Grand tour: A's brass get a look at future home park in Las Vegas

LAS VEGAS – As the Athletics spend this week playing a homestand at the home of their Triple-A affiliate Las Vegas Aviators, the grand vision for their own ballpark just down the road is quickly taking shape.

Situated on the southeast corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Tropicana Avenue is the construction site for the building the A’s will call home starting in 2028. Before Friday’s series opener against the Rockies, MLB.com took a special tour of that site alongside team president Marc Badain, who has been overseeing the project since its inception.

An incredible amount of progress has been made since the official groundbreaking ceremony on June 23, 2025, and this week marked the latest significant milestone with the raising of the first of six trusses that will make up the roof fully enclosing the ballpark. The roof will be made of glass that will attenuate direct sunlight glare while welcoming indirect natural light through northern-oriented clerestory windows.

The tour began in the outfield. This is where most fans will primarily enter from the Las Vegas Strip. What stood out here from A’s manager Mark Kotsay’s tour with the team earlier this week was the view. No matter what part of the main concourse you’re walking in, there will be an unobstructed view of the field and seating bowl with clear sightlines.

“If you’re walking on the main concourse, you’re going to be able to see the field,” Kotsay said. “Not many stadiums have that viewpoint. … Until we get in there, you won’t feel it. But it looks like it’s going to be pretty special.”

The second part of the tour took us to a later-to-be-named club section on the mezzanine level. From this angle, you get a direct view from behind home plate overlooking the outfield, where the backdrop will feature picturesque views of the Strip, with the New York-New York Hotel & Casino and MGM Grand in clear sight with the see-through dome.

The ballpark, located at the former site of the Tropicana Hotel, is being built on nine acres of a 36-acre lot and will be accompanied by a future hotel resort and entertainment complex to be built by Bally’s Corp., which owns the remaining 27 acres of land.

The stadium – designed by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) and HNTB – will have a capacity of 33,000 fans, featuring the closest seats to home plate and the smallest foul territory of any MLB ballpark.

“Seeing it from the implosion to today, it’s pretty impressive,” Kotsay said. “The vision of the ballpark in totality is there now. You can really see the future of an incredible stadium that fans are going to have an opportunity to be as close as they’ve ever been [to the field].”

With the tour concluding here, Badain took some time to field questions about the progress and details of the new ballpark.

Because the stadium will be on such a small plot of land, one big question has centered around what the parking situation will be like. Badain mentioned the A’s are working with PATG-LV, a parking transportation company that previously worked on the construction of T-Mobile Arena and Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas.

“There’ll be a parking garage behind [the home-plate entrance] that’ll be built,” Badain said. “There’s the Boring Company [Vegas Loop] that you’re going to start seeing blowing up all around town, which will help mitigate some of that. You’ve got the Monorail, which goes through the Convention Center and dead-ends at the MGM Grand. We’ve got access to approximately 30,000 parking spots within a reasonable walking distance. So, we feel pretty good about the working transportation ingress/egress plan.”

Badain said that both the timeline and budget of the stadium, which comes with an estimated $1.75 billion price tag, are on schedule.

“There are some parts of the project that are ahead of schedule,” Badain said. “Then there’s cushions built in for the next 18 months to make sure that, if something causes a delay on the critical path, we’re able to mitigate that. Right now, the team feels really good about where they are.”