It’s officially baseball season. And for fans in Oakland, the big worry this year isn’t that their roster lost so much depth, it’s that the bright side of the bay may soon lose yet another professional sports team to the “gross desert” just east of California. 

That’s how Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf described Las Vegas as she discussed the ongoing drama over the Oakland Athletics’ proposed stadium development in California. 

While it’s tempting to respond to the mayor’s depiction of our city as “gross,” punching down isn’t something Las Vegas does — even if it is warranted. Besides, the mayor’s frustration with potentially losing yet another sports team is understandable. The Oakland A’s have been not-so-quietly shopping around for possible sites to build a new stadium in Southern Nevada, and if they were to leave it would be the third team to seek greener pastures in recent years — the second to seek new digs in Vegas.  

Unfortunately, the A’s also seem to be shopping around for taxpayer handouts as much as they’re looking for plots of land. The organization’s president, Dave Kaval, told The Nevada Independent in December they would be looking at “what type of public-private partnership might be required, or be reasonable, that would justify (the site).” 

Of course, it’s not uncommon for millionaire sports moguls to lean on taxpayers when building new toys for their teams — the shiny black Allegiant Stadium on the west side of the I-15 being an obvious example. And Major League Baseball is no different, having long been a willing recipient of political cronyism (in all its forms) from virtually every level of government. 

“America’s pastime” is, apparently, the legislative act of carving out special deals for politically connected sports leagues — not some ballgame played in a park.  

Local jurisdictions across the nation have shelled out billions of dollars in such subsidies for new stadiums, training facilities and other amenities — with some of those projects ending up empty long before the public treasuries were ever “paid back” for their investment. Oakland itself, for example, continues to pay $13 million dollars per year for renovations made to lure what is now the Las Vegas Raiders back to the region way back in the 1990s. 

Maybe the greatest argument against socializing stadium costs through yet another “public-private partnership” isn’t the overwhelming amount of scholarly research showing it is a fundamentally flawed economic practice. Maybe it’s that such handouts don’t guarantee profitable long-term relationships. At the very least, the recent exodus of sports teams from the “bright side of the bay” should serve as a warning to other jurisdictions that truckloads of taxpayer dollars aren’t capable of purchasing regional loyalty from the recipients of such corporate welfare. 

Such subsidies do, however, help paper-over some of the issues that make a region look otherwise unappealing to sports teams, residents and businesses alike — and California certainly has its share of such issues. The latest hiccup in the Oakland A’s proposed California stadium, for example, is fairly typical of the regulatory hurdles frustrating so many projects in the Golden State. Indeed, Mayor Schaaf acknowledged as much, pointing out that building anything on California’s coastline is, inherently, going to be more administratively difficult than building something in “the gross desert” of Las Vegas. 

However, maybe that’s part of the problem: Doing much of anything in California has become far more of a headache than in neighboring states. Certainly, that’s one of the reasons that despite California’s raw beauty and plentiful resources, hundreds of businesses have relocated their headquarters and the state ranks among the top of the list for outbound migration — a trend that only accelerated as lockdowns took their toll on local businesses.  

Nevada’s business climate is likely the envy of many Californians — which is why nearly 50,000 of them are moving here every year along with tens of thousands of residents from all over the United States. In fact, Nevada is pegged as one of the states seeing the highest inbound migration overall — a stark contrast to the Bay Area, which has seen precisely the opposite during even the harshest months of a global pandemic. 

In other words, subsidies aside, the Oakland A’s should absolutely move their franchise to the world-renowned Las Vegas Strip. (Opening days alone would be a spectacle to behold.) Even without public money in the mix, Las Vegas offers the A’s more development potential and significantly lower regulatory and tax burdens than anywhere in coastal California — not to mention a resort corridor tailor made for delivering cheering crowds from all over the nation, regardless of how much the team’s front office guts the player roster.   

Moreover, in a town as entrepreneurial as Las Vegas, it seems like there ought to be plenty of deep pockets willing to invest in such a venture, negating the need to lean on public dollars for constructing a 30,000-seat ballpark. The wealthy business interests up and down Las Vegas Boulevard that stand to benefit from an MLB game in their backyard would be a natural list of potential investors — not dissimilar to the way MGM’s T-Mobile arena became the home for a brand-new hockey team without anyone going hat-in-hand to taxpayers. 

If none of those benefits are good enough to woo Kaval and the A’s without some sort of “public-private” corporate welfare scheme, then Vegas should be happy to pass on the opportunity and let Schaaf continue raiding her own city’s treasury for the privatized profits of a Major League Baseball team. As for this bustling city in the “gross” Mojave: We’ll get along just fine without another welfare-addicted sports franchise from Oakland. 

Michael Schaus is a communications and branding consultant based in Las Vegas, Nevada, and founder of Schaus Creative LLC — an agency dedicated to helping organizations, businesses and activists tell their story and motivate change. He is the former communications director for Nevada Policy Research Institute and has more than a decade of experience in public affairs commentary as a columnist, political humorist, and radio talk show host. Follow him at SchausCreative.com or on Twitter at @schausmichael.