LAS VEGAS
The reluctance of Commissioner of Baseball Allan H. "Bud" Selig to move the Montreal Expos to the Washington area has led Major League Baseball to a 15-acre parking lot behind the Las Vegas Strip.
Here, on pavement hot enough to melt shoes, investors hope to build a $500 million ballpark for all occasions. They call it a "smart stadium" and it would be home to the wayward Expos during the major league season, then be reconfigured to accommodate boxing, concerts and other events the rest of the year.
Las Vegas, Nevada.
(Ethan Miller -- Reuters)
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The District has been without major league baseball for more than 30 years. Look back at a visual history of the Washington Senators.
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The plan is a fanciful one, even by Vegas's lofty standards. It relies almost entirely on private funds from still-unidentified sources. It seeks to fold the national pastime into a neon world that exists to encourage gambling, a baseball taboo ever since gamblers fixed the 1919 World Series.
But Las Vegas, like four other North American cities also under consideration, has one distinct advantage: It would enable Selig to avoid a confrontation with Baltimore Orioles owner Peter G. Angelos, who contends that placing the Expos in Washington or Northern Virginia would cause irrevocable harm to his franchise.
Throughout the relocation process, the commissioner has directed his handpicked relocation committee to seek alternatives to D.C. or Northern Virginia, according to major league officials close to relocation. Last summer, Selig encouraged discussions that led to Las Vegas's formal entry into the process, a source involved in the Vegas effort said.
But 2 1/2 years after Major League Baseball took control of the Expos, Selig appears to be running out of options. Like Norfolk, Portland, Ore.; Monterrey, Mexico; and San Juan, Puerto Rico, Las Vegas holds as many questions as answers, leading some baseball officials to ask whether Selig's choices are limited beyond the Washington area.
"Look around: They really don't have any other options -- other than Washington or Northern Virginia," said a major league official, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the negotiations.
MLB President Robert A. DuPuy disagrees, saying there are "at least five viable options" for the Expos. "While the press continues to focus on D.C. and Northern Virginia, we continue to receive information and refined offers from the other candidates as well," DuPuy said in an e-mail this week.
The story of how Las Vegas came to appear on MLB's radar screen shows the lengths to which Selig has gone to find alternatives to the Washington area, which would immediately become the sixth largest major league baseball population area behind New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia.
As recently as last year, Las Vegas ranked near the bottom of a list of relocation cities compiled by MLB, according to people familiar with the study. Its population, 1.56 million, would have made it the second-smallest population area in baseball after Milwaukee. The idea of associating the sport so closely with gambling was considered by many a nonstarter.
In addition, Las Vegas sports teams have suffered from low attendance recently. The past five seasons, the Class AAA Las Vegas 51s have not averaged more than 4,800 fans despite playing in a 9,334-seat stadium and the UNLV basketball team hasn't cracked the 12,000-fan average at 18,500-seat Thomas & Mack arena. The highest attendance at the Las Vegas Bowl since 1999 still resulted in more than 9,000 empty seats.
But the city used connections, as well as bold promises by popular mayor Oscar B. Goodman, a former mob lawyer, to vault near the top of the list.
The Democrat was approached last year by a Chicago businessman and Democratic Party contributor, Lou Weisbach, who told him he wanted to bring professional sports to Las Vegas.
