Scott Boras, the most successful and famous player agent in Major League Baseball, believes that the Oakland Athletics' planned relocation to Las Vegas hurts the game. Boras expressed his belief during MLB's annual Winter Meetings, which concluded on Wednesday with a blockbuster trade that, fittingly, involved one of his clients: incoming New York Yankee Juan Soto.
"Remember, the commissioner's office on down, every owner approved this," Boras told the San Francisco Chronicle. "This is what Major League Baseball is doing to one of its franchises. We've made one of the great major-league franchises an outlier. I'm not sure why they did it this way. I don't understand it. I think it hurts the game."
Boras' comments were largely focused on how the A's noncompetitive and nomad status hurts their players. The A's lease at the Oakland coliseum expires after next season, yet their Las Vegas ballpark will not be finished until the start of the 2028 campaign, at the earliest. That could leave them without a real home, and a big-league facility, for the duration of the 2025-27 seasons.
The A's have not yet announced their plans for those seasons. One popular theory has them playing their home games at the Las Vegas stadium that houses their Triple-A affiliate. Boras, for his part, questioned why MLB and the other owners voted in favor of allowing the A's to relocate "without having an existing structure to go to."
Presuming the A's do indeed move to Las Vegas after next season, they'll become just the second franchise in recent history to cross state lines. The other recent example, which saw the Montreal Expos become the Washington Nationals, also transpired before a new stadium was completed. As a result, the Nationals played their first three seasons in D.C. at Robert F. Kennedy Stadium, which had previously served as the home for the Washington Senators decades earlier.
