No Casino by Opening Day: Bally’s Tells Regulators Its Strip Towers Won’t Open With the A’s Ballpark

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 6, 2026 — When the Athletics open their $2 billion Las Vegas ballpark in April 2028, there will be a brand-new stadium on the old Tropicana site — and no Bally’s casino next to it. That isn’t a delay, the company says. It was always the plan.

The recordWhat Bally’s told the regulators

At Nevada gaming-regulator hearings this summer, Bally’s executives moved to correct what they called a widespread misconception: that the company’s casino-resort was supposed to debut alongside the A’s ballpark on Opening Day 2028. Attorney Dan Reaser, representing Bally’s, wanted to “make the record clear” — the April 2028 deadline is for the stadium to open and for the baseball season to proceed. What Bally’s owes by then is the retail district, the parking garage, utilities and the plaza. The two hotel towers and the casino, he said, come “at a later date.”

The questioning came from Gaming Commissioner Brian Krolicki, who pressed the company after a widely read June report in SFGate described the Bally’s construction as “lagging” and suggested it was complicating the A’s ballpark picture. Reaser’s answer: the timeline being circulated publicly was simply wrong. Bally’s land-use applications remain pending with Clark County, and the company is still waiting on Federal Aviation Administration height clearances for its two planned towers — a real constraint on a site this close to Harry Reid International Airport’s flight paths.

Earlier in the year, Bally’s CFO Mira Mircheva struck the same note before the Gaming Control Board: the near-term focus is a retail, entertainment and dining district around the stadium, with hotel and casino openings to follow. When board chair Mike Dreitzer pressed her on what would actually be operating on MLB Opening Day 2028, her answer was candid — the priority is the stadium itself, and amenities would follow its completion, hopefully closely.

The moneyAn August deadline and a $1.19 billion district

The financing question is the one hanging over everything. Stadium authority chairman Steve Hill — who also runs the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority — told The Athletic that Bally’s still did not have its financing in place, and the stadium authority has given the company an August deadline to get a plan together. That is the hard date that matters more than any rendering.

The project Bally’s is trying to finance is a $1.19 billion multiphase build-out, per Las Vegas Review-Journal reporting: retail, entertainment and dining facilities, a hotel and casino, a theater, a parking garage and a utility plant shared with the A’s ballpark. The first phase moved to the Clark County Commission this spring, and A’s vice chair Sandy Dean has said Phase 1 should take about a year to complete — meaning construction would need to start by early 2027 to be ready for the ballpark’s early-2028 opening. SFGate’s reporting added another wrinkle: A’s owner John Fisher could take a $100 million hit building a parking garage on his own if Bally’s portion isn’t ready.

The land itself belongs to Gaming and Leisure Properties, which leases it to Bally’s for $10.5 million a year and contributed $176 million toward demolishing the Tropicana — the 2024 implosion that cleared the way for all of this. GLPI has signaled it might provide additional funding to develop the site, which is one of the reasons the financing picture is worth watching more closely than the renderings.

The ballparkOn time, on budget, and already an arch in the sky

For all the questions around Bally’s, the ballpark itself keeps hitting its marks. Construction is described by the team as on time and on budget for an early-2028 opening, and the second steel truss arch — the skeleton of the stadium’s signature roofline — went up in August. The building is a $2 billion, 33,000-seat domed stadium, and the franchise’s valuation keeps climbing with it: CNBC’s latest tabulation put the A’s at $2.5 billion, up $500 million in a year, on the relocation to Southern Nevada alone.

That is the context that makes the Bally’s timeline matter. The stadium will open. The question has only ever been what surrounds it on day one — and the answer, per the company’s own filings and testimony, is a retail and entertainment district with the towers and the casino to come. For fans, that means Opening Day 2028 arrives with a place to eat, drink and gather before first pitch, but not a place to stay or play upstairs. The full vision — some 3.56 million square feet with two towers totaling 3,000 hotel rooms, a 100,000-square-foot casino, a 2,500-seat theater, a 9-acre plaza and a Vegas Loop station, elevated above street level with pedestrian links to Excalibur and MGM Grand — is a second act, not an opening act.

Why it mattersThe south Strip’s decade, all at once

Zoom out and the Bally’s timeline is one piece of the biggest construction cluster the Strip has seen in years. The Guitar Hotel is past its midpoint on the old Mirage site and due in late 2027. The Flamingo is overhauling its lobby and bars for its 80th birthday. The Raiders just secured up to $75 million in public waterfall funds for a $158 million north-entry overhaul at Allegiant ahead of the 2028 Final Four and the 2029 Super Bowl. And a few blocks south of the Tropicana site, the A’s ballpark is about eighteen months from hosting baseball.

None of these projects is waiting on the others — that is the point Bally’s wanted on the record. The ballpark opens in April 2028 with or without the towers. The towers come when the financing, the FAA and Clark County all line up. In a town built on grand openings, the honest timeline is the rarest rendering of all.