LAS VEGAS - Rising from the desert is the New Las Vegas Ballpark, sandwiched between a major airport, a giant Hooters, and casino hotels that prominently feature tacky, gaudy impersonations of the skyline of a city more than 2,000 miles away and a medieval castle.

In 2028, the A's will finally have a new ballpark after calling the Oakland Coliseum, the last multipurpose concrete doughnut of a stadium home from 1968 to 2024, and then, having left their home of 56 years, played three seasons in Sacramento at a Triple-A ballpark while waiting for their Las Vegas edifice to be finished.

Like seemingly everything else in this artificial city that exists solely to separate rubes and marks from elsewhere from their hard-earned cash, the New Las Vegas Ballpark, at least partially designed to evoke the Sydney Opera House, will soon give Sin City a third franchise in one of the country's four major sports leagues.

"Buy the ticket, take the ride," Hunter S. Thompson wrote in Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, and Athletics owner John Fisher will soon have achieved his goal of liberating his team from an aged stadium he didn't like and the fanbase he spurned for a new market and stadium that will likely enable him to flip the franchise he bought with his inheritance for, at minimum, 10 times the $180 million he paid for the club in 2006.

But it won't be easy for the A's, who Fisher has vowed will be competitive when they get to Las Vegas in two years. The franchise, where Billy Beane's Moneyball approach, designed to build a competitive team on a low budget by finding undervalued players, has been in the bottom five teams in payroll nine of the last 10 seasons and had the lowest payroll in MLB three of the last five seasons.

Despite Fisher's unwillingness to spend money on player personnel, the team made three consecutive postseason appearances, earning wild card berths in the American League playoffs in 2018 and 2019. Unfortunately, the team's greatest recent success - and AL West title in 2020 - came at a time when fans couldn't buy tickets due to the COVID-19 pandemic. They have a farm system in the middle of the pack and aside from starting pitcher Luis Severino's three-year, $67 million deal signed before the 2025 season, the club has not been a destination for free agents in quite a while.

Winning is going to be important for The Athletics from the minute they arrive, as marketing a baseball season with 81 home games at a stadium with 33,000 seats to fill and a $2 billion construction.

Unlike the NFL's Las Vegas Raiders, who have eight or nine home games to sell, the A's have a lot of inventory - approximately 2.675 million seats per season, more than three times what the Raiders have to sell at Allegiant Stadium and what the NHL's Golden Knights have to sell at T-Mobile Arena.

While baseball fans do travel - show me a baseball fan who doesn't want to go to all 30 MLB ballparks and I'll show you a liar - it's hard to see fans coming year after year from the 29 other MLB markets when their club plays in Vegas.

The competition for the disposable entertainment dollar in Las Vegas is fierce, and you don't need to look any further than the Excalibur gambling castle across the street, where Tournament of Kings, a Medieval Times-like dinner show, is the longest-running show of its type on the Strip. According to VegasNearMe, there are 325 shows with a regular schedule in Las Vegas, and even if the baseball crowd doesn't completely overlap with the show crowd, each one of them will be competition for the A's.

One hundred and twenty-four years, six ballparks, and three cities ago, John McGraw, who had just left the Baltimore Orioles for the New York Giants, was asked what he thought of the A's, who had a big payroll after poaching some of the biggest names in the National League.

“The Philadelphia club will make no money. They have a big white elephant on their hands,” McGraw said, giving A's owner Connie Mack inspiration to use a white elephant as the team's mascot as the team went on to win six AL pennants and three World Series over the next 14 years.

When the A's and Stomper arrive at their gaudy new home, the franchise will hope that history can repeat itself. Major League Baseball, the State of Nevada, private investors, and John Fisher have put their money on the table, hoping it will.

As they say, when a new dealer comes to the table, "Good luck, everybody!"