As the Athletics continue their Las Vegas homestand this weekend, crews are steadily making progress on the team’s $2 billion future home.
A’s star first baseman Nick Kurtz and his teammates toured the ballpark site on Tuesday, before the team’s 7-5 win over the Milwaukee Brewers at Las Vegas Ballpark, and left impressed.
“You can see where home plate is going to be, and you look out, you see the Strip and it’s going to be really cool,” Kurtz said. “It’s a really cool picture of what it’s going to be.”
Walking the 9-acre construction site, visitors can see that the stadium is starting to take shape, with the 200-level concourse now completing a full circle around the site, the seating bowls stretching up to the 400 level and a just-installed giant steel truss arching overhead, giving the players a sense of how high the ballpark’s ceiling will be when they begin playing there in less than two years.
There will be five giant roof truss arches over the 33,000-fan capacity ballpark. The truss in place now will be the shortest one of the five, A’s President Marc Badain said. The largest will span 700 feet in length and rise 290 feet above the playing field.
The next roof truss is planned to be installed in mid-July, and all five trusses should be in place by the end of the year, Badain said.
Crews have been working on the bowl steel for seating on the third and fourth levels of the ballpark since March. In that three-month period, crews have already added around 80 percent of that bowl steel.
“You can see the progress made by the incredible workforce in town,” Badain said Friday during a media tour of the ballpark site. “You can see how it’s sort of an orchestrated symphony out here. You hear the horns go off, you see cranes lift things and you see the guys up top placing all the steel.”
The next milestone will be hit next week, when installation will begin on the first precast stadia, the precast concrete seating platforms placed on the steel seating rakers of the stadium, Badain said.
“You’ll start to see more of the ballpark start to be framed,” he said.
Badain said the project remains on budget and on time for the scheduled Feb. 29, 2028, completion date.
‘Dream come true’
After working toward getting a new stadium built for years in both Northern California and Southern Nevada, the A’s finally hit the jackpot when they focused their efforts on Las Vegas, leading to the construction rising at the southeast corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Tropicana Avenue.
A’s owner John Fisher is a regular visitor to the project site and can be seen walking the active construction site weekly, donning a bright yellow construction vest with his last name and the number 24 on the back, similar to a baseball jersey.
“I get out to the ballpark under construction at least two or three times a week,” Fisher told the Review-Journal this week. “How often do you get to build a baseball stadium? It’s a dream come true, and something the A’s have needed for the last 25 years, and to see it now happening is just awesome.”
Making it all happen
Fisher said the best part of the stadium construction process is the workers who are out there daily working toward the 2028 completion date.
“The thing that gets me the most excited, besides seeing the structure go up, is honestly meeting the workers out there,” Fisher said. “We’ve got 600 workers on the site right now making this all happen. Over the next year, year-and-a-half, we’ll go up to 1,200. These are the guys that are making it all real, and they are so proud to be working on a stadium on the Strip.”
Having the workers on the site be just as excited to be part of the process to bring Major League Baseball to Las Vegas make Fisher enjoy the process even more than on a personal level.
“Most of them will not be building another baseball stadium anytime soon,” Fisher said. “So, this is something they’ll be able to talk to their kids, their grandchildren and their families about forever. For me that’s pretty special.”
Contact Mick Akers at makers@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-2920. Follow @mickakers on X.
