Once the Athletics’ uniform insignia, this now represents what John Fisher has made of the A’s. And, what Nevada’s cactus-juice-for-brains lawmakers approved for taxpayer financing to move to Las Vegas. It’s your move, Gov. Lombardo.

Let’s put it this way, as Deadspin‘s invaluable Sam Fels has, in more words than I’m about to sketch: Nevada, you’re being had. You have better odds playing for the Megamillions slot jackpot ($14 million) won two months ago by a man in a Reno casino than you have that the Oakland Athletics will make it worth soaking your taxpayers for $350 million plus to build it when they may not come the way the A’s think.

Fels wrote before the state Assembly gave its blessing toward enabling A’s owner John Fisher and his enabler, baseball commissioner Rob Manfred, to count on that minimum $350 million tax soak to build a ballpark on the Las Vegas Strip that isn’t liable to draw anywhere near what Fisher and Manfred think it will. The Assembly approved it a day after the state Senate signed off on it eyes wide shut.

Newly-minted Nevada governor Joseph Lombardo is expected to sign it all. Before he does, you wish he’d read Fels’s warning. Not only are the A’s moving from a large market they threw under the proverbial bus, when they couldn’t shove their once-planned Howard Terminal project of mass real estate investment with a ballpark thrown in for good measure down Oakland’s throat, but they’re planning to build the smallest ballpark in the Show.

Fels warns properly that the A’s may be counting on most of Las Vegas, if not most of Nevada, having just as much cactus juice for brains as their state legislature and, apparently, their governor. The forthcoming ballpark, as planned now, and as Fisher and Manfred want you to believe, means 27,000 tickets sold per game, which is ninety percent capacity for 81 home games. Not so fast, Fels hollers: Nobody sells that much per game all home season long.

You know who doesn’t sell 90 percent of their seats on average? The Dodgers (86 percent). You know who else didn’t? The Best Fans In Baseball, Cardinals (87 percent). Neither did the Yankees (also 87 percent). Are we really supposed to believe that the A’s, run by the duopoly of knuckleheadedness that is John Fisher and David Kaval, are going to produce a team that’s going to draw 90 percent capacity through July in the desert?

Fisher, Kaval, and Manfred say of course you’re supposed to believe it. They’re a trio of Mad Hatters. Except that the Mad Hatter was unapologetically honest about inviting you to come have some tea because he had no tea. The disingenuity from which Fisher, Kaval, and Manfred spring is enough to make smarmy politicians the essence of candor.

Maybe the lawmakers should have asked a major league ballplayer who just so happens to be native to Las Vegas. He grew up the son of a Yankee fan and with friends who became Braves fans (thanks to superstation TBS); Dodger or Padre fans (since each team is a mere four and a half hour reach from Vegas by car); or, Cub or White Sox fans, thanks to lots of Chicago people moving to Vegas over three decades prior to his 1992 birth.

“Are they really going to sell out for a Yankees game on a Friday night?” asks Bryce Harper, now a Phillie for life and hoping to keep things that way. “Is it going to happen? I don’t know. I have no idea. I don’t think anybody knows . . . Do you think people are going to drop the Cubs or the White Sox to be A’s fans? There’s no way. No chance. But that five- or six-year-old, in the next ten years, they could grow up A’s fans. In ten years, you could have a lot of fans.”

Depending, of course, on one small detail nobody’s convinced the A’s can tend so long as Fisher ownes the club and Kaval is his trained parrot. “You can’t have (out-of-state) fans having to push this team,” Harper goes on. “You can’t have that. You need a fan base. They’re going to have to build a fan base, big time . . .”

They’re going to have to build behind a player. Who is that player going to be? Because it has to start next year . . . If they go to Vegas next year, you have to be able to go, ‘We’re going to get this player. We’re going to spend $300 million on him. And this is what it’s going to be.’ And he’s your guy. You have to build around that player. But it has to be a dude. It can’t be a middle-of-the-road guy. It has to be a dude. And it should be two.

Some people seem to think that if the NHL’s Golden Knights could thrive in Las Vegas—not to mention win a Stanley Cup Tuesday night, the second-fastest Cup win for an expansion team in NHL history—there’s hope for the A’s. Uhhhhh, not so fast, folks.

The Knights were born as an NHL franchise in 2017. In what’s surely one of the most grotesque cases of timing in this century’s sports history, great misfortune led to unforeseen reward. The Mandalay Bay atrocity of that year brought the best out in the newborn Knights, whose organisation from the front office to the men on the ice dove headfirst into helping a shattered city rehorse, financially and spiritually.

That cemented the Knights in turn as a “Vegas Born” city favourite. So did smart administration and solid play enable reaching the Stanley Cup final in their newborn season. The A’s won’t be Vegas born, they’ll be Vegas imported. (A joke since I moved to Las Vegas in 2007: if you’ve lived here seven years, you’re considered a native.) And it’ll be like importing pestilence, not princeliness.

When the Dodgers and the Giants went west for 1958, Los Angeles and San Francisco at least had the pleasure of welcoming teams whose owners believed in true competition and were recent World Series winners. (The Giants in 1954; the Dodgers, 1955.) When the A’s move a little ways east, unless Lombardo gets whacked with a wake-up stick, Las Vegas may have the dubious pleasure of welcoming what was once just the team’s uniform breast insignia: a white elephant.

(Harper: “I don’t think they should use the A’s name. I really don’t. I don’t think it’s fair to anybody in Oakland for that to happen. I really don’t. I think they should rebrand it. That’s my own personal opinion. Maybe people in Vegas might think differently. They might love the Las Vegas A’s name. You already have the [WNBA’s] Aces and they’re really good. You’re not going to take a New York Yankees fan and change them into an A’s fan overnight.”)

Part of the scene from Tuesday night’s “reverse boycott” at RingCentral Coliseum. “Vegas Beware,” indeed!

On the same night the Knights secured the Stanley Cup by flattening the battered Florida Panthers, 9-3, in the finals’ Game Five, frustrated A’s fans in Oakland turned out large enough for a “reverse boycott.” Perfect timing: The A’s won (beware the shock factor) their seventh straight game. (“Break up the A’s!” became an immediate punch line.) The day after, of course, they reverted to their 19-51 form losing to the Rays.

“It was never going to stop the [relocation] process,” writes The Athletic‘s Tim Kawakami of the “reverse boycott,” never mind fans hoisting their now-customary banners demanding Fisher either sell the team or pay for his own relocation fully. “But the sights, sounds and emotional flavor of that 27,000-plus crowd were all indelible and important.”

MLB owners will not be persuaded by it, of course. They see the free win in Las Vegas, and they’re going to take it. But sometimes civic defiance just needs to happen. Sometimes the moral moment lingers even in the wake of a larger loss. Maybe especially then.

. . .This is a bad deal for Las Vegas, not only because of potential shortfalls that Fisher isn’t required to cover but also because I’ve not seen any deal language about who’s paying for overruns—which isn’t the only thing about this deal that seems to be unsettled. Do you trust Fisher in a $1.5 billion deal with tons of gray area? I wouldn’t.

. . . Oh, man, the final few months of this season are going to be brutal at the Coliseum, and possibly through next season, which is when the lease expires. I expect Fisher and Kaval to come up with a plan to play their home games somewhere in Nevada next season. But the most likely options are the minor-league stadiums in Las Vegas and Reno, and I can see the players union not being in love with those scenarios.

So there will be a lot of bumpiness in the coming weeks, months and years, to be sure. But soon, it’s likely to be all Nevada’s headache, not Oakland’s anymore. And Fisher will still be Manfred’s headache, too. That’s not going away. Manfred got one problem solved Wednesday, but he gave up a lot for it—that is, if you consider legacy, honor and moral standing important.

Legacy? Manfred’s legacy is liable to be trying to fix what wasn’t broken; ignoring what was and might remain broken; surrendering to the attention-deficit fan rather than enhancing the fan who knows baseball is a thinking person’s game requiring patience and the long view; and, now, enabling a billionaire who trainwrecked a colourfully-historic team and a fan base that loves them to move it out of town and jam too much of the cost down another town’s throat.

“This thing has the potential to be an absolute disaster,” Fels writes, “that will rob a passionate baseball city that’s been [screwed] over repeatedly of its team to give a team to a market that likely won’t want it after too long. But hey, Rob Manfred’s happy as long as Fisher didn’t have to pay for a stadium himself.”

Look. We in Las Vegas would love major league baseball. We’ve made the minor-league Aviators either the Pacific Coast League’s top draw or near enough to it since their lovely little ballpark was built and opened. And we know the only way the Show would work would be in a ballpark with any kind of retractable roof. The summer game would be played dry roasted otherwise. (The average Vegas temperature between the final third of June and the end of August: about 101 degrees. The known highs: As high as 120.)

But I think we in Las Vegas, and in Carson City, should have told Manfred, Fisher, and Kaval, “Halt right there,” when they decided they were going to abandon their Oakland loyalists—after abusing them no end—to come our way and stick us with a bigger bill for a bigger deception than they think they can deliver.

Manfred has spoken lovingly about expanding the Show to two more teams. That’s what Las Vegas should have had if he was that bent on planting a major league team here. Gov. Lombardo should awaken himself, be certain his veto pen has a full tank of ink, and tell Manfred, Fisher, and Kaval: If you want us to come, you build it and you pay for it.