The Athletics did not need long to learn what baseball in Las Vegas might feel like. Their homestand opener against Milwaukee produced 34 hits, 29 runs and 11 home runs, which is less a box score than a weather report with bats attached.
The A's lost the game, but the night still carried useful information. Seven of the 11 home runs came from the home side, and the game lasted four hours and 14 minutes. If the point of an early Las Vegas test is to see how the ball, the heat and the bullpen all behave together, the first answer was not exactly subtle.
First-pitch temperature was 87 degrees after the city had reached triple digits earlier in the day. That matters because the club's future ballpark is expected to include a retractable roof and under-seat air conditioning, which sounds less like luxury and more like basic workplace infrastructure when summer baseball moves to the desert.
The bigger baseball question is how the park will play once the roof is closed. Oakland Coliseum had its own strange personality: heavy air, huge foul territory, a place where hitters often felt as if the building had joined the pitching staff. Las Vegas is shaping up as the opposite experience. The ball carried, the scoreboard worked overtime, and no lead looked especially interested in being safe.
That puts pressure on more than hitters. The A's used seven pitchers in the opener, which makes the next start less about romance and more about innings. Scheduled starter J.T. Ginn, with his groundball profile, fits the kind of arm the club would love to see in this setting. In a park that may reward anything hit in the air, keeping the ball on the ground stops being a preference and starts looking like survival.
One night does not define a venue. Baseball has a long record of making April theories look silly by August. But the first Las Vegas sample was loud enough to be useful: this may not be a place where pitchers get to ease into anything. The A's wanted a glimpse of their future home. They got one with the volume turned all the way up.