The Oakland A's were expected to reveal the renderings of their nine acre domed ballpark on the Las Vegas Strip on December 4th, but pushed back that date due out of respect to the fallen Nevada State Troopers that died in a hit-and-run three days beforehand.
It has now been nearly two weeks since the renderings were supposed to come out, and we're right up against the holiday season. There is a pretty good chance that the A's don't show the public the renderings--which apparently exist and are totally real--until after the New Year.
Are the renderings important to the ballpark actually being built? No.
They should matter to the people in Nevada, though, since they're the ones that will be set to welcome the A's to town in 2028 if everything goes according to plan. A delay in the renderings release doesn't mean that there has been a delay of any kind on the project itself. They're more to create buzz around the project, which is something that has been lacking. There has been plenty said about the A's proposed move to Las Vegas, but not much of it has been positive. The renderings are a chance for some positive spin, and the A's are taking their time for some reason.
Perhaps they're a little shy to show what they've been working on for all of these months since the last time they revealed some Las Vegas renderings, they basically copied and pasted the Oakland Coliseum, had never-ending aisles, and the project took up the entirety of the Tropicana site. The A's have nine acres of that site to work with.
Maybe they're just making sure that the scale is correct this time around after the renderings they thought were ready had in fact taken over the entirety of Clark County. Maybe they're waiting on John Fisher to solidify the funding for his part of this project so they know which dome they can afford.
The longer we wait, the more of a "wow" factor these renderings are going to need. The first ones? Throw them in the trash. We heard during the summer that there would be betters ones ready in November, which got pushed to early December. Now we may have to wait until January.
Maybe the A's and MLB are working on the timing of this together, and want the A's to wait until next month so that they have a solidified home for the 2025-27 seasons, and then the renderings can piggyback off of that announcement. Who knows?
At this point the perception is that this is just more of Fisher and Dave Kaval fumbling their way through the process without a real plan in place and scrambling to figure something out once a deadline arrives. That's how they arrived in Nevada in the first place after all.
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