Oakland Athletics Pick Construction Managers for Las Vegas Ballpark

The Oakland Athletics are putting all of the pieces in place for an impending move to Las Vegas while the franchise waits for MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred to put the move to a vote of MLB team owners. 

The Athletics have selected a joint venture of Minneapolis-based Mortenson and St. Louis-based McCarthy as the construction manager for a $1.5B, 35,000-seat ballpark with a retractable roof on a 49-acre site on Las Vegas Boulevard.

The Mortenson-McCarthy venture is the same team that managed the construction of a new home for the last professional sports team to ditch Oakland for Vegas: $2B Allegiant Stadium, now occupied by the Raiders’ NFL team.

The venture will oversee preconstruction, estimating, scheduling, logistics, bidding, management of trade partners, labor relations and community engagement for the baseball stadium project, which has secured $380M in public funding, ConstructionDive reported.

The Athletics have signed a purchase agreement for a 49-acre site next to the MGM Grand Hotel.

Mortenson has previously worked on MLB ballparks for the Atlanta Braves, while McCarthy has built numerous casino and resort projects in Nevada, the report said.

The vote of MLB team owners to ratify the A’s move—approval of three-quarters of the owners is required—was expected to be a formality after Manfred declared at a June press conference that the city of Oakland had never made a formal proposal to keep the team, which moved to Oakland from Kansas City in 1968.

“There is no Oakland offer, OK? They never got to a point where they had a plan to build a stadium at any site,” Manfred declared.

Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao requested a meeting with the MLB commissioner in a July 9 letter in which the mayor said she needed to clear up his “misperceptions” about the status of Oakland’s plan to develop a new baseball for the A’s.

During the meeting, which was held in a Seattle hotel during All-Star Weekend last month in advance of MLB’s All-Star Game, Thao handed Manfred 31 thick document files that detailed the plans for a Waterfront Ballpark District at Oakland’s Howard Terminal.

The 55-acre development plans include 3,000 residential units and 1.5M SF of commercial space—and a new 35,000-seat ballpark for the Oakland Athletics with a spectacular view of the San Francisco skyline. The plans Manfred had said didn’t exist.

In her letter to the commissioner, Thao said the city was “extremely close” to finalizing a deal with the current ownership of the A’s to keep the team in Oakland.

Thao, who was elected in November, took office in January. She told the assembled media in Seattle that the MLB Commissioner’s office and the Oakland A’s ownership told her office in January not to bother joining the negotiations over the future of the team because they had it under control.

Manfred has formed a three-owner “relocation committee” to make a recommendation to the owners on the A’s move to Las Vegas, with the owners expected to vote on the proposal before the end of the year.