LAS VEGAS — In modern-day baseball, no owner has been scorned like John Fisher. Now, he seeks believers.Inside a trailer at a construction site on the south end of the Las Vegas Strip, Fisher, the owner of the Athletics, said it was never his intention to hide. But in the final seasons that the A’s played in Oakland, when fans were in anguish over his plans to move the club to Nevada, he was often nowhere to be found.That, he says now, was a mistake.“I think people needed to hear from me,” said Fisher, whose A’s played in Oakland for 54 years, through the 2024 season. “Not hearing from me, I think, led to frustration from, frankly, the media. Like, who is this guy? Is he hiding? Who’s the real John Fisher?”The timing of Fisher’s emergence might not make it easier to answer those questions, however. An heir to the Gap clothing fortune, the 65-year-old seems to be stepping forward at a moment of not just opportunity, but of need.A few hundred feet away from the temporary conference room where Fisher spoke to a reporter from The Athletic, massive cranes claw into the Las Vegas skyline. Against a backdrop of famous casinos and hotels, the skeleton of a 30,000-seat, $2.1 billion ballpark grows daily.Already, the sight amounts to a notable victory for Fisher. While the A’s temporarily play home games in Sacramento, his new ballpark is being built, despite some fans’ skepticism that Fisher would ever complete such a project anywhere. Multiple times last week, he took reporters in hard hats through the construction site to see the progress for themselves. So far, the new yard remains on target for a 2028 opening.But in a simultaneous project, Fisher needs to build something else in Las Vegas: credibility.If the A’s are to be successful in Sin City, Fisher will have to court not only locals, but some of the estimated 100,000-plus visitors who are in town on an average day. To snare those travelers, he’ll need sturdy relationships with every major hotel and casino.In other words, his task is to sell his new city on not only his ballclub, but himself.“The news today is not contained within a certain zip code,” Fisher said. “In the sense that people in this community were seeing information coming out of the press in the Bay Area, I felt for sure it was important that they could hear from me … (so they) could understand, why did we make the decision to leave Oakland? But even more importantly, why were we coming to Vegas?”Eventually, Fisher is also going to need a really strong collection of baseball players. Tourists arriving on the Strip for a handful of nights will have to decide whether to watch acrobats at a Cirque du Soleil show or catch a ballgame.“Winning is important in every market. It is especially important in this market, in that there’s so many other things for people to do,” Fisher acknowledged. “It’s not enough to just say, ‘Look at our great stadium in this great location, beautiful view, and the food’s great.’ You have to have a product that’s on the field that is compelling, and compelling means winning.”Already, the A’s are trying to make inroads. Last week and through the weekend, they played regular-season games against the Milwaukee Brewers and Colorado Rockies in a Triple-A park some 20 minutes away from the Strip.Those contests at a venue called Las Vegas Ballpark were the first the A’s have played in the city during the regular season in 30 years, and the club didn’t treat the moment lightly. The celebrity appearances the A’s booked as part of a generally over-the-top approach seemed an acknowledgment of the challenge that awaits: They’ll need to command attention.The total number of runs scored during those six games, 102, did just that — and also validated the A’s decision to play somewhere other than Las Vegas while their new ballpark is built. The new stadium will have a roof and a controlled climate, but without those amenities at Las Vegas Ballpark, a comical barrage of home runs ensued. Thirty-five were hit in all over the six games, which the A’s won four of.Looking ahead to 2028, plenty of questions remain. While the new yard looks like it’ll be ready, most or all of the surrounding development might not be.The stadium is supposed to account for nine acres on a 35-acre lot. Bally’s, the casino operator, has said it wants to build two hotel towers and 500,000 square feet of retail, dining and entertainment around the stadium. But Bally’s might never see the project through.That would leave the A’s holding the bag for some key infrastructure efforts — and, at least for a time, with an empty lot outside their otherwise state-of-the-art venue.The new Athletics stadium continues to rise on the Las Vegas Strip. (Bruce Bennett / Getty Images)That’s likely to provide more fodder for Fisher’s critics. But he said he views the situation as a glass half full, rather than half empty: a stadium he’s proud of will still be operational.“You see the stadium coming up, it’s starting to take shape. It’s at a point where I think a lot of people think it’s too far along to fail,” said Howard Stutz, a reporter for the Nevada Independent who’s been in Las Vegas for 40 years. “There’s always been the question on the Bally’s side. I still think that’s totally up in the air.“I think the question will be ticket sales, what is that going to be like? We don’t know.”When they A’s arrive full-time, they won’t even be the lone professional baseball team in town. The Triple-A Las Vegas Aviators, the A’s own farm team, will continue to play at the stadium where the A’s played those six games last week. The Aviators will probably provide at least mild competition for sponsorship and affordable-entertainment dollars.Locals vs. touristsWhen the A’s open their doors, big-name teams like the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Yankees likely will always sell well. Casinos will be jockeying to have the best tickets available for clients and high rollers to catch names like Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge.But midweek, when lesser teams are in town? That could be a different story.With 81 home dates, the A’s have a much higher inventory of home games compared to the football team in town, the Raiders, who play eight or nine games right off the Strip each year. The A’s also lack the first-mover advantage that the NHL’s Golden Knights enjoyed nearly a decade ago, when they became the first major sports team to arrive in the city.What the A’s hope, though, is that eventually, fans from all markets will build trips to Las Vegas around their teams’ games.