A's Las Vegas Ballpark Won't Have Design Team Until November
In what has become an all-too-familiar theme the last year or so, when something positive happens with Oakland--like last night's fan-led "sell the team" chants in San Francisco--then the Las Vegas Review-Journal has a piece of news to drop about the A's and Las Vegas within 12 hours.
The news from today is that the Oakland A's may not have a group picked out to design their Las Vegas ballpark until early November, per the LVRJ. There are two groups being considered: Gensler, a Las Vegas based design group, and the duo of HTNB and Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), two separate companies working together. HTNB was part of the team that helped design Allegiant Stadium, the Raiders Las Vegas home, and BIG was responsible for the A's plans at Howard Terminal.
The Review-Journal also says that one of the two groups will be chosen based off their design of 75% of the Tropicana site for the A's ballpark project. From there, the A's will connect with construction groups to see how feasible the design is and how much it'll cost.
The A's director of design, Brad Schrock is quoted as saying, "We told the groups, ‘You saw renderings in the newspaper, but wad those up for now. We are really encouraging them to think creatively about the different ways to solve the problem. It will be fun to see what we get back."
You may remember that the ballpark renderings were released on the final day for legislation to be introduced to the Nevada Legislature, and as early as that same day people were wondering just how realistic they were since the design took up way more than the A's allotted nine acres for development. Turns out those designs were just meant to get them in the door of the legislature, and eventually helped them land the $380 million in funding they were looking for.
Schrock also mentions some of the "problems" associated with the Tropicana site on a few occasions. Without saying it explicitly, the problem he seems to be referring to is that they only have nine acres to work with, and with a retractable roof involved, that makes it extremely difficult to find a workable solution.
He also mentions that the fan experience is a big consideration for them in their design process, and touts the views of the Strip that should be visible, but fails to mention that there will in fact be another development on the rest of the land at the Tropicana site that will be operated by Bally's Corp. What those plans entail remains to be seen, but right now they have a giant hotel-casino in the area that makes it pretty difficult to see the Strip from where home plate would be--if the ballpark is even oriented towards the Strip instead of the airport.
The next step in the A's relocation process still appears to be the MLB owner's vote that does not have a timetable just yet. MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred had said previously that it could be done as soon as the summer.
In other LVRJ news, they blocked the Twitter account "Schools over Stadiums" that is fighting the A's ballpark project, apparently because of this tweet.
After a few hours, the Review-Journal has since un-blocked the educators, but also referred to the group as "Stadiums over Schools" which is quite literally the opposite of what they're advocating for. I wish them well in their investigation.
Per their bio, "Schools over Stadiums is committed to pursuing every possible path to stop the use of public funds to subsidize a billionaire’s stadium." They have said in the past that part of that path could involve a referendum on the ballot next November to let the people of Nevada decide if they'd want to help build the A's ballpark in Las Vegas. The best case scenario for the A's is that vote would be a toss-up, if the legislators' internal polling is to be believed. The voting that went along with the A's ballpark bill on the Nevada website for SB1 showed that nearly 80% of the constituents opposed the bill, yet it still passed.
The Review-Journal blocking them on social media has given them more attention, and may have given the group some traction to get their message to more people.
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