiting on them to see what their actual timing is, and we'll just react to that and manage the property accordingly,” Papanier said, noting the ballpark was, “obviously very positive from a valuation perspective.”

Major League Baseball has to decide on the A’s relocation request by the end of the year and requires approval from 75 percent of the 30 team owners. A representative from MLB declined to comment on the relocation process. The A’s have said the ballpark would be ready for the start of the 2028 baseball season.

Bally’s, which has 15 casinos in 10 states, acquired the operations of the Tropicana from real estate investment trust Gaming and Leisure Properties (GLPI) last September. The casino operator pays $10.5 million in rent annually under a 50-year deal with GLPI.

Bally’s does not break out results from its individual casinos in quarterly earnings reports so Tropicana’s revenue was included in the company’s reported $333.2 million in U.S. casino revenue, an 11.1 percent increase from a year ago. Bally’s also has interactive gaming operations in the U.S. and internationally.

“[We] have already materially increased the value of [Tropicana], a testament to our management team’s creativity and ingenuity,” Bally’s CEO Robeson Reeves said in prepared remarks at the outset of the conference call.

The comments were the most extensive the company had made about the A’s stadium project since confirming on May 15 that it would contribute 9 acres of the 35-acre Tropicana site to the ballclub for the stadium development.

“The planning process is only in the beginning phase. We will share additional details as they emerge over the next 18 to 24 months,” Reeves said.

During GLPI’s quarterly earnings conference call last week, company executives said “there’s not a lot of margin for error” in the timing of the stadium project.

The A’s gained support from Nevada lawmakers in a June special session that saw legislation passed and signed by Gov. Joe Lombardo to provide the team with up to $380 million in public financing for the stadium’s construction. GLPI, the Tropicana’s landlord, has committed up to $175 million of funding for stadium project construction costs.

A’s owner John Fisher is responsible for more than $1.1 billion toward the stadium costs, but the team has not said where those funds will originate.

Questions were not asked during the conference call about the size of the potential stadium land and if the A’s were seeking additional acreage.

Bally’s CFO Marcus Glover said the company’s current focus is on opening a temporary casino in downtown Chicago in September. The facility is a prelude to Bally’s planned $1.7 billion resort complex at the former Chicago Tribune plant along the Chicago River. The company is working on financing plans for the development.

“As it relates to the Tropicana, that pathway is pretty far out,” Glover said. “We feel confident as we move forward with Chicago, that we'll be able to solve Tropicana.”

Glover said the company “remains encouraged with the optionality” the Tropicana site will provide for development. He called the location “probably the most visible and most [heavy] traffic corner on the Las Vegas Strip.”