Oakland to Sacramento to Las Vegas: The Whole Timeline, and Where It Actually Stands
Fifty-seven years in Oakland, a temporary stop in a Triple-A park, and a $2 billion dome on the Strip that's genuinely being built. The dates, kept updated.
This is the page that keeps the relocation straight, because the story has moved in stages and each stage got argued about separately. It gets updated as the dates move.
Oakland. Fifty-seven years of major league baseball, three consecutive World Series titles in the early seventies, the Bash Brothers, the twenty-game winning streak, and a Coliseum that went from serviceable to embarrassing while ownership and the city spent two decades failing to agree on a replacement. However you apportion the blame, and this blog has a view, the outcome was a city losing a franchise it had supported for three generations. What the Bay Area lost is the record of what that actually meant.
West Sacramento, now. The interim arrangement: a major league team playing at Sutter Health Park, a 14,014-seat Triple-A park, with an average crowd under ten thousand. Not a home, a waiting room. And unlike most relocations, the fans who supported this team are close enough to watch it happen and far enough that most of them don't go.
Las Vegas, the part that's actually real. This is where people who stopped paying attention are still out of date. The ballpark is under construction on the Strip, at Tropicana Avenue and Las Vegas Boulevard, on the site of the old Tropicana hotel. It's a $2 billion, roughly 33,000-seat domed stadium. Test pilings began in May 2025, the ceremonial groundbreaking was 23 June 2025, and the build is a 32-month programme aimed at Opening Day 2028.
Where it stands right now. On schedule, by every account from the people running it. Over a thousand piles are in the ground, some as deep as eighty-five feet. The lower bowl is taking shape. The first of six roof trusses has been raised. Whatever anyone in the Bay Area wants to believe, this building is happening and it's happening roughly on time.
What that means for the schedule of grief. If 2028 holds, this franchise plays the 2026 and 2027 seasons in West Sacramento and then leaves the region for good. That isn't a distant hypothetical any more. It's two more summers.
The thing worth saying plainly. A domed stadium on the Las Vegas Strip will probably be a good place to watch a baseball game, and the team will probably draw better there than it did in a decaying Coliseum. Both of those can be true and it can still be a civic theft. Oakland didn't lose this team because Oakland stopped caring. Our column on the move is where we make that argument properly.
The Bay Area question nobody has answered. What happens to the fans. A supporter in Oakland or the East Bay has three options and all of them are bad: drive ninety minutes to West Sacramento to watch a team that left, switch to the Giants and pretend fifty-seven years didn't happen, or stop watching baseball. Most have chosen the third, which is why the attendance numbers look the way they do and why they aren't actually a measurement of anything except grief.
What we're watching next. Construction milestones on the Strip, whether the 2028 date holds, attendance in West Sacramento across a second full season, and what happens to the players developed in the interim, because the roster being assembled now is the one that opens that building. The current group is on the depth chart page.
The rest of our coverage is on the A's hub.
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