MLB owners are expected to vote on the Oakland Athletics’ relocation to Las Vegas in November, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal‘s Mick Akers.
Per Akers, the vote is expected to take place during MLB owners meetings in “mid-November.”
A’s owner John Fisher told the Review-Journal in an interview published August 23 that the team had “recently” submitted its application for relocation, per Akers.
That application is currently being reviewed by an MLB relocation committee before it is passed on to MLB commissioner Rob Manfred and an executive council.
The council will provide a recommendation to the league’s owners prior to the vote.
Although the Athletics have committed to their relocation plan by purchasing land to develop a $1.5 billion MLB stadium next to the Las Vegas strip, it is not currently clear which way the relocation vote will go.
The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal said in July on “The TK Show” podcast (h/t NBC Sports) that although some owners want the A’s debate resolved and see Las Vegas as a better market, other clubs are “not happy with the way the team has been run with revenue-sharing dollars in the last year.”
“So those owners, we’ll see how vocal they are when the vote is taken, I suspect they’ll all fall in line as they always do, but maybe not,” Rosenthal said.
Manfred noted in June that baseball’s general “policy and preference” is “to stay put.”
“Having said that, I think the owners as a whole understand that there has been a multi-year, pushing-a-decade effort where for the vast majority of the time, the sole focus was Oakland,” Manfred said.
Even if 75 percent of the league’s owners vote in favor of the Athletics leaving, Oakland might still be an MLB city in the future.
USA Today’s Bob Nightengale said earlier this week that an A’s move would lead Oakland to join Nashville and Tennessee as the top options for upcoming MLB expansion sites. Manfred has indicated the league will expand to 32 teams in the near future.
The A’s chance of landing an expansion team will also hinge on the city’s stadium, or lack thereof. An ownership conflict regarding the Athletics’ longtime stadium would likely need to be resolved in order for Oakland to win an expansion bid.
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