Six years before, while offering a deposit in a New Jersey sports betting instance, then-Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig spoke steadfastly against ever placing a franchise in Las Vegas and railed against gaming as”evil.” Today, a group is working together with investors to build a stadium and deliver a major-league staff to Las Vegas.
Those efforts come as Selig’s successor, Rob Manfred, predicts Las Vegas a viable marketplace for the sport and baseball decision-makers descend on the city to get its league’s Winter Meetings at Mandalay Bay from Dec. 9-13.
Behind the scenes, Lou Weisbach, a Chicago-area entrepreneur who headed the charge to bring the Montreal Expos to Las Vegas in the early 2000s, along with Chicago White Sox television announcer and former Cy Young winner Steve Stone are one of those working to make their dream of bringing a team to Southern Nevada come true.
Weisbach said the people he is working with, including some in Las Vegas whom he declined to recognize, are engaged in ongoing conversations with investors and landowners.
He said people involved have been talking with local leaders.
Gov.-elect Steve Sisolak, the longtime Clark County Commission chairman, was asked if he had had talks about a major-league team in vegas.
“Not that I can talk about. … I hope you understand sometimes I must sign NDAs (nondisclosure agreements),” he explained.
Could it work here?
The jury remains out on if Major League Baseball would thrive in vegas.
Some say no — that the entertainment dollar would be stretched too thin to market out. Then there’s Weisbach.
SHORT DESCRIPTION (Las Vegas Review-Journal)
“We’ve got a lot of different places we continue to operate on and which are accessible and so it’s not a question of whether Vegas is going to have Major League Baseball,” he stated,”it’s a question of when.”
After a more than 30-year lack, Major League Baseball returned to Washington, D.C., since the Expos became the Washington Nationals, who settled into a temporary home at RFK Memorial Stadium.
Whether Las Vegas has been used as leverage or was seriously close to becoming a major-league city in 2004 remains up for discussion, and the answer varies depending on who’s asked.
1 thing was for sure: Washington, D.C., had a scene (and since has assembled a baseball-specific one). Las Vegas did not.
“I believe in the couple instances that I’ve tried to really do this, I think it was too early and we did not have a centre,” Stone explained.
Weisbach went further, saying he considered that if Las Vegas had a stadium at that moment, the Expos could have proceeded west. This time, the plan is to create a stadium first and cope with procuring a team — whether by expansion or relocation — instant.
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