Six decades before, while giving a deposition in a New Jersey sports gambling instance, then-Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig spoke steadfastly against ever placing a franchise in Las Vegas and railed against gaming as”evil” Nowadays, 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, calls Las Vegas a workable market for the game and baseball decision-makers descend on the city to get the 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 tv announcer and former Cy Young winner Steve Stone are one of those working to produce their dream of bringing a team to Southern Nevada come true.
Weisbach said the people he’s working with, such as some in Las Vegas whom he declined to identify, are engaged in continuing conversations with investors and landowners.
He said individuals involved have been speaking with local leaders.
Gov.-elect Steve Sisolak, the longtime Clark County Commission chairman, was asked if he’d had talks about a major-league team in Las Vegas.
“Not I can talk about. … I hope you understand sometimes I have to sign NDAs (nondisclosure agreements),” he said.
Could it work here?
The jury remains out on if Major League Baseball would flourish in vegas.
Some say that the entertainment dollar could be stretched too thin to market out. Then there’s Weisbach.
SHORT DESCRIPTION (Las Vegas Review-Journal)
“We have a great deal of different places that we continue to operate on and which are accessible and so it’s not a matter of whether Vegas will have Major League Baseball,” he said,”it’s a question of when.”
After a more than 30-year absence, Major League Baseball returned to Washington, D.C., as 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 has been seriously close to becoming a major-league city in 2004 remains up for discussion, and the answer varies based on who’s asked.
1 thing was for certain: Washington, D.C., had a stadium (and since has assembled a baseball-specific one). Las Vegas didn’t.
“I really believe in the couple times that I’ve attempted to really do this, I think that it was too early and we did not have a centre,” Stone said.
Weisbach went further, stating he considered that when Las Vegas had a stadium at that moment, the Expos could have moved west. This time, the strategy is to create a scene first and deal with procuring a team — whether by expansion or relocation — second.
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