What Does Baseball Lose When the A’s Leave Oakland?

The Athletics want their next home to be a $1.5 billion dome on the Las Vegas Strip built from five interlocking arches meant to evoke baseball pennants. One arch would carry a Jumbotron the size of four basketball courts. Another would be mostly glass, revealing the sparkle of the casinos beyond.

The award-winning architect behind the design calls it a “spherical armadillo.” Others have compared it to the elegant layered architecture of the Sydney Opera House.

By comparison, the Athletics’ current home, the Oakland Coliseum, has been called “a giant concrete toilet bowl.”

It is, indeed, a hulking mass of concrete, and there is nothing like it left in professional sports. There is exposed rebar, barbed wire, tangled cables and trough urinals. Chairs are coming loose. The lights are failing. Nearly 100 feral cats have moved in. And a broadcast booth has at times been abandoned because a possum was living in the walls.

And yet the argument could be made that the A’s departure from their run-down home for the riches of Las Vegas is a large part of what’s wrong with American professional sports today.

In the hunt for profits, billionaire sports owners have built a steady stream of palace-like stadiums, with a widening array of over-the-top distractions from the game.

The goal — the only goal, it can seem — is to attract casual fans into far pricier seats.

It has all added up to a broad commercialization — and sterilization — of the fan experience.