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Six years before, while offering a deposition in a New Jersey sports gambling instance, then-Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig spoke steadfastly against ever placing a franchise in Las Vegas and railed against gambling as"evil" Nowadays, a team is working together with investors to construct a stadium and bring a major-league team to Las Vegas. Those efforts come as Selig's successor, Rob Manfred, predicts Las Vegas a workable marketplace for the sport and baseball decision-makers descend on the city to get the league's Winter Meetings at Mandalay Bay from Dec. 9-13. Behind the scenes, Lou Weisbach, a Chicago-area entrepreneur who led the charge to bring the Montreal Expos to Las Vegas in the early 2000s, along with Chicago White Sox tv announcer and former Cy Young winner Steve Stone are among those working to produce their dream of bringing a group to Southern Nevada come true. Weisbach said the people he's working with, such as some in Las Vegas whom he declined to identify, are engaged in ongoing conversations with investors and landowners. He said individuals involved also have been talking with local leaders. Gov.-elect Steve Sisolak, the longtime Clark County Commission chairman, was asked if he had had talks about a major-league group in vegas. "Not I can talk about. ... I hope you know sometimes I must sign NDAs (nondisclosure agreements)," he said. Can it work here? The jury remains out on whether Major League Baseball would thrive in Las Vegas. Some say that the entertainment buck would be stretched too thin for 81 home games to sell out. Then there's Weisbach. SHORT DESCRIPTION (Las Vegas Review-Journal) "We've got a great deal of different places that we continue to operate on and which are available and therefore it's not a question of if Vegas is going to get Major League Baseball," he stated,"it is a question of if." Following a more than 30-year absence, Major League Baseball returned to Washington, D.C., as the Expos became the Washington Nationals, that settled into a temporary home at RFK Memorial Stadium. Whether Las Vegas was being used as leverage or has been seriously close to turning into a major-league city in 2004 remains up for discussion, and the response varies based on who is asked. One thing was for certain: Washington, D.C., had a scene (and since has built a baseball-specific one). Las Vegas didn't. "I believe in the couple times that I've attempted to actually do this, I think it was too early and we did not have a facility," Stone explained. Weisbach went further, saying he believed that when Las Vegas needed a stadium at that time, the Expos would have moved west. This time, the strategy is to create a scene first and cope with securing a team -- if by expansion or relocation -- second. Read more here: http://classicsounds.pl/?p=38391