Las Vegas appears to have secured its Major League Baseball team.
Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo has signed a deal, passed by the state legislature, that will provide $380 million in public funding for a $1.5 billion stadium directly on the Las Vegas Strip.
That's a huge win for a city that as recently as 2017 had no sports teams. Now, the Las Vegas Golden Knights just won the National Hockey League's Stanley Cup and the Raiders completed a successful (at least from an attendance point of view) season at Allegiant Stadium, which sits just off the Strip.
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After being off-limits to the pro-sports world, or at least the sports-team world, Las Vegas has become one of the world's major sports cities. You can thank the 2018 Supreme Court decision that allowed states to make their own decisions as to whether to allow sports betting.
That ruling led multiple states to legalize betting on sports, and that in turn made Las Vegas less of a risk for sports leagues. If players were tempted to bet in multiple cities, then Las Vegas had not reason to be off-limits. That led the NHL to award the team an expansion franchise, the Raiders moving from Oakland, and now Major League Baseball's Oakland Athletics making that move.
Building the A's stadium, however, will come with more costs than just the $1.5 billion that will go into construction. The new stadium will sit on the site of the Tropicana, the second-oldest casino on the Las Vegas Strip.
The agreement to build the stadium means that the Trop will soon face the wrecking ball (or an implosion), and along with losing the resort, the Strip will lose a number of other things that the property houses.
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Tropicana Demolition Is More Than the End of a Casino
Built in 1957, the Tropicana trails only Caesars Entertainment's (CZR) Flamingo when it comes to Strip tenure. The resort casino has been on borrowed time since Bally's Corp. (BALY) bought operating rights to the property from Penn National (PENN) in 2022.
At the time, Bally's made clear that it was going to take a year or two to make decisions about the property, but the original resort casino seemed unlikely to survive. Now, Gaming and Leisure Properties (GLPI), which owns the underlying land, has given the nine acres the stadium will sit on to the A's.
Bally's probably will build a new resort casino on the property, but that has not been decided. And when the Tropicana closes, a number of Las Vegas icons will lose their homes on the Strip.
This includes Rich Little, the famed impressionist, who might not be fully familiar to younger audiences but who was a fixture on the Johnny-Carson-era "Tonight Show," One of the best-known names of the 1970s and 1980s, Little even guest-hosted for Carson back in the days when the "Tonight Show" was the only late-night television show.
Little has been appearing in a one-man show at the Tropicana since 2015. The Trop also hosts Murray the Magician, a more modern performer who first came to fame on "America's Got Talent."
In addition to Little and Murray losing their Las Vegas homes, the celebrity chef Robert Irvine will lose his lone Las Vegas outpost, Robert Irvine's Public House. The Food Network chef has been selective about where he puts restaurants and was hands on in building the menu and creating the ambiance at his Tropicana location.
No timetable has been given for the Tropicana to be closed down, but the governor signing the public funding bill removes the last major hurdle that could have scuttled the deal.
