The A's are about to create an unprecedented baseball problem in Las Vegas

When the Athletics head east to play their first planned regular-season games in Las Vegas, it won't be at their brand-new $2 billion ballpark; it will be at an all-too-familiar alternative location: a minor league stadium.

The A's will play their first two Sin City series in 30 years starting on Monday at Las Vegas Ballpark, home to the organization's Triple-A affiliate, the Aviators, in the suburb of Summerlin. The six games against the Brewers (June 8-10) and Rockies (June 12-14) will be a temporary break from their current home at Sutter Health Park in West Sacramento. (The A's have made Las Vegas home for a week once before, moving six home games in 1996 on short notice when renovations at the Oakland Coliseum weren't complete.)

But with the familiarity of the A's in a Pacific Coast League ballpark comes the familiarity of a looming problem that they've set in motion at their second home regarding attendance. Last season, the River Cats - the Giants' Triple-A affiliate and cohabitants of Sutter Health Park - suffered the biggest hit to their average attendance among all minor league teams during the A's first season in the state capital.

Could a similar fate befall the Aviators when John Fisher's ballclub arrives (hopefully) in 2028, at a new ballpark that's less than 15 miles away? Baseball America editor-in-chief J.J. Cooper, who has covered the entire baseball industry for decades and is the leading reporter on minor league attendance issues, says there is not much historical precedent for what's coming in Las Vegas.

"The process usually was major league teams could take over a territory, and they did, but when they did, they effectively paid for the territory. They paid a fee to the minor league club for the territory," he told SFGATE over the phone Wednesday. "It wasn't, 'OK, now we'll share.' It was usually, 'You've had a good run here, now you're going to head off somewhere else, and we're taking over this territory.' So that's where it becomes much more difficult to say, well, what does this mean for the Aviators?"

There are a couple of citable examples of this regional coexistence, although they're within the hundreds of minor league teams across the country. On the independent side are the Chicago Dogs of the American Association, whose stadium is a little under a 13-mile drive from Wrigley Field and has had the second-best attendance of the team's league every season since 2021. The more salient comparison, however, is between the Minnesota Twins in Minneapolis and their Triple-A affiliate in St. Paul: the Saints. The International League organization has averaged over 440,000 fans every year since 2021, when its affiliation with the Twins began - prior to that, it had operated as an independent ballclub since 1993.

(One prominent counterexample is the Triple-A team with the worst attendance for the past two years and second-worst in 2023: the Gwinnett Stripers, the Atlanta Braves affiliate that's about 35 miles from the MLB team's stadium.)

SFGATE reached out to the Aviators, asking for an interview about the upcoming games and future plans for the team. The team redirected all questions about these topics to the A's, who did not respond to SFGATE's inquiries. But Aviators media relations director Jim Gemma did talk about the concern ahead of Big League Weekend in March - an annual promotional event where the A's play a couple of spring training games at Las Vegas Ballpark - and sounded unconcerned.

"They have 81 home dates," he said, per KSNV-TV in Las Vegas. "We will have 75, we play 150 games in Triple-A again, with minor league baseball, it's affordable, family fun. We have free parking here. We have $2 beer nights. The price points will always be affordable. That's what minor league baseball is. That's why minor league baseball is very successful."

There is at least one very notable, very tangible reason to believe that the Aviators have, at the very least, a chance to weather the A's arrival better than the River Cats were able to: their $150 million stadium that officially opened in 2019. When in town to cover a different event, this SFGATE reporter took in a Triple-A game at the ballpark that has a sleek look that matches the modern-day shopping center aesthetic of the area around it. It's rife with amenities that help the crowd beat the scorching desert heat, including over 8,000 breathable mesh seats, a pool behind center field, a kid-friendly splash pad behind the pool, misting stations near gates when it gets to triple digits, industrial-grade fans at the ready and, of course, Vegas-grade air conditioning in the club section.

It's also not audaciously Las Vegas as if to appeal to tourists spending a weekend on the Strip, but instead built for the locals on the west side of the greater metro area. The concourse isn't filled with slot machines, the concessions are affordable, and the sponsors are classically minor league, with local real estate agents, car dealerships and trade unions. The most Vegas thing about the place are some of the large silly alcoholic drinks you can purchase, like a specialty cocktail in a souvenir bat cup, but even that has become common at other ballparks. It's also family friendly, as shown by the "Star Wars" theme night on May 23, where plenty of families were dressed in themed clothes or costumes while holding toy lightsabers and watching baseball.

There's also the possibility that the new A's ballpark might not have adequate parking availability to make the games worth it for locals, who often avoid the Strip entirely if they can help it, to attend. As Gemma said, this is another tick in the minor league park's favor, leading those who are deciding between seeing the A's and seeing the Aviators to lean the Summerlin side.

"It sucks to pay $300 to go see an event and then have to pay another $80 to park," Devin Livsey, a longtime Vegas baseball fan, told SFGATE at the Triple-A game on May 23.

If there is a cause for concern, it's more to do with how Vegas has grown as a sports town. In the past decade, Las Vegas has added the NHL's Golden Knights, WNBA's Aces and NFL's Raiders. Vegas is also considered one of the front-runners for an NBA expansion team, too. As a market, it might not have the bandwidth to accommodate all of the teams that will soon be competing for attention spans and fans' dollars across the area.

In just a couple of years, the Aviators' competition on the summer sports calendar will double from one team in a completely different sport - the WNBA's Aces - to two, including an organization that has more name recognition (both internally and with the opponents it will bring in) and also has more money to provide better amenities to battle the Vegas heat. Also, the A's will simply have the shiny new thing on the Strip, which is bound to at least bring out a curiosity crowd. Cooper noted there are certainly ways to mitigate the hit the Aviators could take through promotions, pricing and luxury suite rentals - regardless of whether the concern is more attendance or revenue-based - but there's only so much wiggle room to squeeze things out so the numbers look all right.

"At the end of the day, there's a finite amount of people looking to go to a baseball game," he said. "You can grow the circle of how many of those people are out there, but you are adding a whole lot of seats for a whole lot of dates at the same time of year, and for a, let's just be honest, more premium package."

The signs that the A's already have a big draw in Vegas are there. The Big League Weekend games were sellouts, with crowds of over 10,000, and that was for spring training exhibitions. If that trend continues, will free parking and other classic minor league amenities be enough to outweigh the draw of seeing Aaron Judge or Shohei Ohtani in Sin City? Las Vegas could start to find out as soon as 2028.

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