A's Potential Las Vegas Home Prefers Los Angeles Dodgers
One of the most popular baseball sites in the world, Baseball-Reference, released their map of the most-viewed teams on their site by state earlier this week, and this year was particularly interesting given the A's plans to relocate out of California.
The A's have been a pretty big story in the baseball world for the better part of 2023, beginning on April 19 when they officially announced that they were planning to relocation to Las Vegas, Nevada. You would think that with that news and with Nevada getting a team to call their very own, that the A's would have ruled the traffic to B-R in the state.
That is not what happened.
Now, this isn't exactly fair. The Los Angeles Dodgers are the team that people in Nevada already root for and they are filled with star players. The A's just had their worst season in Oakland history, but they're also a team that is likely going to be the new hometown ball club in a few short years.
I reached out to Baseball-Reference to see if I could get a little more information, like if the A's were ranked in the top-5 in Nevada, or if they led the Nevada rankings for a day, a week, or a month at any time during the year. They declined to provide any more information which is perfectly understandable.
So what we have to go on is this one graph. It's still a little surprising that the A's didn't lead the way, however. In 2022, the New York Mets led the way in Nevada, presumably with all of the moves the team was making and all of the salary they were adding to the payroll.
The A's actually led three states in 2022, but they are three very random states: Arkansas, Rhode Island, and Maryland. Two of those states weren't big enough to fit the team's logo in.
What may not shock many people is that based off of these two graphs, Nevadans will root for a winner. The big question when it comes to the A's is how much John Fisher will invest to get his team to relevance in their planned new home.