Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman was right to express a bit of skepticism over the Oakland A’s plan to build a stadium where the Tropicana Las Vegas currently sits. 

Speaking on a podcast at Front Office Sports Today, Goodman said the team’s current plans simply “don’t make sense.” Certainly, she’s not the only one with a bit of reservations about how things are progressing.

As it turns out, when it comes to the way A’s owner John Fisher runs his organization, very little ever seems to make much sense — something Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao knows firsthand after the city spent years dealing with Fisher’s haphazard attempts to secure public funding for a new stadium. 

“We’re seeing that [Fisher] has the same issues going to Las Vegas,” Thao told The Athletic last week while discussing the team’s stadium troubles. “There was a thought that this plan he had in the beginning was viable. And now we’re seeing that actually, maybe the plan isn’t viable. The question becomes, are the plans not viable or is it that the ownership’s not viable?”

Undoubtedly, many fans would say it’s the ownership. 

Given Fisher’s history with Oakland and the plethora of questions that remain unanswered about the move to Vegas, such skepticism about the team’s future is well warranted. His track record of backing out of “binding” agreements and vacillating between various paths forward for his team don’t exactly instill one with much confidence that everything’s going to progress smoothly in Vegas. 

The mere fact that the team’s lack of detailed plans for the Tropicana site are currently stalling a planned remodel of MGM Grand is the latest example of the A’s seemingly disorganized approach to building its new home. We already know, for example, that the stadium likely won’t be getting the sort of retractable roof originally promised to lawmakers, fans and the general public. 

These are the sorts of details the team should have ironed out long before lawmakers decided to offer wheelbarrows full of cash to help build anything — and yet, we’re still waiting with bated breath for something as simple as a rendering. 

From the beginning, details have been loose at best, and simply nonexistent at worst. For example, it’s still not entirely clear how Fisher expects to fully finance his nonsubsidized portion of the project — a detail that also probably should have been a larger point of discussion before $380 million of taxpayer money was thrown into the mix. 

Indeed, it often seems as if every media story about Fisher’s team in the last year has revolved around some basic unanswered question regarding its relocation plans. Even something as simple as where they are going to play when the lease in Oakland expires this season remains up in the air. 

Last week, the A’s finally had a meeting with government officials in Oakland to hash out that very issue — but like every other step of this process so far, nothing about that news gave confidence that its future is well planned out. 

The meeting in Oakland took place only weeks after the A’s spoke with officials in Salt Lake City and Sacramento about hosting games while its field in the Mojave is being constructed. One could easily be forgiven for thinking any agreement they might enter into will be about as “binding” as their original land agreement with Red Rock Resorts just west of the Strip.  

At the very least, such indecision is a public relations failure — and it’s only the latest of many in the last year.

Such failures might be more easily overlooked if the team was dominating on the field and showing a serious commitment toward being a contender for a future World Series. After all, winning games and packing crowds into stadiums can buy an awful lot of goodwill among fans, government officials and the general public. 

Unfortunately, on the field, the A’s thrift and short-term thinking is well documented and much lamented by fans. The team currently has the lowest payroll in baseball, more losses than any other team last year, and one of the worst attendance records for home games. Those are metrics that don’t do much to convince onlookers that leadership within the organization is managerially competent.  

Trusting that everything would go smoothly with such an organization never really “made sense” to anyone who’s followed the saga from the beginning. Even beyond the economic arguments against publicly subsidized stadiums, the sheer lack of details, commitment and straightforward answers we’ve had to endure from Fisher and his lobbyists should have always been reason for skepticism as Nevada blundered ahead with yet another corporatist subsidy to an out-of-state sports franchise. 

Unfortunately, because Nevada’s approach to “economic development” is seemingly nothing more than throwing tax dollars at billionaires who promise flashy ribbon-cutting ceremonies, ensuring the details “made sense” was probably never a top priority among lawmakers anyway. 

Michael Schaus is a communications and branding expert based in Las Vegas, Nevada, and founder of Schaus Creative LLC — an agency dedicated to helping organizations, businesses and activists tell their story and motivate change. He has more than a decade of experience in public affairs commentary, having worked as a news director, columnist, political humorist, and most recently as the director of communications for a public policy think tank. Follow him at SchausCreative.com or on Twitter at @schausmichael.