The Oakland Athletics (A’s), Bally’s Corp. and Gaming and Leisure Properties (GLPI) have formed a triumvirate that will soon bring a 30,000-seat ballpark to the site where the Tropicana Las Vegas has stood for decades—the demolition process, however, is still very much undecided.
Bally’s and GLPI agreed to hand over nine of the 35 total acres of the plot for the project for free, and Bally’s Chairman Soo Kim has already said that it may be possible to allocate more land to accommodate a retractable roof system for the proposed stadium.
Now, the two companies are waiting for the team to submit its relocation application to Major League Baseball (MLB) and begin the stadium design process in order to determine the best course of action for demolishing the iconic Vegas destination.
In an email July 20, Kim told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that he is “still waiting for them to get through their stadium design process,” but confirmed that “it’s all coming together.”
Kim had previously told the Review-Journal that the property could be closed and torn down in segments, which would allow for the company to keep the casino open while construction work for the stadium begins.
The other option, of course, would be to implode the building in its entirety in one pass, but those considerations are still very far away, per Kim.
A’s brass has previously indicated that the goal is to have the stadium up and running for the start of the 2028 MLB season, meaning that construction would have to begin in late 2024 or early 2025 in order to meet that timeline.
Earlier this summer, Nevada lawmakers gifted the team with a public funding package capped at $380 million to go toward the construction of the new ballpark, including funds from both the state and Clark County.
Bally’s purchased the operations of the Tropicana from PENN Entertainment in 2022 for a total price of $308 million; GLPI, which owns the real estate, has a 50-year lease agreement with Bally’s at a rate of $10.5 million per year.
