When the Athletics head east to play their first planned regular-season games in Las Vegas, it won’t be at their brand-new $2 billion ballpark; it will be at an all-too-familiar alternative location: a minor league stadium.

The A’s will play their first two Sin City series in 30 years starting on Monday at Las Vegas Ballpark, home to the organization’s Triple-A affiliate, the Aviators, in the suburb of Summerlin. The six games against the Brewers (June 8-10) and Rockies (June 12-14) will be a temporary break from their current home at Sutter Health Park in West Sacramento. (The A’s have made Las Vegas home for a week once before, moving six home games in 1996 on short notice when renovations at the Oakland Coliseum weren’t complete.)

But with the familiarity of the A’s in a Pacific Coast League ballpark comes the familiarity of a looming problem that they’ve set in motion at their second home regarding attendance. Last season, the River Cats — the Giants’ Triple-A affiliate and cohabitants of Sutter Health Park — suffered the biggest hit to their average attendance among all minor league teams during the A’s first season in the state capital.

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Athletics owner John Fisher greets his grandkids before a spring training game against the Los Angeles Angels at Las Vegas Ballpark on March 8, 2026, in Las Vegas.

Could a similar fate befall the Aviators when John Fisher’s ballclub arrives (hopefully) in 2028, at a new ballpark that’s less than 15 miles away? Baseball America editor-in-chief J.J. Cooper, who has covered the entire baseball industry for decades and is the leading reporter on minor league attendance issues, says there is not much historical precedent for what’s coming in Las Vegas.

“The process usually was major league teams could take over a territory, and they did, but when they did, they effectively paid for the territory. They paid a fee to the minor league club for the territory,” he told SFGATE over the phone Wednesday. “It wasn’t, ‘OK, now we’ll share.’ It was usually, ‘You’ve had a good run here, now you’re going to head off somewhere else, and we’re taking over this territory.’ So that’s where it becomes much more difficult to say, well, what does this mean for the Aviators?”

There are a couple of citable examples of this regional coexistence, although they’re within the........

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