Six decades before, while giving a deposit in a New Jersey sports gambling instance, then-Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig spoke steadfastly against placing a franchise in Las Vegas and railed against gaming as”evil.” Today, a group is working with investors to construct a stadium and deliver a major-league team to Las Vegas.
Those efforts come as Selig’s successor, Rob Manfred, predicts Las Vegas a workable market for the game and baseball’s 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, and Chicago White Sox tv announcer and former Cy Young winner Steve Stone are among those working to make their vision of bringing a team to Southern Nevada come true.
Weisbach reported the people he is working with, such as some in Las Vegas whom he declined to identify, are engaged in continuing conversations with shareholders 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’d had talks about a major-league group in Las Vegas.
“Not that I can speak about. … I hope you understand sometimes I have to sign NDAs (nondisclosure agreements),” he explained.
Could it work here?
The jury remains out on whether Major League Baseball would thrive in vegas.
Some say which the entertainment buck could be stretched too thin for 81 home games to sell out. There’s Weisbach.
SHORT DESCRIPTION (Las Vegas Review-Journal)
“We have a great deal of different locations that we continue to work on and which are available and so it is not a question of if Vegas will have Major League Baseball,” he stated,”it’s a matter of when.”
After a more than 30-year absence, Major League Baseball returned to Washington, D.C., since the Expos became the Washington Nationals, that settled into a temporary home at RFK Memorial Stadium.
Whether Las Vegas has been used as leverage or has been severely close to becoming a major-league city in 2004 remains up for discussion, and the response varies depending on who’s asked.
1 thing was for sure: Washington, D.C., had a stadium (and since has built a baseball-specific one). Las Vegas did not.
“I really believe in the couple instances that I’ve tried to really do so, I think it was too early and we did not have a centre,” Stone explained.
Weisbach went further, saying he believed that when Las Vegas needed a scene at that moment, the Expos could have proceeded west. This time, the strategy is to create a scene initially and cope with securing a team — if by relocation or expansion — second.
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