More Athletics Insanity, Harrah's Las Vegas Review, Boyd Gaming Shakeup & Goodbye Trop?

Hello and welcome to the MTM Vegas Podcast. I'm Sean Coomer, your host joined as always by Mark Osterman. We have a great show for you. As a reminder, you can watch this show, along with all the visuals that go with it at youtube.com forward slash miles to memories. We record two shows per week on YouTube and combine them into this podcast for your listening enjoyment. On this week's show, we covered a lot, including a big shakeup at the top of Boyd gaming, a pop up casino that's coming to Las Vegas this month, how Cinco de Mayo was on the strip, even more construction coming to Tropicana Avenue as they build a tunnel and part of the road underground plus Harrah's Las Vegas. What is it like right now staying there and a look at some of the new venues and changes that have happened to the property. All of that and more coming up on this show. As a reminder, you can find all of our Vegas content that's posts, podcasts and videos at MTM Vegas.com. Thanks so much for listening. Let's hit it. So Mark, I have some terrible news. The last of the Britney Spears slot machines in Las Vegas have gone away. They were at Cosmo and they were removed this week. Those Britney slots have been so popular all over town and now they're finally gone. A lot of people probably don't know that a lot of the licensed slot machines are actually owned by the gaming companies and that they lease them to the casinos. They're not actually owned there so they control when they come and go. Apparently, aristocrat decided, Britney, bye. Maybe one more time, no more times, I guess. But yeah, it's crazy that they pull these out if they're popular. You think they'd still want to keep going, but maybe they don't have the deal with her likeness image or whatever the deal is. But you always wonder, what do they do with these when they come out? Do they just put new stuff on them? I don't know. It's kind of interesting. Maybe somebody that works in the industry can let us know that. It's sad to see because I know a lot of people love them. And as you know, on Twitter, a lot of people came up with the obvious reaction, leave Britney alone. This week, we learned that boy gaming is losing its chairman of the board and its co-founder, Bill Boyd. He's 91 years old. He served as the CEO for a long time after his dad's Sam Boyd died and they actually formed the company together. He retired from being CEO back in 2008, but he's been chairman of the board and then most recently co-executive chairman with his daughter. And now his daughter, Mary Ann Boyd Johnson, is taking over. She's been at the company since 1976 and various roles been on the board since 2001. This is kind of cool because it's always been a family company. I mean, they own 28 different casinos. This is a huge gaming company, but they still have that family vibe and the new chairman will be a member of the family as well, somebody who's been basically in the business since the beginning. Kind of cool. Yeah. I mean, it's always kind of crazy when a company leaves from being a privately owned family company, but yet the family members still kind of run it and do it from that. So, it's always kind of fun to see that way, but also, is that the best thing for the future? Who knows? Because what is it? Third generation usually kills a company. But she has been on the board since 2001, served as vice president, came up through the company. So she's been in that and she's been co-executive chairman since few years ago. So, she really has come up and been in management for a long time. So, it's not like just, you know, like on succession. What was interesting and I saw this on Wikipedia, this is the most recent numbers I saw, but they do have 28 properties, 10,751 hotel rooms, 1.7 million square feet of casino space, almost 32,000 slot machines. Boyd isn't a name that we hear nearly as much on the sort of national scale because they do have a lot more local casinos. Obviously, in downtown Las Vegas, they're huge with Main Street Station, Fremont in California, but they are a huge company. And they once had those big visions, the resorts world that we know today was supposed to be their big property, their big splash on the strip at a different time when they were trying to become a major player. But they've become a major player just in a different way with a lot of regional casinos. And they certainly, that many hotel rooms, that many casinos, it's a notable company to follow. Yeah, I wish they would have been able to do that and see their vision for resorts world back when like theming was cool. And it would have been, you know, over the top and kind of what we are missing in Vegas these days. So that would have been awesome if they pulled that off. But, you know, it's always interesting to see all these older people that start a company, build it and how long they stay with it. Like you think anybody watching this is like, oh, you give me $10 million, I'm going to be like out and doing stuff that's fun. But they get so invested in this that they just work until you know, 91, like why are you still going in there? Which I understand chairman of the board isn't a daily thing. But still, you think you'd be like, you know what, I'm going to enjoy, I spent all this time building, I'm going to go enjoy my life. But I would think it becomes such a part of them that they can't pull away from it really. And according to what I saw, he still owns 17% of the company. So a lot shouldn't change their wish him well in his quote unquote retirement at 91, certainly a legend, Bill Boyd. And his dad, Sam Boyd obviously lives on through Sam's town and a lot of other properties. Now, Mark, have you ever heard of a pop up casino? I think we've talked about them before. Yeah, this isn't like a fancy thing for a weekend. A lot of times when properties have a gaming license attached to them, but they don't currently have a casino, they need to do a pop up casino for a period of time in order to keep the gaming license active. And Marriott's doing that this coming week on their property on the corner of Convention Center Drive and Paradise. This used to be the beach nightclub. And it does have a gaming license. Marriott owns a few different hotels on this plot of land, but they're going to pop up a little trailer, put up 16 slot machines, and keep that gaming license active city gaming. I've still never been in one of these. I really feel like I got to do it at one point, go down there and see what it's like. I wonder how good the odds are. Yeah, it's such a weird thing. Like, I don't think anybody that's serious about gambling is going to go there thinking that this is a good option. I think a lot of people that do it just go because it's something unique and something you can say you did once. And it's crazy they've been doing this for what, like 30 years or something like that with the land. And they just keep doing it every 18 months to keep it as an option for gaming, which call me silly, but that's a stupid law. Either just let it be locked in forever or, you know, put a limit on it. Like 30 years is a bit long or, you know, 10 years is even a bit too long. If you're not going to develop it, you're not going to develop it. I think usually they do trailers, but this one's a tent, which just seems weird to me. Yeah, usually it has been trailers. And, you know, one thing about it is the gaming license keeps the property value up, right? If you lose the gaming license that lowers the value. But we did see this recently with Station casinos playing the long game with the Castaways showboat site, which closed, you know, in the early 2000s. And then they just built the wildfire casino that just opened this year in the last few months. So they kept that. It's one of those things where they did the trailer. And if you do want to go see this, it's going to be open for eight hours only on May 23rd, starting at 6 AM. They really don't want to attract a lot of people. They're starting it at 6 AM for eight hours done by two. It's really just just to keep the license active, but a unique Vegas experience for sure. You know somebody watching is going to be there like a rope dropping the 6 AM opening of this. Now I was on the strip at when I obviously recorded the last show there. We were there for Cinco de Mayo. And the strip was so crazy with people. I mean, the win was absolutely packed. And I just didn't have the energy to go down to the center strip and deal with all that. So we spent most of the night at win. Really cool atmosphere obviously there, a little bit quieter, but we did venture over to Resorts World. And Resorts World was just packed with people. They must be printing money there. I mean, just so many people there, young people, old people, all of the clubs were like the Zuknai Club. The line was just extended like halfway through the entire mall almost to the sphere to the ball screen thing. They also had all of their other bars in there like Gatsby's had a Cinco de Mayo event with live music. All of the other sort of nighttime venues in there were just packed full of people. The casino was absolutely packed as well. Almost every machine was full. It was it was a lively fun time. And I visited Resorts World twice last week and came to the realization that the place is really growing on me. Now we did talk that I always sort of liked it. And I liked the Crockford's lobby. I do not like the hotel rooms. I still think they're very generic. So let's put that aside for a second. But you know, feeling the vibe, feeling it full of people, watching the little tweaks that they've made over the last couple years to some of the venues, to some of the ways that they do things. I do think it's a really cool property, really beautiful at night with all the lighting. And yeah, so it grew on me a little bit. But Cinco de Mayo, a lot of fun there. There's a huge music festival in town too. So Vegas was just like every weekend lately. It was mobbed with people, which isn't my favorite thing. Did you please tell me you went and had a tiki drink at least while you were there? We didn't. It was on the list. And then by the time I remembered to do it, it wasn't there. I'll get that for a future, a future show. But Jasmine played a little bit. The one thing that's crazy is they speak easy and we'll talk a little later on the show about some hidden restaurants and speakeasies. The way that they've changed the food court, they've added like these trinket carts and they've done a lot of changes there. But we were also there the night before with my daughter, Ellie, we did like a one night staycation with her. And she finally got to see the disco bathroom. And she really loved that. So that was fun to share that with my child being a being the great parent that I am bringing her into a casino. But you know, like Lisa wasn't free money at midnight. So you're good. Yeah, no, there were a lot of kids surprisingly out at 11 midnight. I saw strollers on the strip in that area, which was a little strange. But yeah, I mean, everything was good. People were having a good time driving trucks down the street with Mexican flags. Everything that you would expect for single De Mayo. I will say, I'll give a lot of props to Resorts World that they haven't just kind of been like, oh, we kind of flopped at the beginning. We're just going to hope that it turns around. Like they've put a lot of effort into it. A lot of gimmicks, a lot of, you know, tweaks and stuff like that. So versus like a virgin where they haven't really done anything, they just kind of came out and everybody was like, oh, it's not that great anymore. And they just were like, oh, well, it is what it is. So we'll see how it goes. You know, they put a lot of effort in over there. So I haven't seen it fully packed before. So it'd be kind of interesting to see every time I've gone there, it's been like, you know, 60% full, 50% full, something like that. So it's good to see that they're still getting people in there. And you know, Cinco de Mayo probably helped out with that some, but just every weekend is packed in Vegas. Now I came across this today, the Tropicana as if they're not doing enough with Tropicana and all of the issues there. And now they're trying to redo it around the airport and the UNLV campus. Now the proposal a couple years ago, which sort of just died out was they were going to elevate Tropicana, kind of make sure traffic flowed a lot better. Now they're going to build a tunnel, because you know, everything in Vegas has to be a tunnel now, Mark, because of the boring company. Except for the walkways, which should have been tunnels all along. Yeah, exactly. So one set of traffic is going to be a tunnel. The other side is going to run normally, but they say it's going to replace the signals. So instead of having an eight way traffic signal, you only have a two way traffic signal. This looks weird, but it says they're saving money. It was like $200 million. Now it's $110 million. It just sounds like it's going to be a mess. But I'll put a graphic all the crashes. Yeah, I don't. But the other good thing that's coming out of this, and I know you'll love it, is it's going to turn into a diverging diamond interchange through here. So yeah, that's always fun. I know they learn from the temporary one that everybody's running into each other. I hate the double D's, man. They suck. They did say in the article that apparently on Tropicana, there's far less incidents with the diverging diamond. So people have finally gotten used to it. But I drove the freeway a lot this week, and I even filmed it. And I'll show some video here of what it looks like right now. But it is the freeway is just so messed up with this Tropicana construction. It's going to go on for another year, man. It's brutal. Also traffic issues this week, obviously, they're still doing the Formula One repaving. And I was out by Harro's in that area. And so the whole right side of the strip is closed. So it's one lane in each direction. Everybody driving on the sort of the east side of the strip. And it's just a parking lot there as well. So just keep in mind with those construction, if you're coming, pay attention to where that construction is as it moves to the various different areas, because it gets very ugly, especially when it's busy. And like I said, it was just a parking lot. Like people would move four or five cars for every light cycle. And one lane in each direction just doesn't work for the strip. The worst thing then waiting in line at a nightclub is sitting in line and traffic. So speaking of Harro's, I was down there. So I was staying at Win. And you know, sometimes I get offers for my because of my Caesar's diamond status. I have through Founders card and Harro's was only $10 for the night. So I decided to book a room there just so I could film it because I know you love to trash Harro's, but I didn't have any footage of the new renovated rooms there. So I went so you got the trash. You got more trash of Harro's good. Good. Good. Good. Then we got that on film. So I went down there and I was like instantly feeling sorry for myself compared to win just just everything the way it was. You go out to the pool and be like, oh, the holiday in pool. Cool. No, it was it was already closed by the time I got over there at night, but Winnie and Buck are gone. And you know, so I go up to the room. I checked in at the kiosk. Now kiosk check in, very good with Caesar's. It works really well. They didn't have anybody in the line. So there was like a line of people and only one agent checking people in. But there was a bunch of kiosks and the people I don't think really kind of knew that they could go to the kiosk. So I had to kind of like jump over the rope to kind of go around them. I you know, they seem like they wanted to check in with a person. That's more and more difficult now as they cut back on staffing. But the one thing about checking with the kiosk is you often get rooms that are not ideal, you know, with the location, lower floors, stuff like that. And that's what happened to me. But again, I wasn't staying in the room. So I didn't care all too much about it. But I get up to the room, instant smell of marijuana. You know, it's that's a staple there. And the bathroom was dirty in a couple spots, not wiped down so well. But I think the room is fairly attractive. I mean, it does look modern. I think all the rooms at the Caesar's properties now, whether it's the flamingo rooms at the flamingo, the renovated rooms at Link or Harris, they're all probably similar level, not fancy, but they're modern and comfortable enough, you know, typical Caesar's bed sheets. I felt really sorry for them. It was definitely a big contrast from my room at the wind. Yeah, that little strip of Caesar's properties is kind of, you know, lower tier. And you can get some really good deals on. I've always had a lot of fun, you know, hanging out in the flamingo casino and even Link, especially that walkout cabana room is amazing. So they have their little sweet spots and stuff. I've just never been a huge fan of Harris. Like I do like the Harris outdoor area is always pretty cool. But the casino low ceilings, not a lot going on hotel rooms or whatever. So, you know, one of my least favorite properties, we should do that. A show on least favorite Vegas properties. There we go in the future. I agree. The carnival court is a cool area. If you want to hear live music, it's a neat area that sits right between Link and Harris. And I always have loved the piano bar at Harris. And sometimes they have dueling pianos. They had karaoke going on during the time I was there because it was earlier in the night. But often later into the night, you'll have at least one person playing piano, sometimes dueling pianos. And they have an indoor and outdoor section there. So that's always really nice. The whole area lights up the whole sidewalk outside is now purple. Since they did that renovation, they have all these purple lights. So you like walk around in this purple hue everywhere. But they do have that new lounge in there. And it's just called the lounge. And it's very swanky, like lots of greens, very modern. It doesn't look like it belongs in the rest of Harris, like almost too nice for the rest of what Harris is. But it has a really cool space. I mean, I liked it a lot. I could see having nice cocktails. So it's good. They have a nice cocktail lounge there in the middle of the casino, even if it doesn't match everything else. And it's green compared to purple. Yeah, that is a strange choice. You know, the one thing Harris really had going for it was their diamond lounge was probably the best besides Caesars. I maybe put it second best. But they had always had a good food outlay and and really great bartenders. And service was always really good in there. So it's kind of nice and it was hidden a little bit upstairs. And so it's, you know, just another thing that Laurel slash diamond lounges are still not a thing. So sad. Yeah, I went to that diamond lounge quite a lot over the years and they had some of the best servers there and they would remember you. And we didn't go there that often. But back in the day when Jasmine and I both had diamond status and you got free drinks, why wouldn't you go there? But that was always one that I like to go to. It wasn't the fanciest of space. Caesars Palace had the best lounge, probably the fanciest. I liked the one at Paris as far as to look a bit a little bit better. But I think the best service of any of the lounges back in the day was the one at Harris. And finally, Mark, I want to talk about pizza cake because I finally got to eat at buddy Velastro's restaurant, his pizza restaurant there. You didn't do the vending? I didn't do the vending because I actually wanted something that was edible. So I was hoping, you know, I, this was my like dinner. So I was like, all right, well, you know, I didn't do the vending machine. I actually went up and got it. And you know, you go up and you order first. So it's like set up like a New York City pizza area where you get your slice and then you pay. But I'm guessing too many people were running off or something. So they changed the whole thing. So even though the line is for you to go through and order your pizza, you got to go pay first. And then they give you your pizza afterwards. The pizza, my first bite was like, Oh, this is actually pretty good. And then I sort of understood that the crust was way overcooked and very dry. And then there was almost no cheese on it at all. I ordered a pepperoni slice to be able to kind of compare it. I tried to use that as like a baseline. And there was so little cheese on this slice about $8 is what it cost. And that was sort of disappointing to me. The flavor was good. Like the crust had a good flavor, but it was overcooked and dry. The sauce had a good flavor. The pepperoni had a good flavor, but there was almost no cheese. So I can't really recommend this for a price. There's definitely the slices on the strip. Cheese like had like evaporated because they overcooked it so much. But you know, cheese is the most expensive thing. So if they're going to cut something from the pizza, I guess that's it. But that just seems cheap, especially eight bucks a slice. It probably cost them like three, four dollars to make the whole pizza. So you're making money hand over fist, put some some dang cheese on it. Yeah, so I was looking forward to it. But it has good bones. Like I feel like if it wasn't overcooked, I mean, the cheese thing kind of sucks, but you can overlook that. At least the flavor is good. So if you want a quick slice, I guess it's okay. But I think secret pizza is better. And that's not my favorite. But I do think secret pizza is better. You know, pop up pizza. There's a few other ones around that are good. And they're all about the same price about eight bucks for a slice, which is ridiculous if you think about it. But yeah, it's not a place I would go out of my way to go get. They also do serve the cake. So if you want the, you know, the cake from the cake boss, how big was the size? Because I know like pin up, it's like, it's basically like two slices that you're getting for that price. Because it's really big. Is it like that size or is it, you know, more like a regular size New York slice? I'd say it's about the size of a normal New York slice, which is pretty big, right? It's not like a tiny piece, but it wasn't oversized. It wasn't as good as as big as pop up. But yeah, I had just one slice. And that was my dinner. And I felt fine afterwards. Like I said, the only real issue was that it was like cracker. The the crust was so overcooked. Just the cotton mouth you got from your pizza. That was the problem. Yeah. But it was fun hanging out there. And quote unquote, staying there, even though I ran back up to win and actually stayed in my real room for the night. But if you're there to party, you're there for a cheap room that is somewhat attractive, somewhat new. You know what the Caesar's beds are? Because to me, they're all the same with the sheets, not the greatest MGM. I think all their properties have better beds and sheets and stuff. But it's perfectly acceptable for the night as long as you don't mind the smell of marijuana. Because I pretty, I think that whole area is just one big cloud of. No, whenever, whenever you get that smell and they're like, obviously, somebody was smoking in there before or whatever. Do you ever like alert the front desk so they don't think it's you in charge you for the cleaning fee or or do you kind of just let it roll? I don't do that. You know, if it was like a really strong smell, but it's more of like just the smell that they can't go out like back in the day when you go into a smoking hotel room, not that somebody just smoked in there five minutes before, but it's just this smell that's never going to get out. That's sort of what it was, you know. So it doesn't bother me. Like I wouldn't have been a deal breaker for me in that room. But I know it bothers a lot of people. But I feel like all those hotels in that area, whenever you're walking around that area, you're smelling it all over the place. And that's one of the realities, I think of today in Las Vegas. Some people like it. Some people don't. But yeah, I felt it was worth mentioning because it was pretty, it was pretty evident. Worse though, though, was that the bathroom had like, you know, some dirt stains and it wasn't cleaned very well, which wasn't nice. But I paid 10 dollars a night. So what's some girlies left behind? No, no curlies just drops. So Mark, here we are, standalone episode. The A's are being absolutely nuts in Las Vegas. We have so much to discuss. Yeah, they need like Brad Pitt to come in and save them, moneyball it up. I don't, maybe moneyballs the problem. If they're trying to be too cheap on everything, I don't know, this is just bizarre. I've never seen anything like this for sports. It's crazy. I'm in Japan and we already prerecorded an episode that was supposed to come out today, but we figured it would be kind of weird for us not to talk about this. So we scheduled this emergency recording session to talk about the A's. So just as a reminder, wait, you know what, I'm really think people is going to blow people's mind when we're wearing the same outfit last week, and then next week when it was supposed to be two in a row, everybody's going to be confused by that. It's going to be kind of funny. Hey, thankfully none of that was time sensitive. So a lot of really cool stuff coming on the next show, which it was supposed to be today's show. But just a reminder, a few weeks ago, the A's sort of railroaded Las Vegas and said, we have this deal for the old Wild Wild West site. They made the deal with Red Rock Resorts and Station Casino's parent company and the Fertitas. And this was going to be a blockbuster thing on Tropicana. They were going to build a bridge over to T-Mobile Arena. They said the deal was done. And they tried to force us into $500 million in public financing, which were basically tax rebates to pay off the bond for the stadium. They said they're going to build a $1.5 billion partially retractable roof stadium here. All was good. Or so they thought. And then the public hasn't really been behind this whole $500 million financing thing. And we thought that they had a deal in place. Then this week earlier, we found out that they are now starting to explore other stadium sites again. So the Nevada Independent covered, I think on Monday of this week, that they were back to looking at other stadium sites, even though they have a binding agreement for the Wild Wild West site. And they even said that they were talking to the Rio owners Dreamscape, who we know previously offered 22 acres of their land for $1 for the stadium. And then the next day came out that they were all of a sudden going to talk to Bally's about buying the Tropicana site or building a stadium there. So let's start with this. Do the A's know anything? I mean, this seems like a episode of Benny Hill, where they're just running around, scrambling around. It's insane. You know, every time you say Wild Wild West, I want to do like the Will Smith dance, do zoom in that song in their head every time Sean says, wow, wow. That's all I can think about. Is it the way I say it? I don't know. Or just maybe the Wild Wild West doesn't come up that much. And that's all I can think of, that horrible movie and that pretty horrible song. But yeah, I don't know what's going on here. It just sits kind of all over the place crazy. And all of this over $500 million when you have a billionaire owner and you're supposed to make that money back out of the stadium, out of the fans and everything. So just seems like they're being super cheap, which is what the A's are known for. They're kind of known as the worst run franchise in baseball, even though they usually feel the pretty decent team, at least on an average basis every few years. And that's crazy with the shoe string budget that Billy Bean works with. But yeah, this is just run a mock basically. And now you can see why Oakland was probably like, see you guys, we're tired of this. You're stupid. Move on. Yeah, Oakland fans were like rejoicing, I think, when they saw just how crazy this was, basically telling people in Las Vegas, this is what you're going to get with this ownership group. So yeah, just to recap, they have their deal with Wild Wild West. Early in the week, they say, oh, we're now all of a sudden looking at new stadium sites. Then they say, we've made an agreement with Ballet's Corporation for the site of the Tropicana. So Ballet's bought Tropicana what last year, and they announced that they were going to redevelop it in some way. And it's actually Ballet's just owns the operations of Tropicana. And then the land is owned by gaming and leisure properties with Ballet's renting back the building. So this is about a 33 acre site, I think, and nine acres are going to be for this ballpark. So this is an incredibly tiny site for this. I think I've been to a lot of ballparks. That's one of the things I do is I travel around and see ballparks. And I feel like one of the smaller ones or more compact ballparks is Atlanta's, which is a newer one. And they were kind of like retrofitting it to a certain space. And that was one of my complaints is it felt tight. You didn't have good sightlines because of it in certain areas. And I looked that up. That's on 15 acres. So I don't know how they plant. Maybe there is an MLB park out there that's on nine acres, but it doesn't seem like it's possible or it's going to just be kind of horrible. And then with this whole thing with them not owning the building, not owning the land, how does this all work? You know, you have there's so many chefs in the kitchen, it just seems like a terrible way and that this is going to backfire on them once again. So yeah, the plan for the Tropicana was to redevelop in some way into Bally's. They had hinted at what they might do. And you know, in either way, Tropicana was going away in its current form. They were either going to gut the buildings and expand it, but the name was going to go away. So for people who were really sad, people who watched this channel for a long time, no, I really love the Tropicana. I grew up staying there all the time. Has a very special place to me. But that property as it is is never going to stay, even if this didn't happen. But Bally said that if they do this stadium deal, that they'll also build a 1500 room resort on the property. So imagine a baseball stadium and a 1500 room casino resort on 34 acres on the corner of Tropicana and Las Vegas Boulevard. Seems like a very tight squeeze. Although Mark, the location hard to beat. I mean, I hate all of this, the whole everything about it pretty much except for the views. I think it will be like the coolest backdrop, the way that they're going to face the stadium. And I don't get the slight retractable roof instead of fully retra- I don't understand the theory behind that. But you know, the part that will retract will be looking at the strip at night. That'll be kind of amazing watching home run balls fly, you know, that way. But one thing we haven't talked about is the traffic, man. Like we already talked about Tropicana tunnels and just how horrible that intersection is. And you're going to throw a baseball park on that, you know, and that's right by the airport where a lot of cars come from the airport. The loop's not open. You don't have a monorail going to the airport. This is just kind of horrible. Is it just me? Just a few more tunnels somewhere in there. Tunnel solved everything in Las Vegas. I'm sure they'll figure that out. I don't know. I think this is crazy. So the public financing aspect has changed as well. And I should point out we do not have a single rendering of what the stadium is. I think this tells you how much effort the A's have actually put in. They're just, I don't know, scattered all over the place with this. And I think honestly, as I said before, we shouldn't give them any money. You know what's going to happen is they're going to spend 500 million that they want from the government breaking all these binding bids that they go around trying to scoop up and they're going to end up back at Rio where it's free and they should have gone in the first place. Yeah, part of this is they said because they don't own the land, they don't have the land acquisition costs, although they haven't altered the cost of the stadium and still a one and a half billion dollar proposal. One of the things that they said to Oakland was that they wanted this whole stadium district. And that's what they said. They were going to build it wild, wild west with, you know, entertainment and shops and everything. Well, that's no longer part of this proposal at Tropicana, although the price remains the same that now they're saying they only need 390 million in public financing, which they should get zero. Just get zero. This is insane. And let's point out that the Tropicana is generating tax revenue currently for the local area. So if you take that property away, it's not generating that. And if they want to put it into a stadium district and get rebates, now this is actually taking tax money away. Whereas with the wild, wild west, you could argue that there's nothing currently there and there's less of an impact. So in either way, we know that Bally's is going to redevelop Tropicana, whether they keep some of the buildings, if they don't get a stadium there, and then they add to it, or if they build something completely new, this is just a bad idea. And I think that the A's need to be sent back to wherever they came from. If they want to come to Las Vegas, they can pay for all of it. Imagine if they have to like walk back to Oakland and be like, please take us. I don't it would be kind of epic. I'm almost a little bit hoping that that happens. But yeah, they have the wild, wild west site set up, you know, they're planning on doing all this thing. And a lot of the baseball stadiums have built these districts. Like I just said, Atlanta, one of the newer stadiums has the Battery Park District, which is a really cool area, bars, restaurants. It's even busy, non game nights. But that's a way that they're making revenue all the time because they built out these places. They ran out the storefronts and the restaurants and all that stuff. And now you're not going to have that. So you're yeah, where's the extra like 500 million going right in their pocket? I don't I don't understand how the price is the same. A nine acre stadium at 1.5 billion. Like, does it have massaging seats? I don't understand where the money goes. Yeah, and where do they come up with what this what they need? Right? They just throw a dart at a board. Yep. 500 million, 390 million. I'd love to know what happened behind the scenes for the wild, wild west deal the seemingly fall through after having a binding agreement there as well. Obviously, I think Red Rock resource can't be very happy with that. And I'm sure like you said, there's a breakup fees. So they'll just keep more and more breakup fees and then eventually settle on somewhere. But I don't think this is great for the community. And then we talked on the last show also that there is an issue with they need the state legislature to pass up some sort of law or bill to give them this financing. And they're running out of time on that. And that seemed to maybe spark all of this to a little desperation as they saw that the community isn't as supportive as of this as they thought. I think they thought that to give just say we're coming to Las Vegas. Everybody would welcome with open arms. We would throw whatever money they wanted. And that clearly is not happening. It's not very popular here in Las Vegas to give them money. Nobody seems to really care too much about this deal. You know, this is not the greatest baseball team in the history. Although they have a long storied history, Las Vegas, you know, is a city that people should want to come to and they need to pay for it. And I don't know, this whole thing is crazy. And it just leaves a really bad taste in my mouth. And I think a lot of other people in Las Vegas is mouth as well. Yeah, everything I've read is like they were getting no backing for building it at Wild Wild West. Nobody wanted to front the 500 million. So like, all right, cool. We'll go to this place that doesn't have a, you know, a land purchase price. And we'll knock that off the top. You know, what is it? 395 million. So 105 million, we knocked off. Oh, people are going to rejoice that we just saved them 105 million fictitious dollars. You know, maybe if you dropped it down to 100 million or something like that, but not just slashing a little bit off the top. That's like going into Kmart in the jewelry section. And they say, Hey, our rings are 70% off. We marked them up 80% before we did that. But cool. I also think this just shows that they don't have a plan, right? Like I said, we don't have a rendering. And they're just like all over the place because they need to get a stadium deal in place because of their timeline to relocate from Oakland. And I, somebody said on Twitter, and I kind of believe this, that the ownership group is just more interested in the real estate deal than they are and actually bringing the team here, you know, in the money that they're going to make in increasing the value of this team so that they can sell it or something like that. It just seems doesn't seem like there's any heart behind it. And I wouldn't be surprised if they switched again to Rio or something else at this point. Because why would you trust anything that they say? The one other site that potentially could have been was the Las Vegas festival grounds, which Phil Ruffin owns on Sahara and Las Vegas Boulevard. Some more information came out this week from him basically saying that there was no way the economics would work because he's making so much money from music festivals and stuff like that. So that probably will never be a site if they decide to change again. I mean, on the surface, I think the Tropicana site's interesting. I would hate to see the Tropicana go, but like I said, it's going anyway. I agree with you with traffic concerns. Those are all there as well. But I mean, having a baseball stadium on the strip would be very interesting. You eliminate the need to cross pedestrians over the freeway. So I do see some potential benefit in this. But again, let private companies make these deals, let them pay for it. There's enough value there, especially if the A's are getting a stadium on the strip. Think about the value there for the team and everything else. We don't need to pay for it. And we need to, you know, look out for ourselves first. And it doesn't seem like the A's care at all about the community. And I would not be surprised if they go back to Oakland and try to negotiate again with them. You know, where does this all end up? I don't know what their current lease is in Oakland and when that ends up, but like, are we going to have a year where the A's just aren't or they're using other people's facilities for a year or two while they get this all figured out? Or can they like force Oakland to accept them for a couple more years? It's just, I think it's going to be really interesting to see how this plays out because I doubt that this is going to get voted on before. What do they go on break at like June 5th or something? I don't see them trying to push this through. I don't know if there's enough public support that, you know, these politicians are going to go out there and be like, you know what? We're going to slam this through on June 5th. I think they're going to let it ruminate a little bit and kind of sit there and sizzle in the background and wait, but that just screws Oakland. So I don't know what the deal is. This is just, it's so bizarre. Yeah, and Oakland almost put up that amount of public financing for the stadium too, which, you know, they said wasn't enough, which is one of the reasons they left. And they said they weren't getting a stadium district to their liking in Oakland, which is one of the reasons they left. And neither of those things are happening at the Tropicana site. So it's all a big mess. I believe their lease lasts through 2024 in Oakland, which is one of the reasons they need to have this in place. They did say that potentially they could play at the Las Vegas ballpark, which is up in Summerland. That's our triple A ballpark until the stadium was built. They do say that the you know what kind of deal would be on the same timeline. 2027. They still wouldn't fill it. The Oakland A's are going to have to they're going to have to call Chris Angel and get his seat fillers when this is all said. The aviators, the Las Vegas triple A team is their triple A team of the athletics. And there have been times where they have drawn more people to their games in Las Vegas than the A's have in Oakland. And so that does say a lot about all of this. And I don't know, I feel like the more I look at it, the more upsetting all this is Las Vegas doesn't need that. We have a potential NBA team coming. We have other sports growing formula ones Super Bowl coming this year. The NFL has done really well. And I think we gave a lot more money than we needed to to the Raiders to build a Legion stadium. But that was a venue that sort of was needed in the community, right? It's a different size venue than we had anywhere else. And you can argue that getting the biggest sport NFL was something a lot bigger. I don't think the Major League Baseball is that big of a deal. And I don't think they're going to draw nearly the amount of people that they're saying, even though there will be 81 games a year, there's just there's just not enough economic potential economic upside for Las Vegas. If they want to come, let them come, let them pay for it. I'll say it again. I know that people are going to be really upset with me. Some people who love the A's, but I feel like most Las Vegas sort of feel this way. Yeah, I think if this was an expansion team, they might be more willing to give up some money or something that's like their own homegrown. But just with the history of this, this owner's group and the way that they've been with the A's and fought with Oakland and stuff, there's just, you know, everything you hear is not good. So you don't really want to give money to somebody that you hear, you know, leaving, like leaving their less last mistress and saying, Oh, they're really bad. You probably don't want them. And oh, here's some money. Take it. Thank you for listening to this episode of the MTM Vegas podcast. Don't forget to check us out on YouTube, YouTube.com forward slash miles to memories and MTM Vegas.com for all of our Vegas content. Thanks again for listening. Talk to you next time.